‘I could do it, Mam, if I had someone to help me.’

This she thought was true, but she knew Peter would not agree.

‘What’s the point of that? I could make a basket myself, and so could anyone, in half the time I’d be helping you make one. Besides, there isn’t enough room for two people at one basket, not with keeping on turning it round. What’s the point of knowing a thing and not being able to do it? No, boy, see what you can do with yourself today. Pile up all that small kindling for a start – I’m fed up.’

At that moment Alice appeared, her face pink and shiny and with a wide smile.

‘Look,’ she said, holding a scarlet pear-tree leaf to the top of her head with one muddy hand, and another under her chin with the other, ‘Alice is a cock,’ and she gave an accurate rendering of a cock crowing. They all laughed, and the laughter was a relief. Alice was pleased with her success. Again Marion felt what an unusual child Alice was. None of her other children had played in this inventive way, none had ever sought to amuse themselves. Alice did seem special, but Marion never had a moment’s regret that any future life that Alice might live to would be one of unceasing domestic toil and childbearing – for that was all life offered. It was life.

‘You’d better both have another try and finish that basket since you’ve begun it,’ she addressed her husband and son, ‘and mind Alice, and take the jar off the loaf on the hearth soon, and put the loaf on the shelf. I’m off to the Hall with their last cheese,’ and she picked up the wide basket and left them. Alice was too busy patting coloured leaves on to the earth to notice her mother was leaving her.

It was quite a good day for mid-November, chilly but not icy, the wind fitful, the sky blue in between plentiful white and grey clouds. Marion looked up into the wooded hills where the steep slope of the ground, thickly covered in dead leaves, was visible now that the undergrowth of hazel and hornbeam was bare. The pale smooth trunks of the beech trees stood out, and here and there was a dark furry mass of a yew tree. The oaks, further up the hill still held their thick ochre foliage and far away the distant trees were a tangle of purplish branches against the slow moving clouds.

She stumped down the Common, the path bare from their constant tramping. The grass on each side, where it had been grazed for most of the summer, was now resprouting a rich vivid green, and several of the villagers’ cows, which they hoped to keep alive through the winter, were languidly grazing. The hawthorns against Molly’s hedge were dark and bare of leaves now, but still decorated with lumps of crimson berries, and among them grew ash saplings, smooth and silver-grey, with black buds, all round their bases a tangle of old nettles, rusty docks, collapsed thistles and fluffy willowherb, all rotting away, the whole held together with skeins of old man’s beard, a grey scum over the dark twigs.