For the remaining twelve years of her life, my mother was a milder presence, particularly from the point two years after my father’s death when Edward’s liver finally became too pickled to keep him above the earth. I had never noticed at the time, but when she had talked to me or my father or Edward, her hands were constantly held together, her nails digging half-moons into her palms, and it was only now that she ceased to do it that I noticed she had ever done it. Cats, hens and dogs no longer fled into hedgerows at the sound of her voice. She ate more unselfconsciously, remarking on many an occasion with a satisfied chuckle that she was ‘full to pussy’s bow’. The stones in her tone became smaller, less sharp, and her mission to tame dirt for good abated. The cottage was at the lowest point in the valley, where all water seemed to come to gather, and that dampness was more noticeable as my mother’s obsessive cleanliness and tidiness fell off. The walls have always felt like crumbling cake here. I believe it is a building fit more for cows than humans. Yet it still stands, and I am still in it, also standing, just about.

My father is interred on the north side of the churchyard, near that Devil’s Door that I have still not located, and it was I who dug his grave, and who planted the ash sapling beside it, which I trust is now hard at work absorbing his essence. It was the driest spring in living memory and the bluebells leaned and withered as soon as they flowered. After Cedric Boyland saw that I could dig with an enthusiasm and strength that belied my size, he believed it only logical to offer me my father’s old position, and I accepted, and at that point the part of my adulthood I lived in the sky ended and the more sunken part began. Yet it is in this subterranean part of my life that my mind has floated higher, into unknown places that seem to be somewhere above the clouds. Sometimes, I think a more significant part of it than not has been spent inside dreams – extremely lucid, deeply textured dreams, sometimes more real than Underhill itself.

There is not a lot else to tell.