‘He knows well enough the difference between goslings and rooks – he just likes throwing stones. Boys.’ Cecily’s attention was distracted by one other of her boys requiring disciplining and she moved away.

From where she was sitting Marion could see across the strip of sunny grass to the bare earth in front of the Hall and to the mounting block and trough and the heap of woolly waves, grey, lined with white, lying where they had fallen from Dick’s shears. Sir Hugh and his family and Father John were sitting at the trestle tables. Everyone was quiet, concerned with eating. The air was full of the baaing of the sheep.

At the table, Molly, capable and sensible and always very serious, was collecting buttery bread in a pile between her hands and taking it very slowly to a log near the Hall porch where Old Agnes and Old Marge were sitting. Marion had not realized they were capable of walking so far from Down the Common. I don’t expect they’ve ever missed a Shearing Feast, she thought, and they don’t want to now. She watched Joan guiding her mother, Old Mavis, who was almost blind, to a seat near them. Her other near neighbour, Jack Plowright, was at the trestle table with several children by him.

Those children never seem to grow, thought Marion. You never know if they’re boys or girls, just small wizened faces with straggling hair falling about, open mouths, crooked teeth, any old rag or nothing round their shoulders, stick-like legs, purple and filthy, toenails curling this way and that – and you’d never get a word out of any of them except to beg. Maybe they can’t talk, maybe they are all as stupid as Small Sarah. After all, she would never be able to teach a child to talk, gabbling the way she does – and Jack couldn’t be bothered.

She watched them shuffling round their father, close together, as if closeness was their only protection, accepting scones in their filthy hands, silent and apathetic. Small Sarah was not with them.

It’s the healthy children who tire you out, Marion decided. They are the difficult ones, those with so much energy. These starving children cause no trouble, but will never be any use to anyone.

She sat back to enjoy the peace and the rare contentment. How restful it was to be warm, warm all over, to relish the fresh breeze which occasionally stirred the oak leaves above her. How very comfortable it was to be dry, not to have damp shoulders where a child had puked, not to have a wet front where a breast had leaked, not to have wet knees where a baby had pissed, not to have wet thighs where, uncontrollably, blood trickled down. She looked at Alice contentedly scratching in the dry acorny earth with a stick, and felt so glad that Alice was almost a dry child now, and thought how short and how rare in a woman’s life were these dry days.