We were four families. We made the land. We solidified and drained it, we built the dykes and, later on, laid the pipes. The town is built on our land. Our name is older than all the houses. It’s older than every cobblestone. Every spring, when the water rises up out of the ground and floods the cellars, it pushes a few old bones out of the earth. Mother used to say that there were more bones under the town than there were stones.

Some summers there’s no sign of the water. It seems to have seeped away for ever; the wind drives the dust over the fields, and our faces and the animals’ backs and the metal machinery are coated in dust. Every now and again the children look at each other and laugh. They draw stripes on their dusty faces with their fingers and laugh so hard they have to clutch their sides.

And then the water is back again. A few hours of rain is all it takes to squeeze out the sponge beneath our feet. The clouds blow over, but the mud stays. Then you’re wading through dirt, boots heavy with earth, black flies buzzing at the back of your neck. And the earth sticks to the potatoes as well. They’re twice as heavy as usual and worth less than half as much.

The land’s no good, but it’s all we’ve got.

My parents grew old, then they died, and one after another everyone left. When the last of my brothers went, he said to me, ‘What are you staying here for? Come with me, before you get eaten by the flies!’

I thought: let them go if they want. More land for me. It’ll pay off. Everything pays off eventually. I bought them out, said goodbye and wished them all the best. I was the farmer now. And I could be stubborn. I kept going back to the bank until I got what I wanted. I bought machinery. I employed seasonal workers. I filled in the old dykes and laid drainage pipes. Then I extended the house, built two garages, the big silo, and a corrugated-­iron hangar for five hundred turkey chicks. I bought a dark-­blue suit and went to a tea dance at the Black Buck, where I found a wife. She couldn’t work, but we had five children together, three of whom survived. At some point they left home. If nothing’s happened to them, they’re still alive.

‘Perhaps this will all still amount to something,’ I said to my wife.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course it will.’

But she didn’t believe it. And she was right. The drainage pipes helped for a while, but then everything flooded again, and we were wading through an ankle-­deep lake where the potatoes drowned. And then there were weeks when everything dried out and the earth split open, sharp-­edged cracks appeared everywhere, and there was no water to save the fields, not a drop. There was the time of flies and the time of dust.