Dan stopped the car at the top of the lane, jumped out and opened up the rear passenger door, and got in beside his daughter. He put his arm around her and gave her a hug. “It’s only going to be for a week, Ni, and anyway, you’ll enjoy yourself. Just wait and see.”

“But what’s there to do up here?” Nina howled.

“Well,” Dan said slowly, trying desperately to think of something moderately exciting to lift his younger daughter’s shattered spirits. “Quite a lot, really.”

Millie, meanwhile, had decided to get into the promised warmth of the cottage as quickly as possible. Having got out of the car, she skipped from side to side up to the gate, doing her best not to get the track’s now slimy mud on any part of her new silver-grey Reebok trainers. She was in the process of working out Josh’s complicated but totally dog-proof latch system, when she suddenly turned and raced back to the car at the speed of an Olympic sprinter, cares for her fancy footwear cast frivolously to the biting wind. She tore the car door open, jumped in, and slammed it shut.

“My God, that thing is terrifying!” she screamed out melodramatically, her eyes fixed on the far corner of the cottage. “What is it, Dad?”

Her voice had expressed such fear and alarm that even Dan wondered momentarily whether he had been unconsciously living in the depths of Jurassic Park for the past five weeks. Then, around the edge of the wooden fence at the front of the garden, appeared the fiercely horned head of Dolly, the resident Blackface ewe, a piece of grass sticking out the side of her mouth and an expression on her face that would seem to suggest that she was deeply miffed that her welcome had been so mannerlessly rebuffed.

“Don’t worry,” said Dan, taking his arm from around the heaving shoulders of his younger daughter and getting out of the car. “That’s just Dolly. She’s as harmless as a . . .” He didn’t bother to finish. He couldn’t think of any happy, pleasing simile that would make any bloody difference to his daughters’ miserable appraisal of their new surroundings. “Come on, you two,” he sighed, “out you get. It’s time to survey the Taj Mahal.”

They declined the bacon and eggs that Josh had generously left for them on top of the cooking stove and breakfasted in silence on cereal and yoghurt, casting looks around the room and then at each other, lifting an eyebrow in foreboding of what they were to suffer during the course of their mid-term break. Dan whistled a merry tune as he went about his domestic chores, hoping that the false contentment that he displayed over his Spartan abode might in some way be infective enough to rub off on the girls. It was, indeed, a tall order.