The pile of hot ashes at Marion’s feet gave her another idea. She had pulled off her outer dress of grey-brown tightly woven wool, stiff with all the oozings of babies, and, wearing only her inner dress of once-white wool more loosely woven, had gone to the stream below the cottages. Here she had spread her dress in the partly shallow water, and had trodden on it, squeezing the muddy water through the fabric with her bare feet. The water was horribly cold and the wind blew very chilly on her bare arms and down her neck. She had pulled the sodden dress out and laying it on the bank, deep in new grass, wild peppermint and cresses, and trod on it again to squeeze out as much water as possible. Then she had walked back along the ditch and, seeing a low ash twig almost horizontal across her path, had hung her dress over it and wrung out as much water as she had strength to do.

Back at the oven, Hilda and Molly were sitting idly on tufts of grass, warming their feet at the ashes and gossiping peacefully. They told Marion she was mad, but helped her to hang her dress on a branch above the ashes, and later when the oven was opened and the bread pulled out, they helped her to spread her dress over the still warm stones of the oven roof. Now, looking back at yesterday’s activities, Marion wondered if she had been foolish to use so much firewood in this baking, and to use up most of her store of flour for this delicious bread that would only last their three households a few days. But the other two women had encouraged her, and each other, and they had all shared a sense of achievement. They knew from years of experience that sometimes in May flour or corn, carefully saved and eked out from the previous harvest, could be found to have gone mouldy and so be wasted.

They had previously discussed whether they should involve Small Sarah in this breadmaking, but Molly had slipped into her filthy cottage on some pretext and looked into her flour-chest and found it half full of damp mouldy flour and mouse droppings. ‘It will only spoil our bread to use any of that,’ she had said, and they all agreed to ignore the feckless family.

Last night Marion had looked back on the day’s activities. She had four large loaves in the mouse-proof chest and her dress had been washed. And, as she had laid in bed, a damp-wool pepperminty smell had wafted up.

If yesterday had yielded achievement, today, alone with Alice, Marion’s intermittent uneasiness persisted. As she had stood in the garden, idly registering in her mind that slugs had been eating the newly sprouting peas, she had seen Hilda with a long hooked stick over her shoulder, followed by her two orange-headed little girls, going slowly up an overgrown path into the forest, and she felt this to be a rebuke to herself. Sensible Hilda, having used wood for yesterday’s bread baking, was going into the woods when no one was likely to see to collect and bring back dead branches to replace her depleted log pile. I should do the same, thought Marion, but idleness seemed heavy in her legs.