Marion had Peterkin and Alice with her. Peterkin worked, raking and tossing, and Alice was minded by the Shepherds’ little girls. They had all more or less finished eating when Peterkin said, ‘Father, who’s Buck?’

‘What Buck?’

‘In the song. No one’s called “Buck”.’

‘Don’t know,’ said Peter. ‘It’s just in the song, always was.’

‘Maybe there was once a person called Buck lived in the village,’ Dick muttered, still gazing up into the branches.

‘Buckercuck,’ said Alice, and collapsed into giggles at her own wit. Marion looked at the squirming little girl and thought how different Alice was from other children. No other village child – or certainly none of Marion’s children not even Nolly – had ever made themselves laugh. I suppose most mothers think their children are different from others at some time – but she’s not my Nolly, thought Marion.

Peter, always conscientious, was the first to rouse himself, start relacing his boots, and then one by one they all rose up stiffly, finding their hats, stepping behind the tree to urinate and arguing whose rake was whose. Someone had left Dick’s rake lying on the stubble athwart a depression in the ground. Someone must have stepped on it and partly split the handle, which, when the pressure was removed, straightened out so that the split was concealed. Dick took it up, seeing nothing wrong, but when he ran his right hand up the shaft, a long sharp sliver of wood, lying close to the shaft and barely visible as separate, pierced the ball of his thumb deeply. He yelped, jerking his hand away and the sliver broke off leaving an inch of wood sticking out of his hand. Hilda was by him in a flash as he gripped the sharp inch of wood and pulled it out with, ‘Eeeh,’ his mouth tense.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, putting his hand to his mouth and sucking the wound. ‘It’s out. Give me a bit of something to wrap round it, Hilda. Look, it’s not even bleeding.’

Marion saw that the sliver he had pulled out was over two inches long, so that it must have penetrated deep into his hand. What neither she nor anyone else knew then was that the point of the sliver, quite a long bit, had been broken off in the wound. He made light of it, bound his thumb round with a bit of cloth that Hilda tore from the cover of the bucket, honed the handle of his rake smooth and went back to the field with the others. Once or twice during the afternoon Marion saw him using his left hand only on the rake and guessed it hurt more than he liked to admit.

They worked long, hour after hour. Marion met Ellen, who was with the party scything the middle of the field, when their raking lines met, and they paused to rest and chat about the weather and Marion mentioned Dick’s mishap. They worked on.

The sky was still clear and blue when they all began to feel real exhaustion. Three more long lines of hay on the ground must be tossed and tossed and reraked, but Hilda said she must now take her children home, and would take Alice too and give her some milk. As soon as she had disappeared down the field, carrying Alice in the now empty bucket, followed by the little girls begging for a similar ride, Dick told Peter that he had to go to look at two of the sheep in the orchard that he suspected were ill, and he took himself off. Marion well knew how he and everyone else looked for excuses to leave the hayfield. The pricking feet, the aching backs, the weary shoulders could be endured only so long – and the July days were longer than endurance. ‘You go off and rest on the Green,’ Peter told her, and gladly she too wandered down the path at the edge of the field on her way back to the village.