IN WALWYK, HONEST COUPLES LIKE THE MAVERICKS, the Haywards and the Drivers woke up together and said:

‘The bell! Curlew Lane again.’ Men began to pull on their clothes and reach for their boots, grumbling, cursing the County Council for not doing something about the river which flooded so easily, saying that the rain must have been heavier than they reckoned.

In the Maverick bedroom, Mr Maverick, stamping into his Wellingtons, was aware, and slightly ashamed, of a secret feeling of pleasure. Last time the cottages in Curlew Lane were in danger, he had effected a rescue with a horse and tumbril. This year he had a Land-Rover. He’d bought it after a good harvest and had always said that anywhere a horse and tumbril could go, a Land-Rover could go. Here was his chance to prove it.

‘Just as good and ten times as quick,’ he said to his wife. ‘I shall be up at the church picking up the chaps by the time it’d take to harness old Punch.’

‘I still don’t think,’ Mrs Maverick said, ‘that it’s flood this time. Might be fire. If it is . . . Tom, Tom, promise you’ll be careful.’

‘Am I ever anything but?’

In other households the innocent partner, heavy with the effects of some of Granny Rigby’s brew, slept on unheeding, while the other crept into the cold side of the bed and lay rigid. Presently some of them would creep out again, to save face, to pretend.

Canon Thorby had no need to grope for trousers or to fumble with shoelaces. He was wide awake and fully dressed, for he never went to bed on these occasions until Isabel was safe indoors again. He was not drunk, nor was he completely sober; long ago he had found that brandy was the most effective buffer between him and what remained of his conscience.

When the first reverberating noise of the bell boomed through the night’s quietude, he sprang to the alert like a sentry. This time something had happened. Something he had awaited with dread for thirty-seven years.

In that space of time he had proved quite conclusively that a man could come to terms and live in moderate comfort with a situation which, when first understood, had seemed intolerable. It was, in fact, something of the position of a humane anti-vivisectionist who discovers that the one person he loves is suffering from a disease which demands constant resort to a serum produced by some unspeakably cruel process. There was precisely the same compulsion to ignore everything except the well-being of the loved one.