Alice woke and objected but Marion proceeded to unroll her from the stinking blanket that wrapped her. She pulled off the woollen tunic, also stiff with drying vomit, wiped Alice’s body with parts of the blanket which seemed driest and then rolled her up again in the new blanket. Alice protested. Marion tried to appease her with a little bread but Alice turned her face away. Marion sympathized with her; all food seemed nauseous.

A distant tanger-tanger-tanger sounded. Along in the village the ‘bell’ hanging from an extended roof beam in the church was being swung by one of Father John’s boys. It was not a real bell, just an old round iron cooking pot with an unmendable hole in the bottom which had been plugged by a knot of wood from which it was hanging, upside down, with part of its old handle attached as a clanger.

‘Mass already?’ asked Marion again, longing to sit still by the fire, but Peter grunted and rearranged the fire logs for greater safety and put a bit of blanket round her shoulders. She stood up, trembling, and pushed her loose hair up under her cap, picked up grumbling Alice, and they set off for the church with Peter’s arm half round her and with Peterkin limping and hopping behind.

Marion and Peter’s cottage stood, with three others near, on a bit of rising ground at the end of the Common. They walked down the little path, passing the old sisters’ cottage on their left. The sisters, Old Agnes and Old Marge, would still be indoors, but Agnes’s daughter, Molly, could be seen on the path ahead, dragging her way towards the village. Of the other neighbours, Dick Shepherd and Hilda and their little girls were probably already at the church – but the Plowright family, surly Jack and slatternly Small Sarah and their brood of ill-cared for children, were probably still huddled round a fire, long since gone out, cold, hungry and dirty, and never willing visitors to the church.

The walk to the main village was some quarter of a mile along the path on the Common that ran next to the stream. They came to the plank bridge which they crossed, holding the rail and going gingerly on the sparkly icy surface. Then passing the Hall and its yard on their left and the Big Oak and the Green on their right, the path took them up to the church. Little groups of their neighbours, hooded and wrapped round in any fabric they had, with shivering children about them, were trudging across the Green to the church.