This was beyond Mrs Julian’s understanding. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I mean it’s lucky for you I’m not one of those council home helps. They’re all coming out on strike, the lot of them coming out. They’re NUPE, see? Don’t you read your paper?’

Mrs Julian certainly did read her paper, the Daily Telegraph, which was delivered to her door each morning. She read it from cover to cover after she had had her breakfast, and she was well aware that the National Union of Public Employees was making rumbling noises and threatening to bring its members out over a pay increase. It was typical, in her view, of the age in which she found herself living. Someone or other was always on strike. But she had very little idea of how to identify the Public Employee and had hoped the threatened action would not affect her. To Mrs Upton she said as much.

‘Not affect you?’ said Mrs Upton, furiously scalping brussels sprouts. She seemed to find Mrs Julian’s innocence uproariously funny. ‘Well, there’ll be no gritters on the roads for a start and maybe you’ve noticed it’s snowing again. Gritters are NUPE. They’ll have to close the schools so there’ll be kids all over the streets. School caretakers are NUPE. No ambulances if you fall on the ice and break your leg, no hospital porters, and what’s more, no dustmen. We won’t none of us get our rubbish collected on account of dustmen are NUPE. So how about that for not affecting you?’

Mrs Julian’s dustbin, kept just inside the front gate on a concrete slab and concealed from view by a laurel bush and a cotoneaster, was not emptied that week. On the following Monday she looked out of the right hand side of the bay window and saw under the birch trees, on the frosty ground, a dozen or so black plastic sacks, apparently filled with rubbish, their tops secured with wire fasteners. There was no end to the propensities of some people for making disgusting litter, thought Mrs Julian, give them half a chance. She would telephone Northway Council, she would telephone the police. But first she would put on her squirrel coat and take her stick and go out and have a good look.

The snow had melted, the pavement was wet. A car had pulled up and a young woman in jeans and a pair of those silly boots that came up to the thighs like in a pantomime was taking two more black plastic sacks out of the back of it. Mrs Julian was on the point of telling her in no uncertain terms to remove her rubbish at once, when she caught sight of a notice stuck up under the trees. The notice was of plywood with printing on it in red chalk: Northway Council Refuse Tip. Bags This Way.

Mrs Julian went back into her house. She told Mrs Upton about the refuse tip and Mrs Upton said she already knew but hadn’t told Mrs Julian because it would only upset her.