August 1952

A hole in the air-inlet pipe had caused most of the damage. She’d already had to scrap the cylinder, the camshaft bearings and the pistons. Finding the replacement parts had been a feat of correspondence, but she’d done it, sending letters, making calls, driving the wagon halfway round the country to acquire what she needed, arriving in the yards of working men who advertised their spares in Farmers Weekly. They’d all asked her the same question when negotiations started: ‘Did your husband not come with you?’ But she’d been steadfast to her valuations. Sellers always buckled when she showed her readiness to leave without a deal. The kindliest of all the men she’d bartered with, a snub-nosed fellow who had teeth like sweetcorn, claimed that it was dirt that wrecked most tractor engines: if there was the slightest hole in the air-inlet system, so he’d told her, muck got drawn into the cylinder. Arriving home, she’d re-examined the old Fordson and discovered a small fissure in the pipe. Well, that explained it. She’d been hopeful for a while that she could get the damned thing operational before the end of summer. But although she’d patched the hole, replaced the parts and got the motor running with the crank – rumbling sweetly, with a force that rattled through her bones when she climbed up and took the wheel – the gears would not engage, no matter what she tried.

A transmission problem: that had been her educated guess. To check, she’d siphoned off the gear oil, mixing up a sample with some paraffin, dunking in a horseshoe magnet. When she’d pulled it out, there’d been a layer of metal shavings at the poles, thick enough to spread on toast, and she’d concluded that the bearing was abraded; probably, the worm gear had been sheared down, too.

Every day since then, she’d thanked the Lord for Charlie Savigear’s arrival, because having one more pair of hands and someone to confer with made the problems easier to solve. Dropping by the garage late on his first afternoon, he’d said, ‘Did you get the housing off it yet, miss? I can do it, if you like.’ She’d given him a set of overalls – they were Arthur’s size, so rather swamped him – and, working in the shade of the garage together, hunched beside the rusty chassis, they’d found an easy synchronicity. He’d proved that he could handle a rachet set as well as he could use a pencil. And he seemed to have a knack for following the terse articulations of the owner’s manual, whose vagueness often mystified her. Once the gearbox was dismantled, they’d surveyed the ruins inside: every bit as bad as they’d anticipated. ‘What now?’ he’d said. ‘Where d’you even find stuff for these old machines?’ She’d shown him the back section of the latest Farmers Weekly and they’d composed their own ‘Parts Wanted’ ad to run in the next issue, walking to the Alms Heath post office together to dispatch it.