The world was painted in such different colours then, when Mother was alive, Netta thought as she sat on the bed. Mother was the smell of treacle scones and honeycomb, warm butter and currant spices; the smell of all the colours of the rainbow in her artist’s palette. Yet how quickly all those familiar colours and smells had faded when she’d passed away. Mother had been one of the only good and certain things in Netta’s life. It was she who’d first said that the rainbow in the Galloway sky was really the handle of God’s basket, carrying the whole world safely through storms and tempests. Mother had said it was made of silken threads. Father had roared in disbelief: ‘Come, Jeanie, don’t fill the bairn’s head with the jewels of untruth. It’s stuffed with enough nonsense as it is.’ Mother just looked up from her sewing and smiled so sweetly.

‘What’s the world without colour, Angus Nichol? Why, the very ark of the rainbow is in the child – the sunset in her hair, the sea-shifts blue and green in her eyes, the sand and pebbles dust her cheeks. Is she not a very rainbow of God’s mercy?’ Her loving words made Netta’s red hair and freckles just about bearable.

‘She pleases the eye, as well you ken, but it’s the colour of her heart which will be the making of her. Rainbows are nothing but tricks o’ light on water and there’s no ark without tears, Jeanie.’

So the heavens darkened and the light went out of her world when Mother was taken away in that wooden casket and put in the cold earth. It was hard even now to think of that sad time, all dressed in black and grey.

There was so little left to remind her once Peg got her thick ankles under the table at Brigg Farm. Father looked sad and his moustache drooped above a clown’s downcurved mouth. He worked all day in the fields with his men and came home silent. Netta knew that he never looked at his daughter again without wincing for she was the image of his loss.