I’d be like that myself, Marion thought, if I hadn’t my health. And she was thankful that she had not had a dozen or more babies over the last ten years. If only Jack would leave her alone … but this thought she barely allowed herself, for it was assumed in the village that men should have their wives whenever they liked except just before or just after a birth.

Peter stood up and rubbed his rather fatty hands down his tunic. ‘I’ll get that bit of ground ready for the peas by noon,’ he announced. Marion knew that was too optimistic.

‘You’ll mind Alice, won’t you?’ said Marion. ‘I’ve got to take these eggs to the Hall while they’re still fresh, and I’ve told Hilda that Peterkin will collect a bag of food from her and take it up to Dick and the boys.’

‘All right,’ said Peter, ‘be back as soon as you can. Come on, Alice, out to play with Father. Finished your bread?’ He scooped up Alice with one hand, picked up his spade with the other and stumped off down the garden.

Marion put the eight eggs from yesterday in a basket on a little straw, sent Peterkin next door to collect Hilda’s bag of food and the two of them set off for the village. She watched Peterkin limping along the path ahead of her, and a pang of sorrow for him struck her, as it often did. His twisted left hand was hooked into the belt of his tunic with the handle of Hilda’s bag twisted round its wrist, and with every step he lurched as his twisted left foot touched the ground.

The disaster had occurred when he was two, and it was extraordinary that he had survived after that winter’s night. They had a tiny candle and the firelight was bright, and Peterkin – Marion could recall exactly his plump baby’s body – was sitting on the floor with his bare legs stuck out towards the fire. Peter at that time had been lying on the bed for days, aching, coughing, unable to eat, sweating and trembling and muttering that he would die. It was because of his illness that the stock of sawn logs was running so low, and Marion, unable to manage the heavy old saw that Peter kept at the cottage, had been dragging long branches in, putting one end in the fireplace and then shoving up the branch as the end burnt. She was aware that she must always remember the unburnt end lying in the semi-darkness on the cottage floor. Margery, a little girl then, was banging beans rather ineffectively in the stone quern, and Nolly, fat and contented, was sitting in the cradle. Then Marion forgot, or tripped, or … she could never recall exactly, but her foot knocked the unburnt log on the floor and the other burning end, on which the big iron pot full of hot soup was lodged, tipped down and the iron pot fell off the fire on to Peterkin’s left foot, pouring the hot soup over his leg. Screaming, he had pushed the pot off his foot with his left hand and had burnt that too. She had picked him up, dipped the end of her cloak into a water barrel and laid the cold wet on his foot and hand and he screamed and screamed. Margery had leapt up, staring in horror, then seized a stick, put it through the handle of the iron pot and righted it, preserving some of the soup.