He kicked off his boots and drew his satchel and spare jacket towards him, folded them under his head for a pillow, and then pulled his travelling cloak and a rug over him. He opened one eye to see that the fire was banked in, and his fish trap was safe, and then he was asleep in moments.

May 1643

Next day John set to work on the fish trap for an hour and set it in the cold, swift-flowing water. The meat from last night’s supper stayed in his stomach more comfortingly than porridge, he felt stronger and more competent all day; but the following morning he felt hungrier, as if his body were expecting meat again. He had the soup from the pigeon bones for breakfast and then had it again, thinned down and less satisfying, for his dinner at midday.

In the afternoon he went to look at his fish trap and found a small trout in the keep-net.

‘Praise God!’ John said devoutly, inwardly praising himself. He lifted the trap from the river, carefully supporting his trophy, and smacked the squirming little fish on the head. He cleaned it and gutted it. There was not much left of it after he had cut its head and tail off but he set it in the pot with a little water and dried maize flour to make a stock and simmered it for a few moments, and then left it to cool until supper.

These foods became his staple diet. The monotonous blandness of the cornflour – as porridge, as vegetable, as sauce, and the occasional treat of fish or meat. Slowly, John adapted, and only ate well and with relish in poignant dreams of Lambeth feasts: great dinners at Twelfth Night, rich tables at Easter.

Every day he chopped wood, and went out into the forest to see if he could recognise any berries or nuts which Suckahanna had gathered, but the branches were showing nothing more than fresh green leaves and the nuts had all blown down in the winter gales or been eaten by squirrels and mice. The woods were not as friendly to John as they had been to her. Everywhere that she had looked there had been food or tools or medicines or herbs. Everything that John saw was strange.

After weeks and weeks of this he thought that he had had his fill of strangeness. His father had loved the rare and the unusual and John had inherited that love. Their whole lives were based on the joy of difference: different plants, flowers, artefacts. But now John was in a different world, where everything was strange to him and he felt that perhaps he liked strangeness only against the background of the familiar. He liked the exotic flower when it grew in his English garden at Lambeth. It was harder to admire when it was growing against an exotic tree, under a foreign sky.