‘I can’t get things out of my head, somehow,’ she answered in a low voice. ‘I lie awake, many a night, wondering what has happened, wondering what grief’s abroad and us here, safe, us here, happy. It might be time for us to go back, Hugh. We might be able to do some good.’

‘It’s not the house you want to see,’ I said.

‘Yes, indeed I want to see our house, our own house, Hugh.’

‘It’s a long journey and there’s risk of danger, Terry,’ I told her. ‘If you like I’ll go and spy—’

‘And leave me here alone! No, no, you couldn’t do that. Why, it’s not so very far. When can we go, Hugh?’

‘When I’ve stacked my peats,’ I told her grimly. ‘I’m not taking any more risks with the weather.’

We sat for a space in silence, but it was with thoughts of our fellow-creatures, and the future, that our minds now engaged themselves; the singing birds in the birch wood sang their heedless song unheeded. We were mortal human folk, and all our work, all our home-making in the cave, all our happiness on this day of June, though it was sweet, did not divide us from our human fellows nor obliterate their woe.

22 JUNE

OUR PEATS WERE less badly spoiled than we expected to find. We set them up on edge to dry and while those that I had already cut were weathering I delved a great many more. Terry took them from my spade and set them flat on bare rocks to grow firm. When they were fit to handle without breaking she brought them to the edge of the cliff above the boulder we had discovered. The rock here was barely thirty feet high, and if we could make a basket it would be easy to lower the peats at the end of a rope. I returned to the birch wood for a stout branch which I bent into a hoop two feet in diameter. We stretched a deer skin across the hoop and when ropes had been attached to it we had a primitive basket. Terry waited at the foot of the cliff to receive the loads I let down to her. She piled the peats beside the boulder ready for stacking. In a week of hard work we had a sizable stack, big enough, I reckoned, to last us six months. We decided to wait until after we had visited our house before we cut a further supply. We might not need them. We were loath to spend labour in vain.