Marion looked down the garden, a gentle slope, with Peter and Peterkin digging near the bottom. The hedge on the right was full of silver ash twigs, dotted with black buds, sticking straight up above the bright green grass. Beyond the ditch at the end of the garden the forest sloped up steeply, bare of leaf – tall smooth beeches, roughened oaks, corrugated ashes, standing up on the red-brown leaf-mould earth through which patches of juicy bluebell leaves and dog’s mercury were now showing. Dotted about this steep wood were dark yew trees and the occasional wild cherry, misty white with opening blossom. Nearer to, in the undergrowth of elder and honeysuckle, hazel bushes were draped in long yellow catkins, sometimes straining out horizontally in the gusts of wind, then bouncing around as the wind released them. Marion looked to the left, beyond the garden fence and her apple tree, still only in tight bud, to the birch trees on the Common. The green veil that covered them today had hardly been apparent yesterday, and the snowy blackthorn in the hedge had thickened. She picked a primrose from a clump in the grass and sniffed its tiny velvety scent, then she called to Peter and Peterkin to come and eat. She went in herself and gave the primrose to Alice, showing her how to smell it first.

They had finished the baked eggs and almost finished the warm bread when two of the Plowright children appeared. There were many Plowright children, all quiet, thin and bedraggled, and of indeterminate sex. Marion often wondered if they really had names, since those given them over the font appeared to have been forgotten soon after.

‘Can we have a bit of bread?’ the taller one whispered.

Marion felt exasperated and Peter frowned fiercely.

‘Hasn’t your mam got any for you?’

‘No,’ said the child, insinuating a thin bare leg over the threshold.

Marion gave half a loaf, carefully broken in two, to each of the children.

‘Now that’s all, do you understand? Share it with the others, don’t come for more.’ Her severity, she knew, concealed her pity. She wondered again if the Plowright baby, which had died before Christmas, had not succumbed to plain starvation. The children said, ‘Yes,’ and departed.

Peter sighed. ‘Only yesterday,’ he said, ‘I saw one of them trying to eat an old cabbage stalk by the rubbish heap. Rotten sort of woman that Small Sarah.’

Yes indeed, the Plowrights were a wretched family. Jack, Marion supposed, was all right, a hard worker on the land, sowing and ploughing and reaping, but he was a surly silent man and too often round at the Hall’s brew house, cadging a pint of ale. Small Sarah, his wife, with her twisted mouth, was small in body and in mind, and now after many years of bearing children, living and dead, she could cope no longer. She sat idle in their cottage caring for nothing. One could not talk to her for no one could understand what she said, only a gobbledy noise came from her. Her upper lip had a split almost to her nostrils and she had an oddly flat nose. She was born like that and had never spoken properly. It made people wonder if she were lunatic, and there was little in her manner to make anyone think otherwise. At times Marion or Hilda had gone to her cottage, put things aright as much as they could, given bits of clothes to the children, urged Small Sarah to be up and doing, but in vain. Days after, Marion found the fire out, mice at the cheese, bread mouldy and children wailing. Once or twice Father John, urged by Sir Hugh, had stumped down the Common to give Small Sarah a talk about her duties, but she had just sat there, her purple feet in the ashes, looking at him with vacant bloodshot eyes and making no reply. Marion knew that nothing could really be done for the Plowrights and that no amount of admonishing Small Sarah would ever give her the physical strength and the mental resolution to raise her and her family from this sordid poverty.