But when she turned the covers back, he said, ‘I’ll be up soon. I’m wide awake now, so I might as well do something useful,’ and she knew that she would find him passed out in the wing chair come the morning with a book still open on his chest.

The north field. Barren in the light of dawn. Crows skip in the mud. Suddenly, the tractor rolls into the frame. The driver slumps. It’s Mr Hollis in his sunhat. Coming back round with the plough. A second row. The blades carve up the earth and darken it. A seam of soil and manure expands into the distance. Soon, the tractor turns to start another furrow. It’s coming back, towards the camera. Mr Hollis twists his body, one hand on the wheel, to check the straightness of his work. Meaty chunks of dirt spit up behind him. He gets closer, closer, closer, till the white roll of his cigarette is visible, clamped in the flat pocket of his mouth, the lit end bobbing. A slow pan left, towards the copse, the boundary fence, the driveway and the yard. There’s Joyce, blowing on a mug of tea. How young she looks. She gives a thumbs up to the lens and grins. Pan to the right. The tractor stands at rest, its engine throbbing. Mr Hollis climbs down from the driver’s seat and trudges over to assess the plough. He beckons to the camera. Cut this.

September 1952

It was a fine and honourable thing that they were doing to help these borstal kids, no doubt, and Hollis knew they had the best intentions. But he couldn’t stand to watch the Mayhoods have their hearts wrung out by folk who didn’t recognize a good thing when they had it, which is where all this was headed in the long run, wasn’t it? He had a sense for other people’s disappointments, a way of reading changes in their temperament. Not that it had done him any favours down the years. There’d been steady jobs he’d had to walk away from in the past because of it, and ones that paid him a good wage to boot; he’d cut ties with his family because of it, and even his own childhood sweetheart, Maureen Bull, who’d had it in her mind to marry him.

He’d hated ducking out of his responsibilities like that, without folk hearing the particulars of why. But how could he describe it to them without sounding like some batty palmist at the fairground? There was a knowing in him for these things, that’s all it was, and people never liked to hear about it. Who wanted to be told bad news was coming down the road? Who cared to hear about another person’s intuitions? Still, he didn’t take much pleasure in being proved right neither, when the troubles finally reached their doors. His brother and that prissy lady book-keeper who’d fleeced him of his savings – what a sorry situation. The lovely grain farm that went under like he knew it would, because of foolishness and greed – another sad affair. And Maureen Bull – he never did find out who she was seeing on the side, but if the pair of them weren’t happy, that was their bad luck.