Then a neighbour who had bought a bundle of old books for a few pence at a sale lent them Old Saint Paul’s, and the outhouse door was soon chalked with a cross and the wheelbarrow trundled round the garden to the cry of “Bring out your dead!”

Between the ages of seven and ten, Laura became such a confirmed reader that, when other books failed, she would read her father’s dictionary, until this disappeared because her mother thought the small print was bad for her eyes. There was still the Bible, which could not be forbidden, and she spent many an hour over that, delighting in the Old Testament stories of the Pillar of Fire, and of Ruth and Esther and Samuel and David, and of Jonah and the whale, or learning by heart the parables in the New Testament to repeat at Sunday School. At one time she had a passion for the Psalms, not so much from religious fervour as from sheer delight in the language. She felt these ought to be read aloud, and, as she dare not read them aloud herself, lest she should be overheard, she would persuade Edmund or some other child to read them with her, verse and verse about.

Once, when Edmund was upstairs in bed with measles and her mother was out, she and another girl were having a fine time imitating the parson and clerk reading the Psalms in church, when Edmund, who could hear all that was going on downstairs, called out to ask whose Bible Alice was using. She was using his and when Edmund had his suspicions confirmed he was so enraged that he dashed downstairs in his nightshirt and chased Alice all down the garden to the gate. If his mother could have seen him out of doors with his spots, in his nightshirt, brandishing his Bible and threatening the retreating Alice, she would have been horrified, for measles patients were then told that they must not put so much as a hand out of bed or the spots would “go inward” and the simple measles would turn to black measles, when they would probably die. But no one saw him and he returned to his bed, apparently not a ha’penny the worse for his airing.

A little later, Scott’s poems came into their lives and Edmund would swing along the field path to school reciting “The way was long, the night was cold”, or stop to strike an attitude and declaim,

Come one, come all! this rock shall fly

From its stern base as soon as I,