Bob had constructed a ramshackle hen house and run nearer their house and moved the hens and the cat. The next job was to remove the curtains of cobweb which hung from the old beams down to chicken head height As Peter was an arachnophobe (i.e. he was terrified of spiders), this was my job.

I bound up my hair in an old silk scarf – pre-war, I am sure – borrowed a brush and dustpan from Yvonne, and went in. I found I had to deal not only with old spiders’ webs, but with the dust of decades. Of course, I had to look upwards to see what I was doing, so there were only my eyebrows and eyelashes to protect my eyes. Soon they began to ache, but I struggled on. By now, as the cobweb curtains fell the air became saturated with dust, so it was difficult to see any improvement. Finally I staggered out to be met by Peter and Gale, both in fits of laughter.

“Look at yourself!” they shouted, and ran back to our tent to fetch a mirror. I was exactly like a 1920’s film star, my eye sockets black with dust, my cheeks red with exertion. I was very grateful indeed when, as I took back the borrowed tools, Yvonne offered me a bath.

Next, Bob shovelled and barrowed out about five years of chicken muck off the floor. Peter was sorry to see it go. It would make wonderful fertiliser. Then we borrowed a stiff broom and plenty of water to clean the concrete floor. We found that at the south end of the building the concrete had been broken up to rubble. Now, too, that we could actually see the beams we became conscious that the whole building had sunk to the South over the centuries by about five inches.

The floorboards as well as the trap doors upstairs turned out to be really too rotten to save, but the beams themselves seemed sound.

We had to decide on a school for Gale, now six. The obvious thing would have been to send her to the village school just one field away – but we had now been there long enough to learn that Mr Herring, the Headmaster, completely under his wife, Vi’s, thumb, thought it unkind to teach the ordinary village children anything. He said so! “So much in-breeding, you know! You cannot expect anything from them. It wouldn’t be kind.” So, like Squeers, he sent them out to weed his garden while he concentrated his efforts on the very few local children who had taught themselves to read and write against all the odds. Obviously, the daughter of a Grammar school Head of Department would be one of the elite. We thought that this situation would be bad for Gale, but hadn’t made a final decision.