I climbed from the creaking wagon and tottered into the house by the door he indicated for me. He introduced me to his wife as a poor youngster been lost in the plains, and went away to stow his wagon and the horses and unload the peat he’d got today.

He was back surprisingly soon. In the light he was a short grizzled man. The wife was large and fat and a dozen children, babies, hens and a goat tumbled round the floor, in the yellow light, apparently all inextricably mixed. I never saw one of them separate, a baby without another baby, or a child without a hen, or the goat without a baby.

The wife terrified me.

As soon as I got in she began to scold me, called me names, hustled me into a comer and stood over me so that I was hemmed in. Only when she pushed brutal slabs of ham into my mouth did I realize that she had not been standing merely scolding but had been cutting them while she scolded: also, that she was mothering me.

“You shouldn’t have been out on those plains, no means or not,” said the husband from where he sat devouring ham and by the look of it, two babies who had climbed on to his knees and were poking their snot-nosed faces at his face.

I couldn’t have found the breath to answer over the row of clucking and crying and squealing and quarrelling there was in the room, but I wasn’t given the chance anyway.

“No, you shouldn’t,” the wife immediately scowled at me. “They’re not safe for us, not safe at all. What do you think you are? Mightn’t you’ve been sucked in the marshes, drowned in the streams, lost in the woods or eaten by the reptiles? You could’ve been lost in there for ever, and never got out again, and then where would you’ve been, and you with obviously no more sense than your age. Did you not see the murderess on the plain? You lads have no more sense than hair on your beards. There, you wicked brat, up if you must.” She hefted a squawling baby up where it lay astride her hip and stopped squawling as it pulled on her breast. She watched it and stopped talking. The husband took advantage of the momentary lull. He saw I had finished my ham, stuck a roasting potato on the point of his knife, pulled it from the cauldron, and tossed it to me. He spun the knife, letting it leave his hand completely, and catching it by the hilt again. I am not generally neat at catching. While I grovelled for the piece amongst the straw on the floor, he said, “You’ll need to cut that hair, too, lad. How long were you in the wild for it to grow like that?”