The dance finishes and the lavender boy steps out, takes Mel’s arm and steers her to a place. His eyes are lavender too. One of the other dancers has captured Pete. The music starts and the dance begins, sunwise, a simple skipping round the pole. Mel’s elderflower falls out of her ear and is trodden on by the dancer behind, who mouths ‘sorry’ with a grin. She can’t stop to pick it up but then sees the Cakes and Ale barman reach in from the crowd and pluck it from under the trampling feet. As she passes him again he smiles at her, holding the flower to his chin.

On the other side of the pole, Pete has a good skipping action. When the dance ends, the barman approaches and holds out the slightly crushed elder to her.

‘Find Patti,’ he says. ‘She’ll help you make a crown.’

‘Patti’s up by the bales,’ says someone. ‘They’re making them there.’

Up towards the wood, Mel and Pete find a woman who must be Patti, sitting on a hay bale resplendent in medieval robes and occult pendants, her greying hair in a bun. A pile of besom brooms and a line of metal buckets filled with water rest near her. She is drinking from a clay cup.

‘We’ll be lighting them soon,’ she says, as they approach. ‘Just waiting for the fire.’ She nods over her right shoulder, near the uppermost corner of the field, where a small group huddles round a shallow pit.

‘We want to make crowns,’ says Mel.

‘Oh, I’ll do some of that later. Here it comes.’

A young woman in a rainbow jumper runs over with a flaming torch.

‘Stand back,’ says Patti, and touches the torch to a bale, corner by corner. It catches quickly. ‘We’ll do the others once there’s a crowd.’

The flames soon draw a small one away from the maypole, and after a while the dancing music stops.

‘Who’s for jumping?’ says Patti. She takes a broomstick and gives one end to the rainbow girl. They hold it four feet in the air like a high jump and Patti extends her other hand in invitation. A tall man steps forward. As soon as he does so, they raise the broom to five feet, nearly over the girl’s head. The crowd laughs, and so does the man. He takes a step back, then a couple more, patting the crowd back with his hands, then hurls himself over the jump shoulders first like an Olympian. The crowd applauds.

‘Any more?’ says Patti.