The hideous but invaluable corrugated iron was fastened to this elaborate wooden construction with zinc nails which were new to me – a round 1/2" head and a 3" stem which had a mild thread to it. Some came out easily enough but many had to have the heads wrenched off – my father-in-law spent many patient hours on this job when spending a holiday with us – before the corrugated plates could be got off the timbers, then lifted from their square concrete holes and the concrete itself patiently broken up – it was, as I have said, rather poor thin stuff: 1 in 5 I should guess, but marked off by wave-curves in many places, corresponding to the wave of the corrugated iron against which the wet concrete must have been thrown. Much of this rough stone was later embodied in the dry wall which still divides the lawn with its dominating mulberry from the four island beds which contain so much of our horticultural wealth and most of our perennials. From the house – or rather the house-site, as there was nothing there apart from the circular Mill itself – there was a curious twisty attractive and somehow inevitable little path curving down to the ditch at the bottom. This marked the edge of the barley-or-sugarbeet field next to the chaotic garden. As a part of this field was also to be ours we retained the path for its delightful curve and it’s still there – now running under the transplanted walnut tree; straight and no-nonsense until it gets half way, then subtly and beautifully twisted in a way that no land scape gardener could reproduce down to a broad grass strip at right-angles which runs with the orchard. Just why the field – meticulously cultivated, and this extraordinary little corner of chaos and weeds and scratched soil and broken grass should be divided by such a curve at the bottom I don’t think we discovered: but Diana insisted on keeping it as inherently beautiful. We did see the contrast between the straight regular furrows and the four, five, six foot flowering (or, worse) seeding weeds dominating the bit near the mill. The field was ploughed in late September and we made two discoveries: one that the horses (it was actually ploughed with horses that recently!) as they were turned on our edge of the field left beautiful heavy horseshoe marks which embodied for us the rurality I, at least, so needed and wanted – the kind of thing that couldn’t exist in our ever-so-elegant suburb, let alone in dear old Kentish Town, or Chancery Lane. The second discovery was that the very skilled and careful farmer who farmed the little field (it was only two and a half acres and we were to have a quarter of this for our very own) had ploughed a doubly-deep furrow for drainage – at right angles to the run of our land, thus turning up some relatively dead soil, and what we now call the cross-border, which divides the vegetable garden from the orchard, has always been a little less fertile than the surrounding soil – though it has grown some fine rugosa roses and lilacs the soil is slightly dead and only recently have we built it up with compost as thoroughly as the island beds and