It is astonishing how anyone managed to enjoy any form of Christmas celebration through the hardships, cruelties and devastation of war, yet as the reader will discover, it takes more than an air raid or being thousands of miles from home to kill the Christmas Spirit.

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From evacuees who find themselves pitched into unfamiliar surroundings, sorted like livestock then billeted with families who had nothing in common, via soldiers deep into the Western Desert with only a wrecked umbrella to double up as a Christmas tree to tortured victims in one Stalin’s worst gulags, Christmas was the great survivor.

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There is humour, with such dreadful stories as an airman’s attempt to secure his Christmas goose to the author’s grandmother resorting to liquid paraffin to make a Christmas cake in the teeth of having no butter or lard on ration, with dire results.

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Anyone who feels slightly disappointed by their own celebrations will draw comfort at these triumphs of goodwill in circumstances that few today could imagine.

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A Wartime Christmas is published by The History Press and available online or through all good bookshops.