‘I want summat inside the wagon,’ he said under his breath and I stood aside like a fool to let him go past me. But as soon as he was near he grabbed me with one hard grimy hand and twisted my arm behind my back so hard that I could hear the bone creak and I squeaked between clenched teeth for the pain.

‘Get up on ‘er,’ he said softly in my ear; his breath foul. ‘Or I’ll beat you till you can’t ride ‘er, nor any other for a week.’

I jerked away from him: sullen, ineffective. And I scowled at my stepmother who stood, picking her teeth with her free hand and watching this scene. She had never stood between me and him in my life. She had seen him beat me until I went down on my knees and cried and cried for him to stop. The most she had ever done for me was to tell him to stop because the noise of my sobbing was disturbing her own baby. I felt that I was utterly unloved, utterly uncared for; and that was no foolish girl’s fear. That was the bitter truth.

‘Get up,’ Da said again, and came to the horse’s head.

I looked at him with a gaze as flinty as his own. ‘I’ll get up and she’ll throw me,’ I said. ‘You know that, so do I. And then I’ll get on her again and again and again. We’ll never train her like that. If you had as much brains inside you as you have beer, you’d let me train her. Then at least we’d have a sweet-natured animal to show this farmer. The way you want to do it we’ll show him a whipped idiot.’

I had never spoken to him like that before. My voice was steady but my belly quivered with fright at my daring.

He looked at me for a long hard moment.

‘Get up,’ he said. Nothing had changed.

I waited for one moment, in case I had a chance, or even half a chance to win my way in this. His face was flinty-hard, and I was only a young girl. I met his gaze for a moment. He could see the fight go out of me.

I checked he was holding the horse tight at the head and then I turned and gripped hold of the saddle and sprang up.