The summer was hotter and dryer than the previous one had been, and the soft fruit harvest was exceptionally good. But this year there was no Aunt Julie to cast a cynical eye over baskets of raspberries. And Jimson’s Weed, datura, the thornapple, did not show itself in the Fyfields’ garden or, apparently, in any part of Great Sindon. A ‘casual’, as the wild plant book described it, it had gone in its mysterious way to ground or else wandered to some distant place away over the meadows.

Had it appeared, it would have exercised no fascination over James. He had his thirteenth birthday in June and he felt immeasurably, not just a year, older than he had done the previous summer. For one thing, he was about six inches taller, he had ‘shot up’ as his mother said, and sometimes the sight in a mirror of this new towering being could almost alarm him. He looked back with incredulous wonder on the child he had been, the child who had boiled noxious fruits and leaves in a pot, who had kept white mice in a cage and caterpillars in a box. He had entered his teens and was a child no more.

Perhaps it was his height that led directly to the drama – ‘the absolutely worst day of my life’, Rosamund called it – or it might have been Mrs Hodge’s operation or even the fact, that, for once in a way, the Women’s Institute met on a Tuesday rather than a Wednesday. It might have been any of those factors, though most of all it happened because Mirabel was inevitably and unchangingly Mirabel.

The inhabitants of Ewes Hall Farm knew very little about her life since they hardly ever saw her. It came as a surprise to Elizabeth Fyfield to learn how much time Mrs Hodges had been spending sitting in with Oliver or minding him in her own home. It was Mrs Hodges’s daughter who told her, at the same time as she told her that her mother would be three weeks in hospital having her hysterectomy and another goodness knows how many convalescing. Mirabel would have to look elsewhere for a babysitter.

She looked, as they might have known she would, to the Fyfields.

Presenting herself on their doorstep with Oliver on one arm and a heavy shopping basket on the other, she greeted James’s mother with a winsome, nervous smile. It might have been last year all over again, except that Oliver was a little boy now and no longer a baby. James, home for the long summer holidays, heard her sigh with despair and break into a long apology for having ‘neglected’ them for so long. The fact was she was engaged to be married. Did Elizabeth know that?

‘I hope you’ll be very happy, Mirabel.’

‘Gilbert will make a marvellous father,’ said Mirabel. ‘When I compare him with that stupid, immature oaf, that Francis, it just makes me – oh, well, that’s all water under the bridge now. Anyway, Elizabeth dear, what I came to ask you was, do you think James or Rosamund would do some baby-sitting for me? I’d pay them the going rate, I’d pay them what I pay Mrs Hodges. Only it’s so awful for me never being able to go out with my fiancé, and actually tomorrow I’m supposed to be meeting his parents for the first time. Well, I can’t take a baby of Oliver’s age to a dinner party, can I?’