Although Josh was working most days in the factory, he found time to plunder Patrick’s tool shed for the necessary hardware to restore order to the garden. He pulled free the wind-blown sections of the fence from the tangled matt of overgrown grass and hammer-and-nailed them back into place with a volley of missed blows and wind-absorbed expletives. He then put to use his teenage ingenuity by enticing an itinerant Blackface ewe into this now secure palisade to eat down the grass, but her gourmet tastes turned out to be more for the sweet stalks of the flowers than the rank, tasteless roughage. Consequently, Josh had to hurriedly dispense with her services by wrestling her reluctant form from the garden, during which exercise he was given little creditable assistance from the dogs. Biggles sat cowering by the front door of the cottage, having never before encountered on his jaunts around Clapham Common anything quite so weird as this long-haired, violent creature, while Cruise, who had not scented one decent bitch in all the time that he had been in Scotland, sniffed hopefully at the ewe’s backside. The unfortunate result of this failed experiment was three hours’ hard labour on Josh’s part, kneeling on damp ground with a pair of rusty garden shears, to get the grass to a height that could be managed by Patrick’s mower. Having discarded the raked-up piles over the fence to the expectant Blackface ewe, who was now content with any slim pickings, Josh had steered the groaning mower up and down, and at the end of a further hour, stood back with pride as he surveyed his new, perfectly striped and perfectly yellow front lawn.

The interior of the cottage had also been restored to full working order. Dan had managed to conquer the temperamental idiosyncrasies of the cooking stove, his success being such that even with the vents shut right down and with the wood barely glowing, he was forced to throw open the front windows to allow out the heat generated both by the stove and by the hot water tank that gurgled as dangerously as a capped geyser. The walls throughout the cottage had been given a fresh coat of white paint, courtesy of Patrick and the odd-job man at Seascape, the kitchen table adorned with a new oilcloth, while the three-piece suite, now swathed in a mass of brightly coloured bothy rugs, had been rearranged so that each seat commanded an excellent view of the new television-cum-video that Dan had rented from a small electrical store in Fort William.