So here we are in our perfect house, overlooking the English Channel, kicking off our shoes and enjoying the view.

I’m looking at the sea right now and granted, it’s not blue, it’s grey. There is a stiff old breeze whipping up the waves into meringue-tops and the temperature leaves a little to be desired. What Merchant Ivory did not admit about England is a lot.

But we’re all here together, life is good.

I can hear the children careering around in the terraced garden: it’s a wonderland for kids, and when I can get Maddie to forget her handbags and heels, throw theatrical dignity to the wind and play there, pub-style raucous laughter rasps up from somewhere amoung the Californian poppies.

There’s a jacuzzi in a sheltered part of the garden. The routine for indulging is as follows: get into your swimmers, open the front door: brave the curious gazes of the clientele of a small but well patronised pub next door: utter a short, strangled gasp as one’s breath is stolen by a bracing south wester.

Mince gingerly barefoot along the garden path, avoiding any globetrotting snails that feel like making a more than usually fateful journey. Sigh with relief as one’s feet reach soft English grass. Realise belatedly that there’s a caveat to this blessed relief. The grass squelches.

At this point the best course of action is usually to dive over the three-foot-high jacuzzi boundary in a bid to rid ones feet of whatever unspeakableness lurks there.

Shudder.

Nice jacuzzi, though.

This little house must date from the twenties or thirties. The village in which it is situated is like a happily retired bachelor, who potters around, just enjoying his life, without event: it is serene, but with highly eccentric overtones.

It has two great Napoleonic Martello towers, fortresses built to protect the English coast against a French dictator, hundreds of years ago: one of which lurks in the woods, and one which guards the steep shingle beach officiously.

And the house is perfectly at home, up a steep path from the beach.

A funny thing happened as soon as I walked through its pretty blue door.

I had a strong impulse to sing a certain wartime song.

And I have been singing it ever since. I sang it all through teatime in front of bemused offspring; I whistled it as I unpacked: it won’t go away.

And some people will recognise it, and it will be a new title to others. But it is quite the most haunting melody.

It’s called A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.

Written by Manning Sherwin and Jack Strachey, it’s essentially a wartime song, though it was written in a little French village and given it’s first airing in a London pub in the Summer of 1939.

And it is one of those almost unbearably wistful markers of history. It heralded a dark time for this little set of islands.

Think of a song, an evocative, key song for you, and it’s fairly certain it will pull in it’s wake vivid memories of a time.

For a generation, this sublime little melody was a silvery reminder of something they needed in that darkest and most alone of times.

Life goes on. We fall in love, we sing. And that offers hope, that last vital occupant of Pandora’s Box.

The tune persisted through breakfast; and the morning’s activities did nothing to silence the song.

We drove to our favourite theme park: Dover Castle. On the agenda for day one: a visit to the secret wartime tunnels.

Now Felix has been doing this tour since he was about three. We know it by heart. The story of how our navy and air force holed up in the White Cliffs and held a great evil off our shores.

The tunnels are breathtakingly evocative. They house dormitories, map rooms, offices, a telephone exchange, a hospital. It’s a ruthlessly faithful reconstruction by English Heritage.

It reminded us once more of so many people who knew the cost of careless talk: a time when ordinary life became horrifyingly extraordinary.

I’m still singing the song. And the past of this ordinary little stretch of coast seems to sit beside me, as I gaze out at that thin grey stretch of sea.