I remember there was a fair on the Green and I was wearing my dress with the blue buttons and he was running away, so tiny, and his hair was so bright                   and Dad shouted. He said he could wear the helmet if he wanted, but Ned didn’t stop and there were rides and music and cakes and he was running

very far.          And that was the last time            that was the last

I think I remember but nothing is certain.     I wonder if they ever found him in the water.

1 June 2007

Alex

The man tells us his name is Keith. He says the best way to learn how to build a dry stone wall is to try and repair one. He stands next to the collapsed section, his wellies sinking into the boggy ground. Across the field there’s an empty barn, a lone farmhouse nestled in at the foot of the fell. The wall snakes out, neat and rough at the same time, dividing up the grass. The outward stones are covered in patches of bright green moss, spattered white with bird shit. It doesn’t look like any man built it. The broken gap is just a spill of stones. It could have been kicked in by a giant.

‘Gather round,’ he says and we all move forward, circling the broken stretch of wall like student doctors about to observe an operation.

‘The first thing is to clear the stones, to sort them into organised piles to be used later.’

I try to remember the diagram in the library book from college, the layers of construction, the order of it. Foundation stones, through stones, coping stones. The base width of the wall should be twice the width of the top layer.

He sets us off looking for specific shapes, tells us to place the stones down gently. ‘Especially the through stones,’ he says, ‘if you just lob them on the ground they’re sure to crack. There’s no putting them back together after that.’