Peter’s own writing:

It must have been in the period between the agreement with Bob as to what he was willing to sell, and our actual excited coming into possession that I got to know a little the surroundings at the mill.

The south of the mill building was a chaos, a half-hearted chicken run and an area roughly twelve yards by twelve of discarded pigsty. These pigsties, two of them, were made of very strong materials and stood in the middle of the patch, surrounded by hen-scratched and channelled earth interspersed with equally dusty patches of nettles and horseradish, the latter not very familiar to me as a wild or semi-wild plant. The hens kept all other herbage at bay but despised these two. A little twisty path, or rather, stamped down drift, led to some chaotic rows of cabbages and lettuces – chaotic because Bob’s method was to weed a patch and dump the weeds, many of them in flower or seed alongside the bumpy little bit he sowed or planted; these soon made irregular-shaped heaps of vivid flowering plants – red deadnettle, vast quantities of field pennycress, field thistles, docks, and the ubiquitous horseradish, which also appeared a bit blasted-looking but otherwise flourishing, actually in the rows of turnips and onions before these were even more than a few inches high. The fine mulberry-tree, already bearing impressively, dominated the chicken run and its fruit was already beginning to fall into the surrounding dust, though the chickens and starlings ate most of them, dust and all.

Beyond Bob’s vegetable garden scratched out from a background of huge seeding docks, young elder trees and impressive spear thistles, the ditch dividing us from the field that stretched to the school cut at right angles across any further vegetable-growing efforts by Bob, and if you went left, you soon came to the edge of the garden and Mr Lampard’s three-acre rented field, also, fortunately for us, owned by Bob. The proposed sale of the property at £250 included a bit of Mr Lampard’s field, and the surveyor and I marked on the edge of the ditch and well into Mr Lampard’s barley, an important boundary mark – a mere stick which I was more than once tempted to shift a trifle further east, but which the official had driven in fairly hard, perhaps to discourage such an impulse. Dozens of times I walked along the bumpy ditch edge to stand with the corner post between my knees and survey the vast area it subtended, driving an imaginary line through the almost white drooping heads of the barley, all the distance to the right of way.