A shot to test the camera, out of focus. The shadow of a hand moves to the lens. The picture tightens. All the grey tones in the foreground deepen. And there’s Florence on the doorstep, hands on hips. In overalls. A scarf tied in her hair. She’s mouthing to the camera. ‘No, no. Arthur. No.’ A playful cut-throat gesture. ‘Stop it! Stop!’ She hides her face behind the crossbones of her arms. The camera lingers on her till she turns away. It pans up slowly, to the transom window. The picture lurches with a sudden zoom. Brickwork now and mossy pointing. A little downward shift. And there’s the fancy plaque. Its painted letters judder in the frame and settle. LEVENTREE. Another awkard zoom out. Camera shake. A momentary sky. A flash of knee. A pair of bootcaps. Gravel. Blurry darkness. Keep it.

August 1952

The Savigears had already alighted and were waiting for her at the bright end of the platform. Their supervising officer had followed her instructions to the letter, dispatching them on the mid-morning train from Waterloo and providing a few pennies for the phone at Horsley station. Around eleven, the call had come – a deep and cheerless voice said, ‘Morning, Mrs Mayhood. It’s Joyce Savigear. I was told to ring when we arrived?’ – and this first conversation, brief and stilted as it was, had felt momentous. They weren’t just faces in a file any longer, or names she raised in speculation. It was as though, with everything she uttered on the phone that morning, she was going over pencil lines of them in ink.

She’d changed out of her overalls and climbed into the car without a word to Arthur, who was so deep in the field with Mr Hollis, spreading bucketloads of sand, that all her whistling went unheard. In any case, it was her husband who’d forewarned her not to make a special fuss of their arrival. He’d decided they should walk to Leventree or take the bus – ‘It’ll be a decent test of their initiative’ – and it was only after several days of needling him with counter-arguments that he’d relented: ‘Pick them up, if that’s what you think’s best, but go without me. Come and find me when they’re ready to start work.’

The drive from Ockham was a short one, but she hurried all the way, because she didn’t want them to mistake her lateness for indifference – no one liked to be an afterthought. She remembered getting fidgety at Horsley station as a girl, watching all the strangers disembarking and diffusing while her mother held her hand, moaning every time a car came up the hill without her father in it. A momentary anxiety like this could turn into a lifetime of resentment if you let it and she didn’t want that for the Savigears. Besides, there was a certain thrill in breaching the speed limit in the Austin, bringing it to that sweet point above forty where it seemed to hover in mid-air. The car park was quite empty so she rolled up right outside the station house.