But I wasn’t really grateful that the mess had been confined to the area round the door. I was too tired to be grateful for anything except bed.

Peter’s garden was really taking shape and the vegetable garden was beginning to make a real contribution to our diet. He raised many boxes of seedlings in his strange cold frame, and as June turned to July he and Gale were off down the garden whenever I needed them for a meal or wanted something done – picking sweet peas! The mill was awash with sweet peas in jam jars. “You must pick them every day,” he explained, “or they stop flowering.” And pick them every day they did.

At first, as we had no compost or manure to build up the fertility of the soil, our vegetables, though fresh and tasty, were on the spindly side – but no matter.

Now that we had stairs it wasn’t long before we had a bedroom door from the stairs – and Graham was called in to remove the ladder and little door at its top, and to replace it with a proper window. This time we decided to have wooden lintels. We were also going to put in triple south-facing windows as we needed more light and more air. With no cavity walls and nothing but boards under the tongue-and-groove our bedroom was liable to get too cold in the winter and much too hot in the summer. The new window to replace the door could be standard like the one that faced north-east, but the triple would have to be made by Graham as it would be too expensive to get it purpose built by Brown’s. The lintels we did have made for us in the village. The long one would need to be curved but the triple window could consist of the three windows at a slight angle. Now Graham was a wood butcher, not a carpenter, but we had infinite confidence of his ability to do anything, as had he himself. He set to, and his windows would have been fine had they not caught on the bottom edge of the roof so that they could only be opened outwards a few inches. This was a pity because we really needed the fresh air in the summer. However we left that problem to be sorted out later – much later.

Luckily I felt very well. The floors were in upstairs in the house. We acquired a very intelligent female tortoiseshell cat who very soon became pregnant too. This did not stop her catching lizards and bringing them in, where, in self defence, they shed their tails. Either she ate them or they escaped, and several times we found a tail still wriggling long after its owner had gone.

Once we had a spare bedroom in which to put a bed, my father came to stay with us, and our cat produced kittens. He set himself the task of building us a potting shed and bike shed