‘Must just get a bucket,’ shouted Marion, and ran back home. At the door of her cottage she paused. She possessed only two buckets. The larger one stood on the cottage floor full to the brim with rich milk souring to be turned into cheese. The smaller, which she had just milked the goat into, now also brimmed with fresh rich milk. She had nothing to empty either into. The earthenware jar that the Rutherford goose meat came in, now full of water, would not anyway have held a quarter of the contents of the smaller bucket. Her spirit revolted against wasting all that good hard-won food by pouring it away, just to assist some careless neighbour who had let her cottage get ablaze.

She remembered the hens’ drinking tub. She seized a spade leaning up against the wall, and knocking aside the hens’ plank, started prising up the old tub. The earth round it was slimy and sour with hen droppings and she splashed a lot of water over her feet as she dug, but she got it up, leaving a round hole with a smooth earthy base on which pink worms curled. She tipped out the remaining water, and then realized it had of course no handle. She looked round, the continuing tang-tang-tang-tang increasing her desperation all the while. She found a couple of sticks in the wood pile. The first was too short, the second too thick to go through one of the holes in the taller staves. She looked round again. A broom was by the door. She tried it – yes, it went through the holes. It would just do, if she could break off the end with all the birch twigs tied to it. She tried and failed. It was too strong so she realized she must take it as it was, twigs and all. The long-sodden bucket was very heavy and its width made it very difficult to carry. No matter, it’s the best I can do, she thought.

She picked up yelling Alice under her other arm and rushed up to Molly’s cottage. The two old women had come out to their garden gate, and accepted Alice as a matter of course. Alice’s yelling became wilder. Poor Alice, she had been shouted at by her mother for some unknown crime and was being punished by being abandoned with these old ladies while her mother rushed away without a word, without a caress, but Marion, lolloping away down the path to the Common was unconcerned.

The wide bucket was even more awkward to carry than Marion had guessed. She had to hold her arm out sideways to prevent it hitting her legs as she ran. Reaching the bridge, she paused for breath after the supreme effort of lugging the bucket up the steps. The burning cottage was half hidden by the branches of the Big Oak, but she could see that it was Hodge and Cecily’s cottage, the last one along the top of the bank before you reached the sheepfold.