‘Honestly, love,’ says Mr Broderick, as he kindly touches my elbow, clearly mistaking the dusty cause of my tears. ‘We do this all the time! Move people over here for a taste of the good life, then get a call to move them back six months later when they realize what a mistake they’ve made. They’re missing everything about good old Blighty and want to go home! It happens all the time! You can’t beat Blighty, that’s what I say. Isn’t that right, Lexie?’ He raises his voice to call over the wind to the woman – possibly the same age as me, late thirties – jumping down from the back of the truck and walking towards us. She’s wearing a matching Broderick’s polo shirt, smiling. She has short, spiky white-blonde hair and leopard-print jeans. She seems oblivious to the wind swirling around the driveway, the rolling terracotta pots and the clouds of dust pluming around her steel-toe-capped boots.

‘What’s that, Dad?’ she shrieks, over the wind.

‘I said,’ he shouts, over the banging shutter, ‘we do this all the time. Move people over here and move them back six months later.’

‘We do.’ She smiles widely. ‘He always says there’s nowhere like Blighty.’ She’s standing next to her dad now. ‘Nice to see you again,’ she says, and suddenly her warmth feels like a glimmer of home.

This time actual tears spring to my eyes. Home. Where exactly is home? We sold the house, paid off the debts we’d run up, when we moved out here. Now Ollie is organizing us a house to rent ‘back home’. But I have no idea where it will be, or what home looks like.

‘Six months, that’s the norm,’ says Mr Broderick. ‘Mind you,’ he chortles, ‘yours is the shortest I think we’ve ever done. Six weeks is probably a record.’ He chortles some more. ‘Now, where shall we start?’ he says, clapping his hands together and stepping into the farmhouse.

Six months is the norm, I repeat in my head. But ours is the shortest he’s ever done. Six weeks, from moving in to moving ‘home’. Six long weeks. I sigh.

Ralph runs excitedly in circles around Mr Broderick and his daughter. I make a grab for his collar but he swerves past me and thinks it’s a game. Then he lies down in the dust, tingeing his cream coat a kind of peach, barking at me. I throw up my hands, despairing at his disobedience.

‘Ollie!’ I call to him in the car. But Ollie waves a hand to indicate he’s busy. He says he gets his best phone signal sitting in the car on the drive. I think he’s spent more time on the phone in his car than in the house over these six weeks.