Once she was married it never occurred to Marie that she might have a career of her own, though she knew she was brighter than Vic, quicker at picking up facts and ideas. She had taken him on when they had married and even though she was younger than he she had known that he was a responsibility.

‘Whatever do you see in him?’ her sisters had said when she had first started courting Vic. It was 1962 and their heads were full of pop music and boys. They went to village dances with teenagers in black leather and came home late on the back of motorbikes.

What had she seen in him? she wondered now as she rubbed fat into flour in a large, china bowl. Someone gentle, steady. Someone who needed looking after.

She had done quite well at school, moving from secondary modern to the grammar when she was thirteen and staying on for the sixth form. She had thought she would go away to Carlisle and train to be a teacher. She had always liked little children. Her father ran the garage in Crowford Village and encouraged her, proud to think that one of his daughters would go away to college. Even when she started going out with Vic her plans were the same. She could come home for weekends, she said. She would see Vic then.

The flooding of the valley changed everything. Her family had been forced to move and used the compensation from the Water Board to set up in a new petrol station on the A69.

Vic was frightened of losing her. He thought she would never come back. On the summer day when she left school he asked her to be his wife, explaining in a strange, old-fashioned way, what his prospects were. He was only under-keeper, he said, but in six months his boss would retire and they could live in the cottage on the estate. She had been touched by the emotion in his voice and his need for her. On her nineteenth birthday they were married in Crowford church, the last couple to have a wedding there before the waters came. Now, nearly thirty years later, she would have wished for nothing different.

She scattered flour on the table and began to roll out the pastry in firm, hard movements. She was a large woman, big bosomed and hippy with strangely fine ankles and small feet which she squeezed into patent leather shoes. Shoes, she always said to Vic, were her weakness.