Before long, he was going to have to leave this place behind as well. Leventree was five and a bit acres of good land to work, and he’d enjoyed being in charge of it. He’d liked it best of all when it was only him and Mr Mayhood in the fields, taking their short tea breaks on the back porch, jotting down their plans for what to grow and how they should rotate the crops. Nobody had ever trusted him with managing their farm before, but Mr Mayhood had consulted him on every last decision, asking what provisions he required to make it run the way he wanted (to begin with, he’d mistaken ‘resources’ for ‘race horses’, which had caused a laugh or two between them – he’d put it down to Mr Mayhood’s northern way of speaking).

But since the borstal kids had moved in, nothing was the same. He’d decided that a year would have to be his limit. He’d stay to gather in the winter crops and for the harvest in the spring. He’d get the ground just right for seeding in the summer. After that, he’d give his notice to the Mayhoods and find something else to do. He had a lot of fondness and affection for them both and it’d pain him to move on. But he couldn’t stop the knowing part of him from ringing in his head like funeral bells whenever those two youngsters were around. They weren’t ever going to have the stuff it took to work this land. And, at his age, he didn’t have the wherewithal to cover for them.

Take the sister, Joyce, for instance. She had a lot of power in her shoulders – probably enough to haul the corn drill all the way to Leatherhead and back – which only made her lack of effort harder to forgive. There was slyness to her ways: she was the sort who’d pay you compliments across a bar as long as you were paying for her drinks, then leave with someone else at closing time. A proper schemer. Last week, when they’d all been spreading the manure in the north field, she’d lifted six or seven forkfuls from the trailer before asking for a fag break. ‘Isn’t there some sort of a machine for this? God knows there ought to be,’ she’d had the gall to say. All right, so it wasn’t pleasant to be standing on a pile of horse shit with that rotten fruity stink inside your nostrils, getting underneath your nails, into your skin – but she had no right to gripe. ‘Just bloody well get on with it,’ he’d warned her. ‘Stop your bellyaching.’ Well, her eyes had turned to slits. He could’ve sworn she’d balled her fists up tight. ‘If I wanted to be bossed around all day,’ she’d said, ‘I would’ve stayed in borstal.’ He’d been thinking, Don’t you worry. Keep this up and they’ll be sending you straight back. But he’d just taken up his fork again and told her, ‘We’re not doing this for me, it’s for the Mayhoods.’ That’d cowed the girl, and he’d been proud of the achievement.