‘What is it?’ Peter mumbled from the bed, with the baby’s screams aching through his head.

‘Soup’s upset on Peterkin’s foot,’ Marion said, and to Margery, ‘Go to Hilda Shepherd and get some of her ointment.’

Margery was terrified of going out in the dark, but recognized an emergency, and felt her way by the familiar stones on the path to the Shepherds’ cottage. She was relieved when Hilda, taking a horn from a shelf, hurried back with her to the cottage.

Peterkin was still screaming. Nolly was sitting up in the cradle, frightened and wailing. By the intermittent light of the fire and the one tiny candle flame, Hilda gently spread some of her ointment, an impure lanoline mixed with innocuous herbs, on Peterkin’s wounds. He screamed even more. She gave him a spoonful of some other concoction of her making which she said would make him sleep. Marion found it the longest night of her life. Peterkin lay on her lap – such as there was of it, for she was six months pregnant – screaming and writhing and touching his foot with his good hand and hurting himself even more. She could do nothing for him. Peter dragged himself up, groaning and shaking, and put a blanket over her. She told him to go back to bed and to take Margery and Nolly with him and to put out the candle as they might need it more later on. Eventually, hour after ghastly hour later, even Peterkin dozed and lay in Marion’s arms whimpering and shaking. When light came she could hardly move she was so cold and stiff. She lifted Peterkin into the cradle and pushed open the top half of the door and the wintry dawn light showed her Peterkin’s wounds. She gently pulled aside the wet cloth with which she had been trying to cool his foot and hand all night, and with it the skin of his foot came off like a sock. She covered the wounds again as he lay screaming. Then suddenly a darkness clouded her eyes and she lay down on the floor, fainting.

Extraordinarily, Peterkin had survived. His foot had barely suppurated, and new skin gradually grew over the wounds, but the fabric was damaged and his foot had never since grown straight. He had learnt to get about, and even as he got older to climb trees, but he limped badly and had to hop to keep up with other boys in the village. His left hand had not been so extensively damaged as his foot, but the thumb was immovably pressed against the base of the first two fingers which were themselves almost immobile. It was a hand incapable of holding.

Marion watched him hopping along ahead of her and told herself that he would probably never get any better now. A lame, one-handed boy was a liability, not an asset. How could a boy like that ever handle a plough? Or a scythe? And to follow his father and be a carpenter was impossible. But still – he was sharp-faced, like his mother, with deep-set grey eyes, very clear-sighted, and with his right arm could throw a stone at a pigeon, calculating not only the bird’s position, but the trajectory of the stone through the branches, so that he could hit the pigeon without warning it. Short-sighted Peter regarded Peterkin’s stone-throwing ability with pride and awe.