The evening before, Peter had spent some time carefully instructing his son in the job of pollarding the two willows near the water-place.

‘I’ve told one of the Hunter boys to come over and help, and he’ll bring his knife. Now I’m going to lend you this knife. It’s on a long thong and you must keep it round your neck all the time – do you understand? I’ve had that knife since I was a boy, and this knobbly wooden handle – it’s a briar root, smooth as an apple, just fits into my palm. I’ve sharpened the blade, but take the little whetstone in your pocket in case. Get the Hunter boy to give you a leg up into the tree – he’s tall enough to get up himself – and cut all the saplings off. Cut them off right at the bottom. Don’t leave bits sticking out so each tree looks like a rolled-up hedgehog. If you do that it will be hurting your feet like murder next year when you go cutting – anyway, you’ve seen men pollarding year after year before now. And keep the thong round your neck, and when you’ve done both trees lay the withies out, cut ends together neatly, in three piles, long, medium and short. Now is that all clear?’ Peterkin had said it was.

Marion wondered how Peterkin, with his twisted foot and damaged hand, would really manage. She sometimes thought that Peter ignored or forgot his son’s disability in his eagerness to have jobs done properly. Now Peterkin’s over eight, she thought, we’ll really have to find out what he can do, and train him for the possible jobs. There’s so much he’ll never be able to do.

However, this morning it was not raining, thank the saints, and Peterkin hung the little curved knife round his neck, pushed a little worn whetstone into his tunic pocket and ran off to meet the Hunter boy at the edge of the stream.

With husband and son departed, Marion went over in her mind the various jobs for the day. She made a fire, then sat down on the log, exhausted. Her throat was very painful, her nose congested, her forehead aching. Autumn was always a time of unceasing work. Even after the actual corn-cutting, at which everyone helped in the fields, there was the stacking and carrying of the sheaves, the cutting of the ears, the threshing and winnowing in the wide barn behind the church, and then the seemingly endless sieving of the corn, collecting the chaff, the sweepings to be saved for the hens and pigs.

Then there was her own garden: digging the leeks and onions, picking the ripe beans and peas as they hardened, podding them and storing them in sacks, hanging up the sacks from rafters to keep them from mice, saving the apples as they ripened on the tree by the fence – there was no end to the heavy back-breaking jobs. And as well as all this, she must find food for her family every day. In spite of fatigue she must go on. It had always been thus, and the consequences of an alternative way of life, idleness, were always before her eyes in the Plowright family: silly, morbid Small Sarah, who sat all day with her feet in the ashes of her fire, sometimes weeping, always idle and feckless and with her group of idle, feckless and starving children around her.