How curious she’d been, when they first arrived in Suffolk, to see all that agricultural machinery on the roads and in the fields. Having only ever known London, she was completely unaware of the rhythms of the seasons, the wild flowers that came and went with the passing months, or the focus of the community on growing livestock and cultivating the deep, fertile fields. She remembers being told about the harvest festival – the day when the village thanked the earth for its bounties and decorated the church with sheaves of real wheat and barley, piles of red apples and enormous green marrows. But she never got the chance to celebrate it.

Molly is so absorbed in her thoughts that almost before she has noticed, they have passed Sudbury. A gracious town, she recalls, with Georgian houses lining wide streets, a large church dominating the square, and the bronze statue of an artist flourishing his paintbrush and palette. She remembers going on a market day when, after the livestock sales were done, grizzled farmers would gather in the pub on the Market Hill, putting the world to rights. Around lunch-time they would be joined by their wives, who were laden with the spoils of a morning’s haggling: the best cuts of meat, the greenest greens and whitest potatoes.

But they see none of this today, following a bypass punctuated with roundabouts, past unlovely industrial buildings in varied states of prosperity or decline. They make a short detour through a council estate, and soon enough they are on a road that seems to writhe like a snake as it follows the contours of the river.

Ah, the river, just a gentle meandering stream these days that has somehow, through the ages, carved out the wide valley along which they are now passing, a landscape that inspired great artists like Constable and Gainsborough, its floodplain creating lush pastures that fed the medieval wool trade and the prosperity that helped to build many of its mighty churches.

Now they are over the humpback bridge at Bures, past the pub on the corner, and The Pines looms ahead. It was such an iconic landmark in those days, that grove of ancient evergreens high on top of the hill, but the storm did for it that night and it has never recovered. Many of the trees have gone, and even those that remain look ragged and forlorn.

As the countryside becomes increasingly familiar and the stone weighs increasingly heavy in Molly’s gut, her earlier resolve seems to leach away. Whatever is she thinking, going back there, she chides herself? But it’s too late to change her mind now. The die is cast.

The road climbs through a deep cutting in the hillside, carved before the days of tarmac by centuries of countless carts and carriages. On either side, steep banks are covered in bluebells that, when they catch the sunshine, are of such an intense cobalt-blue that it almost hurts her eyes.