His speech was strange too. Marion recalled how, many years ago when she was a girl, he had arrived one burning hot harvest day and had said, ‘Give me a beever, for the love of God,’ in his sing-song intonation, still imitated by some of the Rockwell boys. And when ‘beever’ was not understood, he had made a gesture of drinking. All agreed it was a funny way of talking. He exuded a strange smell, partly derived from the half-cured foxtails which, twisted together, formed his hat. A human stink was hardly noticed by the villagers but this strange animal odour they found repulsive, and it, together with the yellow-eyed bitch, sent all the dogs in the village into paroxysms of barking.

This alien who arrived over the hills, unattached to their people, could easily have evoked a malaise of hostility, and it was Chris Foxcap’s unexpected professed Christianity that cooled any hostility. It had been years ago that he had arrived one Saturday evening and had spent the night in the Hall with his dog at his feet in the straw under one of the benches. In the morning he had started to get out his equipment when it was pointed out to him it was Sunday.

‘Sunday, is it?’ he had said, ‘Well, there’s a blessed thing. I’m to go to Mass with you all, am I?’ Someone had asked with some surprise if he were a Christian.

‘Surely I’m a Christian, born on St Christopher’s Day, him that carried the Holy Child over the stream. My father had me at church the day after I was born, so he said.’

‘Where was that?’ the priest had asked him.

‘I’m telling you what my father told me, but I don’t remember it myself. Do you remember where it was you was christened, Father? Babies don’t look round and say, “This is Rye,” or “This is Pevensey,” or “This is … Rutherford,” do they?’

This wide knowledge of the alien world added envy and horror to the mystified minds. But Chris had gone to Mass that day. He had pulled off his fox cap at the church door and had knelt down and said ‘Amen’ and crossed himself with all the others, a real Christian they had had to admit. But a certain mystery remained in their uneasy hearts. Later that day one of the village boys had asked him where he had been born.

‘Under a hedge.’

‘What hedge?’

‘Well, boy, one hedge looks much like another, specially when you first open your eyes and have never seen a hedge before. But, so they told me, they took me to church and had me christened. It was the church at Rutherford to my way of thinking because that is St Christopher’s church, as yours here is St Paul’s church. I think St Paul journeyed here with your stone cross many, many years ago and had your church built, same way St Christopher came to Rutherford and there he met the Holy Child and carried him across the stream. There’s a picture of him on the wall in Rutherford church. There he stands as some of you must have seen, a really big man, with his tunic pulled up and his bare legs in the water – swirling about it is, just below his knees, fish or two in it – he has a big face and a woolly beard and he twists round to look at the Child on his shoulder – nice-looking little chap Christ was – and St Christopher holds a big pole with leaves sticking out at the top to steady himself in the water. Well, that’s what St Christopher did at Rutherford, so that’s why he has his church there.’