Boss has an arrangement with the Travester who delivers eggs to the house; this man brings a sack of chicken shit for the garden. They yarn for a few minutes, the two men, while I dump the smelly shit onto the midden and take the empty sack back to the egg man. Later, it’s my job to turn it in with the fork. Once, when I complained about the smell, Boss said that some shit is like gold, and it’s time I learned the difference.

We plant seeds together – beans outside, along the bottom of the high trellis that runs along the border of the garden, while cabbage seed goes into trays in the shed. As well as the vegetables, there are herbs that grow around the borders: dill, fennel, coriander, parsley and thyme.

Boss is particularly proud of his gherkins. The Director, he says, has personally commended him on these gherkins. Those plants have all the special treatment – I’m not even allowed near the plot at the top end of the garden where the plants can get the most sun. Boss has a special spray he concocted for the leaves, to stave off the white mould, and the plants get plenty of water and well-rotted material from the midden.

He shows me the chart pinned to the back of the shed door. It displays the last five years of plantings, notes where everything has grown. Squinting at the complicated diagram, I can see the vegetable cycles. Nothing grows in the same spot the following year but is rotated to another area. Root vegetables are followed by brassicas; brassicas by tomatoes or corn.

“But the gherkins never move,” I point out, feeling a bit cheeky that day.

Boss taps the side of his nose. “Green crops,” he murmurs mysteriously.

There’s a rainy day. We potter inside the shed, doing all the little jobs that tend to get left while it is fine. Boss puts a pot of water on the stove to boil for chicory, and we eat our lunch sitting in our usual places – Boss in the old brown armchair that’s moulded to his shape, and I’m perched on the wooden crate. It’s the same lunch every day, though it always tastes good. I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of sausage and bread.

When Boss gets up to make the chicory, I slip a piece of the bread into my jacket pocket for Marina. She’s looking peaky these days, and spends a lot of time lying on her mattress brooding. It’s a shame we don’t have an aunt and uncle in the country so she can have a change of scenery and some fresh air.