Each morning I boiled up our vegetable peelings and some very tiny potatoes on the primus and mixed the drained result with spicy bought food – to carry it, steaming and succulent down to our eager ladies. Each afternoon, at about 3 pm I scattered handfuls of mixed grain and laying pellets in the straw for them to scratch for before dusk sent them indoors onto their perches. Mr Lampard let us have a bale or two of straw to strew in the run to keep their feet dry. They were pampered creatures but rewarded us well and next summer we got a FIRST for eggs at Trimley Flower Show.

At the end of October, Peter’s fruit trees arrived – no problem to plant, as that bit had been ploughed. They went in quincunx, Peter explained, so that we could get more in without putting them too close together. We had ordered the cheapest we could find – a mistake as it turned out as several turned out to be not what we had paid for – but proper trees not bushes, and not on dwarfing stock as we wanted trees with trunks so that when Gale grew up she could entertain her young men in a hammock slung between two of them. The soft fruit and rhubarb went between the hen house and the plum-tree hedge, as did a bush Beauty of Bath for Gale’s early picking. For these we had to tackle some of Bob’s very varied weeds.

The main weed round the pigsties was horseradish, but before we could tackle that we had to dismantle the sties themselves. They were made of good quality corrugated iron fixed securely into thick concrete and held together by countless large headed nails which had been hammered through the iron, so were very difficult to get out. Peter and Graham made a start and, during the week, I set to, but in my ignorance took the edge off Peter’s best chisel. Eventually we dismantled the building and then Graham’s sledgehammer came into its own as they smashed up the very solid concrete base. The rusty old angle irons and inadequate chicken wire came up next, and the space round the mulberry tree was ready for us to prepare a lawn.

Christmas itself we spent in London, and brought back with us two of Peter’s old boys, brothers from Stratford, who slept on the concrete floor of the mill under our old scullery table. One morning as I washed Gale using an enamel bowl on the table, trying not to tread on our guests who refused to get up, there was a knock on the door and there was the French teacher from Northgate looking extremely astonished. When he decided to be neighbourly and call I don’t think he quite expected what he found. Peter liked to keep his private life and school life separate at that stage.

After Christmas, Mr Woolnough arrived as promised with the house plans. As he measured out the foundations, he looked worried. “You can’t keep that walnut tree there,” he said, “its