‘I’ve been sick.’

I knew she hadn’t been, but I asked her why.

‘That horrible old woman and that horrible thing she was talking about, like a bit of liver in a bottle, she said.’ Her mouth trembled. ‘Why does she call it a vinegar mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps because mothers make children and it makes vinegar.’

That only seemed to make her angrier and she kicked at the tree.

‘Shall we go down to the pond or are you going to read?’ I said.

But Mop didn’t answer me so I went down to the pond alone and watched the bats that flitted against a pale green sky. Mop had gone up to our bedroom. She was in bed reading when I got back. No reader myself, I remember the books she liked and remember too that my mother thought she ought not to be allowed to read them. That night it was Lefanu’s Uncle Silas which engrossed her. She had just finished Dr James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. I don’t believe, at that time, I saw any connection between her literary tastes and her reaction to the vinegar mother, nor did I attribute this latter to anything lacking in her relationship with her own mother. I couldn’t have done so, I was much too young. I hadn’t, anyway, been affected by the conversation at supper and I went to bed with no uneasy forebodings about what was to come.

In the morning when Mop and I came back from church – we were sent there, I now think, from a desire on the part of Mr and Mrs Felton to impress the neighbours rather than out of vicarious piety – we found the Elsworthys once more at Sanctuary. Lady Elsworthy and her son and Mrs Felton were all peering into a round glass vessel with a stoppered mouth in which was some brown liquid with a curd floating on it. This curd did look quite a lot like a slice of liver.

‘It’s alive,’ said Mop. ‘It’s a sort of animal.’

Lady Elsworthy told her not to be a little fool and Mrs Felton laughed. I thought my mother would have been angry if a visitor to our house had told me not to be a fool, and I also thought Mop was really going to be sick this time.

‘We don’t have to have it, do we?’ she said.

‘Of course we’re going to have it,’ said Mrs Felton. ‘How dare you speak like that when Lady Elsworthy has been kind enough to give it to me! Now we shall never have to buy nasty shop vinegar again.’

‘Vinegar doesn’t cost much,’ said Mop.

‘Isn’t that just like a child! Money grows on trees as far as she’s concerned.’

Then Lady Elsworthy started giving instructions for the maintenance of the thing. It must be kept in a warm atmosphere. ‘Not out in your chilly kitchen, my dear.’ It was to be fed with wine, the dregs of each bottle they consumed. ‘But not white wine. You tell her why not, Peter, you know I’m no good at the scientific stuff. It must never be touched with a knife or metal spoon.’