She smiles. ‘I drove Muriel mad. She’d leave me for five minutes stewing apple on the range and come back to find the apple burnt dry, the back door flung open and me nowhere in sight. Dad would send me back in with a flea in my ear, but it didn’t make any difference. I used to take off from school too. As soon as morning break came, I’d sneak over the playground wall and make my way home.’ Her laugh rings with impish delight. ‘When he was at his wits’ end, Dad offered me a deal: he’d let me help with anything he was doing, as long as I’d spent all day in school getting my education. That seemed fair enough.’

‘So, is there anything you don’t do?’

‘No.’ She laughs. ‘He gave me a pony for my fifth birthday, a cow for my eighth and a pig for my tenth. I was milking by nine, ploughing by thirteen, and I had my own business raising geese for Christmas by fourteen. I can’t dress a goose,’ she declares with an air of triumph, having inadvertently stumbled on the answer to his question. ‘I always left that to Muriel, in return for a cut of the profits.’

‘Very enterprising.’

‘I love it,’ she confides with unashamed candour, ‘this life. It’s hard work, relentless … but there is nothing better than being outside, working the farm. I don’t think I was ever cut out for anything else. The school room was an alien environment for me. There was nothing worth learning there, not when nature could teach me everything I needed to know. I belong to the land. It’s part of me and I’m part of it.’

‘I envy you that. That sense of belonging. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that.’

‘Not at home? Where you’re from?’

‘No. I mean, obviously the city’s familiar, but it’s a dirty, noisy, bustling place – I never relished being there – and perhaps it can afford opportunities, but it never really afforded me any. I worked the shipyards out of necessity, not passion. It was a job, a wage. I never felt any affinity with it, not like what you feel. I can tell, listening to you talk like that – you talk from in here.’ Jack pats his chest with a furled fist. ‘From the heart, like.’

‘Yes … you’re right. My heart is here, in this, in all I do. Whenever I clear a ditch, or plough a furrow, sow a field, pleach a hedge … I’m putting a little bit of me into it. Sometimes I don’t know where I stop and the farm begins.’

‘There’s poetry in that.’

‘Yes … yes, I think there is.’