This room was the children’s nursery. Their mother called it that sometimes when they had been cutting out pictures and left scraps of paper on the floor. “This room’s nothing but a nursery,” she would say, forgetting for the moment that the nurseries she had presided over in her pre-marriage days were usually held up by her as patterns of neatness.

The room had one advantage over most nurseries. The door opened straight out on to the garden path and in fine weather the children were allowed to run in and out as they would. Even when it rained and a board was slipped, country fashion, into grooves in the doorposts to keep them in, they could still lean out over it and feel the rain splash on their hands and see the birds flicking their wings in the puddles and smell the flowers and wet earth while they sang: “Rain, rain, go away, Come again another day.”

They had more garden than they needed at that time and one corner was given up to a tangle of currant and gooseberry bushes and raspberry canes surrounding an old apple tree. This jungle, as their father called it, was only a few feet square, but a child of five or seven could hide there and pretend it was lost, or hollow out a cave in the greenery and call it its house. Their father kept saying that he must get busy and lop the old unproductive apple tree and cut down the bushes to let in the light and air, but he was so seldom at home in daylight that for a long time nothing was done about it and they still had their hidy-houses and could still swing themselves up and ride astride on the low-hanging limb of the apple tree.

From there they could see the house and their mother going in and out, banging mats and rattling pails and whitening the flagstones around the doorway. Sometimes, when she went to the well, they would run after her and she would hold them tight and let them look down to where, framed in the green-slimy stones, the water reflected their faces, very small and far down.

“You must never come here alone,” she would say. “I once knew a little boy who was drowned in a well like this.” Then, of course, they wanted to know where and when and why he was drowned, although they had heard the story as long as they could remember. “Where was his mother?” “Why was the well lid left open?” “How did they get him out?” and “Was he quite, quite dead? As dead as the mole we saw under the hedge one day?”