Near the edge of the Common, a little way from Marion’s cottage, stood what they called the Old Barn. It was already derelict when Molly’s mother and aunt were young, so no one knew how old it really was. It had mostly been built of oak beams and wattle or board walls, as had the Hall, but the two end walls had been built of blocks of smoothed stone, like the church, and against one stone wall was a small bread oven, now very rarely used. Years and years ago in a legendary storm which had uprooted trees (including those that had revealed the spring at Rockwell), a huge beech tree had crashed down on the barn cracking the ridge beam of the roof in two, demolishing one end wall of stone and breaking most of the rest of the roof. It had long been abandoned as a barn. Over the years the beech tree had been cut and split, and the serviceable beams and rafters had been dragged away to furnish materials for other buildings, and year by year ivy and honeysuckle had grown over the ruin, and nettles and elder had flourished inside. Owls had made nests among the remaining rotting beams and semi-wild cats from Down the Common cottages had bred in the gloomy green hollows. Marion had sometimes gone down there and peered into the dark interior where long pale green tendrils of plants starved of light hung down in thick curtains, and the spongy floor at her feet was sour with owl droppings and stank of cats. It was an eerie place, one to be avoided.

But the bread oven was too rare an asset to reject, and with the company of the other two women, Marion would take advantage of it. They had to slash a path to it with sickles through the cow parsley and docks, and then pull strands of ivy, old convolvulus, goose grass and brambles from the semi-domed roof. Then Hilda, by far the most agile of the three, had climbed up and pulled the creepers from the short chimney. They had cleared it, removed the loose arch-shaped stone which was its door and swept out the inside of the oven. Then Hilda and Marion had gone back to their cottage for wood, kindling and a glowing log, which Marion carried in an old iron pot. They filled the oven with fuel and lit it. Then back to Molly’s cottage where she, on a good broad tree stump by the door, was kneading the great lumps of dough made from their three contributions of flour. It was Marion who possessed the newest bucket in which to convey the dough down to the oven. It was very heavy and she and Molly carried it between them with a long stick through the holes near the rim. The oven hot, they had raked out the ashes as best they could and divided the dough into lumps. Those for Marion were marked with a cross, those for Hilda with two parallel lines, Molly’s with a triangle. They slid them with the help of a spade into the oven and all three together had lifted the stone door back into place.