Barley, then chaos I see to my left, behind me ditch and a vast field of sugarbeet with leaves flagging in the hot sun; the red-brick village school on an oblong chopped out of it. The garden, my garden, would be enormous, and I imagined already elegant sweeps of lawn, curved flower beds backed with shrubs, and above all row after row of superb vegetables. Not long now. It was a relief from some of the hard slog on the mill building to stumble yet again through the clods at the field edge and survey my garden plot in potentia.

I got to know the mill’s immediate surroundings piecemeal. A favourite short walk was along Innocents’ Lane, one of the crossroads a couple of hundred yards from the mill itself – at that time a twining curly road with a high hedge on one side sentinelled with trees, and a flowery ditch on the other side with open sloping fields beyond.

As I have said, everything must now be done at once if we were not to spend the winter under canvas. The new extension could now be left to Birkin, who was investigating local builders, but we must arrange the mortgage, so we went straight to the Woolwich, confident as we had been saving with them now for more than three years. They too one look at Birkin’s plans and turned us down flat.

“Too unusual,” they said firmly.

This was a real difficulty as obviously we couldn’t afford two mortgages, but Birkin suggested we tried a local society, perhaps the Ipswich Building Society where his reputation would help us. Later, when the house was completed we could apply to the Woolwich again – once they saw what he had done he was sure they would allow us to transfer.

We thought, too, that a local village builder would be best as his workmen would have a reputation to keep up in Kirton. There were two, Farthing and Woolnough. We have ever since been grateful for Birkin’s local knowledge when he chose Woolnough whose workmen had been with him, and his father before him, since they left school and were all real craftsmen. Mr Woolnough came to see the site – had a good look at the plans and offered us two prices, the lower, £1100, being on condition he could use us as a dormitory job – that is, we would allow him to take his men off to urgent jobs from time to time – and didn’t mind if he couldn’t start until after Christmas.