They had walked for miles, it seemed to Ella, whose legs had begun to grow tired. ‘Can’t we wait for a bus, Mum?’

Kate had smiled. ‘You’d wait a long time, love. They don’t come out this far.’

‘No buses!’ the girl had exclaimed, her skipping stilled for a horrified moment. To their right the fields, brown and flat, stretched westwards as far as the distant horizon with only a lonely farm, or a line of trees here and there, to break the monotony.

Then Ella was skipping again, taking little running jumps and stretching her neck, trying to see over the sand-dunes. ‘Where’s the sea, Mum? You said we were coming to the seaside. I’ve never seen the sea.’

‘Beyond the dunes and across the marsh, love,’ Kate had answered, waving her hand absently to the left. ‘You can go and look at it later.’

Now, sitting in the kitchen that must once have been her mother’s home, Ella looked about her at the peg rug on the hearth, the brick walls painted red, the pots and pans lining the shelves and a ham hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Then her gaze came back to the woman standing behind the scrubbed table peeling and coring apples and laying the slices in a pastry-lined, circular tin.

Ella studied her. So this woman, who had called her that dreadful name, was her grandmother.

Although old in the girl’s eyes, Esther Godfrey’s hair was thick and still a luxuriant auburn colour though there were strands of grey at her temples. It was piled high on the top of her head and two combs thrust into its thickness held it in place. Only the curls on her forehead and escaping tendrils softened the severe style. Her skin, though tanned through working outside in all weathers, was smooth and remarkably unlined for a grandmother. The woman’s green eyes glanced up briefly and for a moment met Ella’s blue gaze. ‘Dun’t stare, Missy. It’s rude. And stop kicking ya Grandpa’s chair; ya’ll scratch it.’