‘Hello, love,’ she chirps cheerfully when Bella answers. It’s so quick to phone, now her grandson Lewis has added something he calls speed-dial. ‘I want to ask a favour.’

‘What time is it?’ her daughter groans. ‘Oh. For heaven’s sake, Mum, it’s six-thirty in the morning. Sunday morning.’

‘Is it? I’m so sorry, darling. It’s already light and the birds are singing their little hearts out. I thought it was at least nine. But while I’ve got you . . .’

‘Go on.’ She can hear Bella yawning.

‘I need to go there, one last time. To Wormley. Can you take me? Today?’

‘Today? It’s Lewis’s football, Mum.’

‘Can’t Andy take him?’ Bella’s ex is a fireman. Molly was sad when they split, because she now sees so little of him. They’d been together so long – since Bella’s schooldays – that she’d come to think of him as a son.

‘Possibly. Depends on his shifts. I’ll have to ask.’ A pause. ‘You’ve never wanted to go back before, Mum.’

‘Everything is different now,’ she says.

A few hours later Molly is being trundled down the path in her wheelchair, helped into her daughter’s scruffy old car and trying to find a place for her feet in a footwell deep with the detritus of empty crisp packets and fizzy-drink cans.

The sun is shining and Bella seems to have recovered her good humour.

The traffic is light this Sunday morning, and they are soon skimming along the rolling switchback road through the county she has long considered her own. It is May, and the verges are laced with cow parsley, the hedgerows so white with blossom that they look like banks of snow. The long-forgotten memory of a sad poem she learned at school rises to the surface of her mind and she tells Bella about it: ‘Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge, that will not shower on me. It’s a dying soldier longing to see his home country one more time.’

‘That’s a bit gloomy for a lovely spring day,’ her daughter replies, accelerating past a tractor the size of a two-storey house. They make them enormous, these days, Molly thinks. Not like the little machines that trundled back and forth along the village street, past the vicarage, several times a day.