Jimmy had shaken his head regretfully. ‘She wouldn’t lend me a cold in the head,’ he had said dismissively. ‘She guards that perishin’ house as though it were Buckingham Palace. But the next time she goes out shopping I’ll sneak back in – not into the house, since she’s the only woman in this town what locks her doors, but into the outbuildins. I’ll surely find somethin’ amongst the old clutter.’

But now, sitting on the pigsty wall, Jimmy knew ruefully that he would have to disappoint his friend. He had rootled, poked and pried, both in the woodshed and in what she termed the twll gogoniant, where she threw anything not wanted at the moment, but she thought might come in handy in the future. But neither search, though thorough, had led to the finding of even the tiniest tray, so it looked as though Jimmy would have to content himself with snowball fights and similar pleasures.

He was still sitting on the wall and swinging his legs when he remembered the old biscuit tin in Mrs Hughes’s kitchen. It was square and much battered but the lid, he thought, might be used if he squeezed up small. He wondered how he could acquire the tin, then put it out of his mind as his friend came slogging up the lane towards him. As they set off towards the hills where they would practise both the art of sledging and the making of slides, he admitted to Wynne that he had not managed to find a tray but had hopes of a tin lid for the next day. His friend shrugged.

‘It doesn’t matter; we’ll take it in turns on mine,’ he said generously. He chuckled. ‘I bet your sister will breathe fire when she finds we’ve gone sledging without her.’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘She won’t,’ he assured Wynne. ‘She’s not like that. For one thing, she’s never sat on a sledge in her life, ’cos when our mam was alive she said such things were dangerous for girls, and then the woman we lived with never let us do anything except work in the house and do her messages. That’s shopping,’ he added hastily, seeing bewilderment on his friend’s face. ‘I don’t know why it is, but everyone in Liverpool – or all the kids at any rate – calls the shoppin’ “the messages”.’ He grinned widely. ‘So you Welsh rabbits ain’t the only ones to have two languages,’ he concluded.

Wynne laughed. ‘I reckon all kids is the same: we have one language for grown-ups and another what we use between ourselves. See ahead? That’s the hill we’re makin’ for. It ain’t as high as Moel Famau, and Snowdon makes it look like a molehill, but it’s the highest one around here, or at least the highest that you can sledge down. You get a grand view from up there, too; you can see for miles.’

‘I wouldn’t say I were much of a one for views,’ Jimmy panted as they reached the summit. ‘Do it have a name, this hill? Gosh, don’t the town look little when you see it from here?’