‘I don’t want anyone to think that I don’t appreciate the way you’ve all rallied round and taken on twice the usual amount of work,’ Nain had assured them. ‘But now that I can walk with only a bit of a limp, surely I can actually be of some use? I’d like to watch the harvesters at work and share the harvest tea, and the stories and laughs as well. If you, Glenys my dear, and you, dear Sam, will take an arm each I’m sure you could get me there safe and sound, and it would be such a treat.’

She had sounded so wistful that Glenys almost burst into tears, and it was at that moment that the idea of having the party in the harvest field instead of in the farmhouse was born.

‘All the neighbours will be working on your twelve-acre, so it will be as much of a surprise for them as for Nain,’ she had told Taid as they milked the cows. ‘We’ll bring the sandwiches, sausage rolls and other savouries down first, and then we’ll get Jimmy to blow a blast on his harmonica and you and Sam can process down the lane and into the field with the candles already lit on the cake and we’ll all sing Happy Birthday. Do you think Nain would like that?’

Taid thought it was a grand idea and very soon the children began to talk secrets, planning what they would give Nain for her birthday, arguing and plotting, until Sam told them that they would give the game away simply by their behaviour. ‘You carved a little wooden bird when the big beech fell in the gales,’ he reminded Jimmy. ‘Carve another and give it to Nain; she’ll appreciate it more than the most expensive trifle you could buy in a shop because you made it yourself.’ He smiled at Mo. ‘And why don’t you embroider a Peter Pan collar for Nain to sew on her blue dress? Could you manage that? Just lazy daisies and love knots? Nain would be tickled pink that you’d tried, because she knows embroidery bores you to tears.’

Both children agreed to the plan, and very soon decided to go to bed early at weekends so that they might toil over their birthday presents in peace, and if Nain had an inkling of what such strange behaviour might mean, or wondered about the whispered conferences which ceased abruptly whenever she entered a room, she never said so much as a word.

Now, Glenys slid her legs out of bed and crossed the broad expanse of linoleum to where her washstand with its flowery ewer and basin awaited her. Once, she and Mo had shared this room, but that was because it meant Glenys was handy when the little girl had a nightmare. Now Mo’s bad dreams were a thing of the past, and she slept happily in her own pretty room on the opposite side of the landing, though if she woke first Glenys was apt to come round to find the little girl’s weight on her protesting stomach, whereupon she tried to bury her head in her pillow and assure Mo, with pretended annoyance, that she was still fast asleep.