try to recall what the actual surface was like except for Bob’s funny little hummocky beds and remember that as there was no grass, no beds, no paths, except for the “accidental” field path, what was it “made of”? A large area near the mulberry was full of coal dust and small bits of coal – remnants we were told of the donkey-engine that took over from the windmill sails when they blew down in 1933. Then there was an indeterminate area dominated by the scruffy mixed flock of chickens which slept in the mill, their front door being a rough hole about twice their height but strangely with its own little lintel, which is still there in the now bricked-up wall. For many yards from this entrance the soil was bone-dry (we arrived in July) flattened except where large rat holes exposed the yellow complex roots of nettles: not a green thing for yards with two important exceptions – horseradish – masses of it in great dusty leafy clumps, and nettles, again in large healthy clumps – presumably because they got regularly manured. Bits of chicken wire stapled on inadequate and rickety sticks showed some half-hearted attempts to keep the hens in, though they found their way into the field, the road, the next-door cottage and so forth. This dry desert punctuated by its clumps of horseradish and nettle was to be our lawn and it took a full winter to dig it over.

When at length the house was built too – no, when the foundations were dug out – we had eight- to ten-foot heaps of dead soil which I had asked the builder not to cart away, and in the next year we used this dead soil – not utterly dead but very suitable for alpines which shouldn’t have rich food, to build a three-foot dry wall: a little bogus perhaps with its dead soil as a filler and its pigsty concrete pretending to be stone – but it was a great success from the very beginning, much admired by me and my friends and relations, and we managed to keep it in shape except when Geranium sanguineum or Helianthemum took over greedily and had to be restrained, fairly fiercely (I’ve just done a chopper-job on the dry wall this autumn – pleasurable, cleansing, faintly heart-breaking).