We kept strictly to her arrangement for almost a week. We slept from midday to dusk. Then we ate a light meal of a fried pancake made with flour and a gull’s egg; we allowed ourselves one egg a day. We drank a cup of weak tea. When the blaeberries started to ripen we added a dish of fruit to this our first meal of the day.

The nights of early July were never so dark that we could not see to work out of doors; even when the valleys were dim a luminance in the sky made the peaks visible; one could have seen to read small print by the light of the sky shining on the hill-top where we cut our peats. The sun’s progress past north to its rising was marked by gaudy colours all round the northern horizon.

Sometimes we took a piece of boiled venison with us, in case we grew hungry, but most nights we worked without more food until dawn warned us to leave the moss. I remained for a while cutting peats by myself while Terry descended to cook. In the new spirit of caution that gripped us we cut a vast quantity of peats beyond what we were ever likely to use. But, we said, no one knew how soon winter might come on us, nor how long it would last.

We had an appetite for dinner. Game formed the staple of this meal. Sometimes Terry pot-roasted a bit of venison haunch and made a sort of Yorkshire pudding to accompany the meat; generally she stewed the venison; we had venison and grouse, blue hill hares and an occasional rabbit, black-cock, snipe, duck, plover and roe-deer. We had no lack of quantity and variety so far as meat was concerned. As soon as the blaeberries ripened we added them to our dinner. Terry often made soup of a bone; we hunted the country round for green stuff to put in the broth.

Our garden of nettles which grew over the ruins of an old house was quickly stripped. We cooked the nettles like cabbage and used the water in which they were boiled amongst our soups. The nettle-pottage tasted as sweet as cabbage, but it came to an end. We tried many queer messes thereafter, young grass in the soup, birch leaves cooked like cabbage. We attempted to eat the latter dish once only. But when we flung away the mess of boiled birch leaves I recalled a trick of my boyhood. I made slots in the bark of some birch trees and collected the spilling sap that flowed from these cuts in milk-tins nailed to the trunks of the trees. We supped the sap with a teaspoon as if it was medicine, and felt that it was doing us good.

‘Spring’s the time for the sap,’ I told Terry.

‘We’ll need it then,’ she said.