Marion and Simon went round the corner of the house, past the wood pile, to where the family was assembled to eat, and Marion again thought, millers’ children don’t go hungry, as she looked at her strong handsome relatives.

Near the end of the house stood a close-planted group of tall pendulous holly trees whose hanging branches, intertwined, made a thick semicircular curtain, the branches on one side having been cut off to make an aperture. This was called, for as long as Marion could remember, ‘the holly cave’, and it made an almost completely dry shelter for hens and geese. Over its lower interior branches clothes and sacks were often hung for drying. Marion remembered it much more overgrown and wild, and the ground thick with dead prickles, horrid to the feet, but now the branches had been trimmed back and the ground swept clean and smooth and broad logs had been placed for the family to sit on.

Marion’s father, the Old Man, or Grandpa to the children, had been carried out there to his special chair, a chunk of solid elm wood with a plaited wattle backing, and there he sat in the holly shade, his pink bald head bowed, his sagging features losing themselves in his straggling beard, which itself became lost in the grey-brown blanket which covered him. His hands, with swollen red knuckles and contorted fingers, lay in a muddle on the blanket, and his purple-blotched legs, covered in a network of ill-knotted veins, were part hidden in voluminous sheepskin boots. Even to Marion’s unfussy nostrils, he stank.

‘Father,’ she said, touching his hand, ‘are you awake? It’s Marion come to see you with Alice.’

The Old Man made vague sounds, half opened an eye and closed it again.

‘He’s asleep again,’ said Betsy, ‘best leave him,’ and Marion thought that one time soon, he would look the same, and they would try to waken him and would find he would never wake again.

Betsy plumped herself down on a log, picked up the loaf and started slicing it, holding it against her body. Marion sat down too, took Alice on her knee and looked round at her nieces and nephew. Gib, the second son, a gangly boy in a sacking loin cloth, sat with his long sunburnt legs bent up under him, and his long sunburnt freckly arms flung out. On his bony shoulders patches of freckled skin had peeled off leaving blobs like squashed raspberries on the points of bone. His pale hair had been cut off round his ears and his more gingery beard split wide every time he put a huge slice of bread into his mouth. Ellen had just come up the grassy path from the stream with a bucket of water. She was, Marion thought, so like what her mother had been when Betsy too was seventeen. Lisa, the eldest child, recently married to Martin Rockwell, was the same type – plump and pink with gingery hair and blue eyes, wide laughing mouth, and, where not freckled or sunburnt, with the very white skin that was so much admired. Kate, the youngest, a girl of about fifteen, was different, slighter and dark-haired, with a brownish skin and deep-set dark eyes under straight brows and a thin arched nose – like Simon, thought Marion. She had always been surprised that villagers had commented on how alike Kate and Marion were, but Marion could be no judge of that as she had no real knowledge of her appearance – nothing more than the dim silhouette in a puddle or in a full bucket of water.