“We can’t get lost. The path goes right round this hill. We go up, we go down – there’s no way we could miss it. In fact, when we get to the top we should be able to see the village.”

“All right,” he said. “But quick. I’m dying of this cold.”

To get up the side of the hill we first had to clamber over a stone wall. It was one of those walls that are made of stones just piled up on each other, with nothing sticking them together. Well, I say “just piled up”, but you could see how cleverly they were stacked, with no spaces in between them.

“See, Kenny,” I said. “It’s like a stone jigsaw puzzle.”

But Kenny wasn’t in the mood to enjoy the craftsmanship.

It was easy enough to climb over the wall, apart from having Tina. I scrambled up first, then got Kenny to pass her to me. I jumped down and thought Tina would follow, but she just paced nervously along the top of the wall.

“Getting a bit old for this sort of lark, aren’t you?” I said, and I picked Tina up and put her down in the snow on this side of the wall. The snow was deeper here, where the wind had blown it into drifts.

Kenny followed us, but as he jumped down he knocked one of the stones off the top. Kenny has always been a bit clumsy. He bent to pick it up.

“Just leave it,” I said.

Kenny gave me a dirty look.

“Gotta fix it,” he told me. “That’s only fair.”

The stone made a satisfying clunk as he laid it on top of the wall. Then he straightened it up, so it looked nice again.

“Don’t be all day about it,” I said.

I had a flashback to when we were young ’uns – Kenny five, me four, or something like that. It was before Mum left, and things were still OK at home. We had these wooden building blocks and a little wooden cart thing with red plastic wheels to push them around in. It was Kenny’s favourite toy. He used to spend hours piling the bricks up. He always tried to make a tall skinny tower, with just one block on each level. But because he built it on the carpet, the tower would never get very high before it fell down. I was too young back then to understand that Kenny didn’t always get things the way other kids did. I used to tell him to build it wider, with four blocks at the bottom, but he didn’t like that.

“Want it high!” he’d yell. “Up. Up. Up.”