‘Oh Peter!’ Marion was made nervous by Peter’s casual references to the Devil. ‘I’ll go back to the Hall later and see what’s happened. Alice, what have you got all over your knees?’ She had pulled up Alice’s rough dress and found her knees, under their earthy crust, were covered with scarlet lumps.

‘She crawled into those nettles just coming up,’ Peter jerked his thumb towards the hedge, ‘got terribly stung and yelled and screamed. Wasted a lot of time calming her. Still, we found some dock leaves, didn’t we, Alice, and it’s all better now.’

‘Dock,’ said Alice. Despite regarding attending to Alice as wasting his time, Peter was a kindly father. There came a shout from the cottage and they saw Peterkin jiggling down the garden to them.

‘Anything to eat?’ he asked.

‘Didn’t the shepherds share anything with you?’

‘Yes. Not much.’

‘You can have this bit of bread and cheese,’ said Marion.

‘Dick cut my toenails,’ announced Peterkin, pulling off his old boot to show them. ‘Did it with the small shears he says he keeps for going round the sheeps’ ears.’

Marion inspected Peterkin’s feet. The toes of his right foot were all straight and Dick had cut the nails close and neatly, but the twisted left foot was a problem because Peterkin always put its outer side and the little and fourth toes to the ground, and both these toes were twisted inwards, and the nails, growing into his foot, were difficult to cut.

‘Did it hurt?’

‘Yes. He made me sit with my foot in a puddle up there for ages. It was freezing, but he said it softened the nails and then he could cut them.’

‘Wish we could all have shears like that to cut our toenails,’ said Peter.

‘Why’s Alice all yellow on her face?’ Peterkin asked, as he put on his boots again.

Marion, inspecting, found that Alice was eating a dandelion. She removed it, Alice squawked.

‘She can’t like it,’ said Peterkin. ‘Dandelions are as bitter as bitter. I’ve tried.’ Alice let out a bleat of disgust. Marion bent down and scooped a fingerful of mashed dandelion from Alice’s mouth.

‘Silly girl,’ she said. ‘First it’s nettles, then it’s dandelions. Still, you’ve got to learn.’ Marion knew she had said this many times before to her children and would likely say it many times more to future children. Her life was made of such little repetitions – her mother’s and grandmother’s lives had been the same – and in twenty years or so Alice herself might be standing in this very spot wiping dandelion petals from the mouth of some infant, and so on and on for ever.

Before sunset, Marion and Peter walked back to the village. Marion left Alice with Hilda, and Hilda’s elder child, Meg, a round-faced girl with orange curls, had welcomed Alice ‘to play baby with’.

The wind had dropped and the sky had clouded over when they crossed the bridge and saw most of the villagers standing about under the oak tree and round the Hall porch, their movements slow, their speech subdued. Beyond them, up the sloping path towards the church, Marion saw a little procession. Father John went first, followed by Rollo carrying a small bundle, and behind him in an orderly file some dozen children, none over twelve, all carrying little bunches of wilting buttercups, cowslips, closed dandelions, lady’s-smocks and stalks of wild cherry blossom. She could see Loppy Lambert, a figure apart, neither child nor adult, lurking by a yew tree, watching intently.