‘No.’ She laughs. ‘He gave me a pony for my fifth birthday, a cow for my eighth and a pig for my tenth. I was milking by nine, ploughing by thirteen, and I had my own business raising geese for Christmas by fourteen. I can’t dress a goose,’ she declares with an air of triumph, having inadvertently stumbled on the answer to his question. ‘I always left that to Muriel, in return for a cut of the profits.’

‘Very enterprising.’

‘I love it,’ she confides with unashamed candour, ‘this life. It’s hard work, relentless … but there is nothing better than being outside, working the farm. I don’t think I was ever cut out for anything else. The school room was an alien environment for me. There was nothing worth learning there, not when nature could teach me everything I needed to know. I belong to the land. It’s part of me and I’m part of it.’

‘I envy you that. That sense of belonging. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that.’

‘Not at home? Where you’re from?’

‘No. I mean, obviously the city’s familiar, but it’s a dirty, noisy, bustling place – I never relished being there – and perhaps it can afford opportunities, but it never really afforded me any. I worked the shipyards out of necessity, not passion. It was a job, a wage. I never felt any affinity with it, not like what you feel. I can tell, listening to you talk like that – you talk from in here.’ Jack pats his chest with a furled fist. ‘From the heart, like.’

‘Yes … you’re right. My heart is here, in this, in all I do. Whenever I clear a ditch, or plough a furrow, sow a field, pleach a hedge … I’m putting a little bit of me into it. Sometimes I don’t know where I stop and the farm begins.’

‘There’s poetry in that.’

‘Yes … yes, I think there is.’

As instinctive as Gwen’s connection is with the land, so is the herd’s sense of direction. They lead the way down the narrow country lane and when the farm gate appears, they turn into it, bellowing their arrival as they amble up the yard to the holding pen at the side of the milking parlour.

‘Never underestimate the intelligence of a cow,’ Gwen grins, as Jack exclaims his surprise. She swings the gate shut behind them. ‘They can outsmart the best of us if they choose.’

Gwen shoos the first few cattle inside. They trudge into their preferred stalls and wait to be relieved of their bloated udders. Gwen hands Jack a bucket of soapy water and a rag.

‘They need to be cleaned up before they’re milked,’ she explains, and shows him how to wash the mud and muck from the teats and milk sacs.