Margaret Barker’s Any Morning 1929 is in the Tate, which says: ‘Margaret Barker was interested in charging everyday incidents with extraordinary meaning. The quiet atmosphere of this bedroom interior is established through the ritualised movements of the woman and girl as they make the bed. This stillness is echoed in a painting over the bed, The Courtyard of a House in Delft by Pieter de Hooch.’ There is a timelessness about this painting of domesticity that Dorothy Whipple (indeed all our writers, think Elizabeth Cambridge, think Helen Hull) understood and wrote about.