Looking back now, she realises that there was no reason why her father’s job in itself should have been the cause of so much teasing; many of the children had fathers employed in pursuits that were positively disreputable, whereas her father’s position was secure and respectable. And her cousins over the river certainly didn’t suffer in the same way. Uncle Bob, who worked at Crossness, was a jolly man, always ready with a joke, full of good stories about rats and diamond rings. He had a ring of his own, of which he was very proud, made from a gold sovereign he’d found in the old King’s Pond Sewer; he and his mates were a friendly lot. But Walter was a different matter altogether. There was something purposefully, provocatively irritating and alienating in his manner; he would harangue neighbours about their drains and cisterns and faucets, he was a busybody, aggressive, interfering, self-righteous, and utterly lacking in human tact. Whenever Kate saw him talking to anyone in the street, her heart would sink, for she could catch all too quickly the expressions of bored impatience and sulky resentment with which his temporarily captured audience would listen to his lectures.

He was a useful man, of course. Those whom he had not too deeply offended would call him in when pipes burst or blocked, when ballcocks misbehaved. And Kate is herself a dab hand at washers and plumbing. She cannot bear to waste water, and has been known to leap up from other people’s dining tables to turn off a dripping tap, to return smiling defiantly and apologetically with an amusing account of the price of each wasted drop in man hours and money. People always assume that her father instructed her in these skills, but that, she says, isn’t so—why should she have needed to learn these things when he was around to do them? No, she learned the hard way, when she got married, from a do-it-yourself book. But the neurosis, if such it be, is inherited. She doesn’t think it’s neurosis, she thinks it’s common sense. She gets very annoyed when people own up to the range of things they flush down the lavatory. Just think, she says, of the people on the receiving end. Luckily, she manages to say these things in a manner that people find endearing, acceptable, even charming. Unlike her father.