It wasn’t exceptionally well built, as we discovered forty years later when my son rebuilt it, but it used up all the concrete blocks of every shape and size left from the foundations of the pigsties and went up in one day. I don’t remember how pregnant I was by then, but it must have been summer as the lawn had grown and could be walked on. Now he was on the lookout for dry wall plants from friends and neighbours. We left a gap so that I could go straight down though it to feed the chickens.

I don’t remember either who gave us the little old lawnmower – one of the old fashioned ones you never see now in the days of hover mowers and petrol-driven monsters. There was plenty of horseradish coming up through the long grass, and even more hedge garlic, as much of that as of grass, but constant mowing discouraged the weeds and encouraged the grass, whose length in irregular patches demonstrated the hollows and bumps we hadn’t noticed when we thought we had made it level. The orchard “meadow” grew sparse but tall.

We registered with a married couple of doctors, Drs. Leslie and Katya Smith. Dr Leslie was a very tall, gentle man, and came out to Kirton every day from Felixstowe to see patients. He had arranged to call into Black Mill House to see if any phone messages had come about late calls to be made in Kirton before he drove home. He couldn’t eat anything containing flour, being what we now know as coeliac, but that hadn’t yet been discovered, so Yvonne would bake him little cakes made of soya flour to eat with his cup of tea.

Because I am RH Negative, as had been discovered not long before – indeed all my siblings and my parents were RH Negative – and because our house might well not be ready by August 15th, Gale’s birthday, which was the expected date for the new baby, he booked me into Heath Road Hospital in Ipswich. Normal births still took place at home in those days. He and Peter soon became very intimate as he too was a fanatical gardener

The roof was on the extension and the windows and doors were in place – as were the stairs. The time had come to knock the holes between the mill and the extension. That day I had to take Gale to the dentist – but I have an account written by Peter of that event:

I think it was a Wednesday evening when I felt shivery on the bus coming back home and the mile from Banks’s corner to the mill seemed a very long way and the third form essays I was carrying in my case were heavier than usual in more than one sense. It was a bleak, chilly – yes, showery evening and even the usual thrill of the familiar cone of the mill roof being actually alongside a proper pantiled roof carried less delight than usual.