‘Could be a swirl in the current,’ said Marion. She threw in a bunch of dead grass. It landed nearer to her feet and it too started to float slowly down stream.

‘Looks as though it’s going down,’ said Peter. ‘If the rain keeps off we may be all right. Go and look at the water-place, Peterkin.’

He ran off, and Molly, seeing the ducks in his hands said, ‘What it is to have a boy handy with a stone – not that there’s ever much to eat on a duck.’

‘Wonder how they are at the Mill,’ Marion said. ‘They must have had the sluice open all night and the water thundering down. I can remember how it was in the flood when I was a girl.’

Peterkin rushed back shouting, ‘The water-place is underwater. It’s halfway up the tree stump, but it must be going down now as there are bits of grass hanging all wet on the branches over it, about this high over the water,’ and he indicated a space of a foot between his good and his twisted hand.

‘Nothing we can do,’ Peter said, waving a greeting at Martin who joined them, bleary-eyed. ‘We’re all lucky not to have been washed out of our beds in the night. Come along, Marion, Alice could be up to all sorts of mischief by now.’

When they got back to their cottage Alice was sitting up on the bed with Peter’s measuring stick perilously balanced over her tiny ear and in her short hair.

‘I’m Father,’ she said to him, and he laughed as he took it from her and put it behind his own ear.

Marion attended to the fire again, a job to be postponed always at her peril, and then looked at the two mallard drakes which Peterkin had dropped on the log seat. They were not large birds and she agreed with Molly that there was not much to eat on a mallard, but all that wonderful duck fat, she thought with relish, and the fresh meat stewed up with beans, beans which would absorb some of the fat and be richly satisfying. The next day, when the stew was cold in the pot, she would scrape off a layer of thick soft fat and spread it over slices of bread. How good, how sustaining, how warming, a food that was. She stroked the emerald head of one drake, full of admiration for its unearthly colour, while her mind planned rich meals ahead. She tied the necks together and hung them up outside under the eaves. She would see about plucking and drawing them later. She surprised herself with a sudden sick feeling in spite of her pleasurable anticipation of eating the duck and had to go out to the midden to be sick.

That bacon again, she thought. Can’t get rid of it, like Molly and her mother.

Peterkin had watched his mother’s pleasure at his kill, and a mysterious feeling of pride flooded his mind. He decided to boast about the ducks to his mates in the village. He had not, with his lame foot and his bent hand, previously had anything to boast about to them.