As he came towards the far end of the drive, he spotted something in the corner of his eye. The passage of a body through the copse. It could’ve been a deer, or something smaller. Possibly a sheep had wriggled through the neighbour’s fence and gone a-wander. Or it could’ve been their trespasser was still about. It hadn’t made a noise. A flash of movement, nothing more, but it was something. He stepped over the verge to see what he could gather.

The copse was quiet. Empty. Not a stirring of a leaf that didn’t have a reason to be stirring. Just the daylight breaking through the canopy of trees. Birds cheeping and pecking at the earth. He walked into the clearing where the air was thin and cooler, sweetened by the scent of plums and damsons left ungathered. There was a mighty hornbeam with a twisted trunk, a spuming head of branches. By its roots, he noticed a large rock, the sort he used to heave out of the ground all day when he was digging trenches overseas. The dirt beside it was imprinted with the tread of someone’s boot, and, from the size of it, he reasoned it was Tweedledum’s. Lifting up the rock, he found a little hollow underneath it, packed with insects. A perfect circle pressed there in the soil. It was unnatural, but not exactly untoward.

He set the rock back down and looked about him. Nothing. Not a sight or sound that gave him pause. Tomorrow, he’d tell Mr Mayhood that he’d spied some movement in the copse and pester him again about a German shepherd. But there wasn’t any cause to go back up there now and interrupt his work. One dose of aggravation for the day was quite enough for everyone.

A thirst came over Hollis, then, and not the sort that could be quenched by water. He would’ve stopped into the Barley Mow, but his last ten bob was pissed away on wrong’uns at the weekend, more fool him. Even the few shillings he’d been saving from his wages every week to get himself a motorbike had gone now, too. At this rate, he’d be walking everywhere until the spring.

At least he had his little caravan – he’d never give that up. A fella who had known his brother years ago bequeathed it in his will, together with the slip of meadow where it sat today on Hungry Hill Lane. It was such a lovely thing, a Winchester with leaded windows and two skylights and a glossy wood interior, nestled in high grass and sheltered by a line of oak trees. He took proper care of it, revarnished it and painted it, and scraped off all the scum and moss that gathered on the roof. When his brother had moved down to Devon, he’d left the keys for him and said, ‘It’s all yours, Geoff. I’ve got no use for it no more,’ and ever since they’d had their falling-out there’d been no mention of evicting him. Perhaps some day he’d find it missing from the meadow, towed away to Devon. But not yet.