That Tuesday visit was the first of many. Inside, Rose Cottage belied its name. It seemed dark and gloomy, unlike ours, which was always full of sunlight and bright flowers. The furnishings were antique, even a little shabby. I recollect no family photographs of the kind that embellished most mantelpieces, but there was a huge gilt-framed painting of a young girl working alone in a field hanging on one wall. If the place sometimes smelled a little musty and neglected, the aroma of Miss Teresa’s fresh-baked scones more often than not made up for it.

‘Mr Hardy was full of contradictions,’ Miss Teresa told me on one occasion. ‘He was a dreamer, of course, and never happier than when wandering the countryside alone with his thoughts. But he was also a fine musician. He played the fiddle on many social occasions, such as dances and weddings, and he was often far more gregarious and cheerful than many of his critics would have imagined. He was also a scholar, head forever buried in a book, always studying Latin or Greek. I was no dullard, either, you know, and I like to think I held my own in our conversations, though I had little Latin and less Greek.’ She chuckled, then turned serious again. ‘Anyway, one never felt one really knew him. One was always looking at a mask. Do you understand me, young man?’

I nodded. ‘I think so, Miss Teresa.’

‘Yes, well,’ she said, staring into space as she sometimes did while speaking of Hardy. ‘At least that was my impression. Though he was a good ten years older than me, I like to believe I got glimpses of the man behind the mask. But because the other villagers thought him a bit odd, and because he was difficult to know, he also attracted a lot of idle gossip. I remember there was talk about him and that Sparks girl from Puddletown. What was her first name, Eunice?’

‘Tryphena.’

‘That’s right.’ She curled her lip and seemed to spit out the name. ‘Tryphena Sparks. A singularly dull girl, I always thought. We were about the same age, you know, she and I. Anyway, there was talk of a child. Utter rubbish, of course.’ She gazed out of the window at the green, where a group of children were playing a makeshift game of cricket. Her eyes seemed to film over. ‘Many’s the time I used to walk through the woodland past the house, and I would see him sitting there at his upstairs window seat, writing or gazing out on the garden. Sometimes he would wave and come down to talk.’ Suddenly she stopped, then her eyes glittered, and she went on, ‘He used to go and watch hangings in Dorchester. Did you know that?’

I had to confess that I didn’t, my acquaintance with Hardy being recent and restricted only to his published works of fiction, but it never occurred to me to doubt Miss Teresa’s word.

‘Of course, executions were public back then.’ Again she paused, and I thought I saw, or rather sensed a little shiver run through her. Then she said that was enough for today, that it was time for scones and tea.

I think she enjoyed shocking me like that at the end of her little narratives, as if we needed to be brought back to reality with a jolt. I remember on another occasion she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Of course, the doctor tossed him aside as dead at birth, you know. If it hadn’t been for the nurse he would never have survived. That must do something to a man, don’t you think?’

We talked of many other aspects of Hardy and his work, and, for the most part, Miss Eunice remained silent, nodding from time to time. Occasionally, when Miss Teresa’s memory seemed to fail her on some point, such as a name or what novel Hardy might have been writing in a certain year, she would supply the information.

I remember one visit particularly vividly. Miss Teresa stood up rather more quickly than I thought her able to, and left the room for a few moments. I sat politely, sipping my tea, aware of Miss Eunice’s silence and the ticking of the grandfather clock out in the hall. When Miss Teresa returned, she was carrying an old book, or rather two books, which she handed to me.

It was a two-volume edition of Far from the Madding Crowd, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, it was the first edition, from 1874, and was probably worth a small fortune. But what fascinated me even more than Helen Paterson’s illustrations was the brief inscription on the flyleaf: To Tess, With Affection, Tom.

I knew that Tess was the diminutive of Teresa because I had an Aunt Teresa in Harrogate, and it never occurred to me to question that the ‘Tess’ in the inscription was the person sitting opposite me, or that the ‘Tom’ was none other than Thomas Hardy himself.

‘He called you Tess,’ I remember saying. ‘Perhaps he had you in mind when he wrote Tess of the d’Urbervilles?’

Miss Teresa’s face drained of colour so quickly I feared for her life, and it seemed that a palpable chill entered the room. ‘Don’t be absurd, boy,’ she whispered. ‘Tess Durbeyfield was hanged for murder.’

We had been officially at war for about a week, I think, when the police called. There were three men, one in uniform and two in plain clothes. They spent almost two hours in Rose Cottage, then came out alone, got in their car and drove away. We never saw them again.

The day after the visit, though, I happened to overhear our local constable talking with the vicar in St Oswald’s churchyard. By a great stroke of fortune, several yews stood between us and I was able to remain unseen while I took in every word.

‘Murdered, that’s what they say,’ said PC Walker. ‘Bashed his ’ead in with a poker, then chopped ’im up in little pieces and buried ’em in t’garden. Near Dorchester, it were. Village called ’igher Bockhampton. People who lived there were digging an air-raid shelter when they found t’bones. ’Eck of a shock for t’bairns.’

Could they possibly mean Miss Teresa? That sweet old lady who made such delightful scones and had known the young Thomas Hardy? Could she really have bashed someone on the head, chopped him up into little pieces and buried them in the garden? I shivered at the thought, despite the heat.

But nothing more was heard of the murder charge. The police never returned, people found new things to talk about, and after a couple of weeks Miss Eunice and Miss Teresa reappeared in village life much as they had been before. The only difference was that my mother would no longer allow me to visit Rose Cottage. I put up token resistance, but by then my mind was full of Spitfires, secret codes and aircraft carriers anyway.

Events seemed to move quickly in the days after the police visit, though I cannot be certain of the actual time period involved. Four things, however, conspired to put the murder out of my mind for some time: Miss Teresa died, I think in the November of that same year; Miss Eunice retreated into an even deeper silence than before; the war escalated; and I was called up to military service.

The next time I gave any thought to the two ladies of Rose Cottage was in Egypt, of all places, in September 1942. I was on night watch with the Eighth Army, not far from Alamein. Desert nights have an eerie beauty I have never found anywhere else since. After the heat of the day, the cold surprises one, for a start, as does the sense of endless space, but even more surprising is the desertscape of wrecked tanks, jeeps and lorries in the cold moonlight, metal wrenched and twisted into impossible patterns like some petrified forest or exposed coral reef.

To spoil our sleep and shatter our nerves, Rommel’s Afrika Korps had got into the routine of setting up huge amplified speakers and blaring out ‘Lili Marlene’ over and over all night long. It was on a night such as this, while I was trying to stay warm and awake and trying to shut my ears to the music, that I struck up a conversation with a soldier called Sidney Ferris from one of the Dorset regiments.