They made the first batch in the afternoon. Mr Arnold called on the following morning with his barrow. ‘Your private refuse operative, Mrs Julian, at your service.’

‘Ah, but I’ve done what I told you I should do,’ she said and insisted on his coming down the garden with her to see the compost heap.

‘You eat a lot of oranges,’ said Mr Arnold.

Then she told him about the marmalade and Mr Arnold said he had never tasted home-made marmalade, he didn’t know people made it any more. This shocked Mrs Julian and rather confirmed her opinion of Mrs Arnold. She gave him a jar of marmalade and he was profuse in his thanks.

She was glad to get indoors again. The meteorological people had been right when they said there was another cold spell coming. Mrs Julian knitted and looked out of the window and saw Mrs Arnold brought back from somewhere or other by Mr Laindon in his car. By lunchtime it had begun to snow. The heavy, grey, louring sky looked full of snow.

This did not deter Mrs Julian’s great-niece from dropping in unexpectedly with her boyfriend. They said frankly that they had come to look at the rubbish tip which was said to be the biggest in London apart from the one which filled the whole of Leicester Square. They stood in the window staring at it and giggling each time anyone arrived with fresh offerings.

‘It’s surrealistic!’ shrieked the great-niece as a sack, weighted down with snow, rolled slowly out of the branches of a tree where it had been suspended for some days. ‘It’s fantastic! I could stand here all day just watching it.’

Mrs Julian was very glad that she did not but departed after about an hour (with a jar of marmalade) to something called the Screen on the Hill which turned out to be a cinema in Hampstead. After they had gone it snowed harder than ever. There was a heavy frost that night and the next.

‘You don’t want to set foot outside,’ said Mrs Upton on Monday morning. ‘The pavements are like glass.’ And she went off into a long tale about her son Stewart who was a police constable finding an old lady who had slipped over and was lying helpless on the ice.

Mrs Julian nodded impatiently. ‘I have no intention whatsoever of going outside. And you must be very careful when you go down that path to the compost heap.’

They made a second batch of marmalade. The boiler refused to light so Mrs Julian said to leave it but try it again tomorrow, for there was quite an accumulation of newspapers to be burnt. Mrs Julian sat in the window, sewing together the sections of the dark blue two-ply jumper and watching the people coming through the snow to the refuse tip. Capped with snow, the mounds on the tip resembled a mountain range. In the Arctic perhaps, thought Mrs Julian fancifully, or on some planet where the temperature was always sub-zero.