‘Buttercup,’ she told him, pulling at the necklace. Marion saw a slow smile stir in his beard as he bent down to pick her up. It pleased Marion. It was always thought in the village that loving relationships between father and child were made by a good wife and mother, and that quarrels between fathers and children were regarded as proof of a mother’s failure. She took Peter’s pleasure in his baby daughter as a compliment to herself. It did not occur to her that Alice, naked, wet, with muddy hands, smelt sweet to him for the first time in her little life.

‘Her bum’s like ice,’ he said, and Marion took her from his arms and rewrapped her in her smelly dress.

‘Come on,’ said Peter to dawdling Alice as they walked back home along the Common. ‘We’ll never get home at this rate.’

‘She’s tired,’ said Marion, ‘been trotting around all day.’

‘I’ll carry you,’ he said, and scooped her up under one arm, his other being burdened with a bag of tools. Alice yelled. ‘Now you shut up,’ he said in her ear.

‘Want pickypack!’ screamed Alice.

‘Can’t, got my bag to carry.’

‘Want pickypack!’ roared Alice. The parents took no notice. Alice continued to roar.

‘She’ll get tired of that soon,’ said Marion as they walked on.

‘Not before we’re driven raving mad,’ he said, but he laughed in Alice’s furious face, and she stopped screaming and laughed back.

As they went through the gate and up the incline by Molly’s cottage they heard angry female voices, and round the side of the cottage they came upon Old Agnes and Old Marge, both leaning on the doorposts looking exhausted, and Molly fiercely berating Small Sarah who stood before her, bedraggled and dirty as ever but cowed and furtive as well. Molly saw Marion and Peter and directed her berating at them.

‘What d’you think? We just got home to find this slut down in our garden, by the hen shed, and I says to her, what you doing here? I says, and I grab her arm and she’s got half a dozen eggs under her cloak, stolen, from my nests, and she drops them all on our dung heap and all are broken. Aunt goes into our cottage and finds two loaves gone and a bucket of new milk upset all over the floor and comes out screaming to tell me. All that milk wasted, she says, and we only yesterday gave your brats some bread and cheese, she says – an’ what have you got to say to that, Sarah? And where’s our two loaves?’ And so the angry monologue went on, and Small Sarah stood there, open-mouthed as always, with nothing to say.

Molly calmed down a bit, and said to Marion, ‘You’d better see if she’s been at your place. She could have been stealing everything, sly bitch – us being away all day. She’s been at the Shepherds’ too, I expect.’ Here Sarah protested that she had not.