‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh – oh!’ Marion put her down again and noticed how the snowy ground reflected a strange chilly light up into the rafters of the cottage.

Later that day, aware that a likely frost would make the ground even more treacherous and turn the stream to ice, she had gone down to the water-place with a bucket. The stream was not frozen over then but was narrowed by the fat domes of snow that overhung the black water, domes supported by lumps of dead grass and reeds bowed down over the water. Marion had supported herself by leaning on the snow-covered willow as she pulled the rope to get up her heavy bucket. Carrying it up the steep path with her feet slipping and the bucket wobbling was very onerous and by the time she got it to her door the bucket was half empty. She shovelled some snow into it, but a terrible lot of snow was needed to fill it up to the brim. Her hands and feet ached with the cold. She put two more logs on the fire and collapsed on to the log seat in a sort of stupor.

The family hibernated. They sat silent hour by silent hour by the little fire, half stupefied by the cold, half by the smoky air. Sometimes a little snow at the cracks round the roof-hatch melted and drops sizzled on the log below. They ate little bowls of warm barley porridge, sometimes a bit of cheese. They went out reluctantly to the midden when they could wait no longer. Tibtab, dropping down from his patch of hay on the shelf, had jumped up over the partition to the goat’s area and they heard him scraping in the straw round the goat’s feet.

Marion was in constant pain from her feet. She had started a chilblain under one heel on the frosty walk home after the Christmas feast and it had not healed. Every step pressed the raw wound, and now she had found chilblains, red, shiny lumps, on most of her toes. They itched and ached and when she rubbed them the skin split. Her sheepskin boots were soaked through, for one had a crack above the instep and the other a split in the sole. It would be days before they would dry out even on the boot-rack and by the fire, and then they would be so hard and stiff they would hurt her as much to put them on as to go barefoot. And, of course, if she went out in them in the wet they would be soaked through again in two minutes.

By the fifth day the snow seemed to have been reduced. More sticks and more tufts of grass down the garden were visible. A little gust of wind had rattled the ivy on the ash tree, a shower of ice had been flung about and the ivy was green again. The sun came out around noon, the snow on the roof melted a little and all the afternoon there was a steady drip from the thatch which melted the snow below and showed a line of clean-washed pebbles, white and pinkish and toffee-brown. Next morning the drips had become long ribbed icicles, a silver fringe hanging along the edge of the thatch. Peterkin was delighted and broke off some and sucked them. Alice demanded an icicle too and got wet all down her front.