lacquered wardrobe, rugs and stained boards, and pots of red earthenware and yellow glaze. The bathroom was beautiful – all green and chromium, and the doors were “original” with cross-beams and iron latches. Diana was restless and I suspected pigeons, and so was piggish myself.

But the next morning when we saw the sunny snow on the hills flanks, we really wanted to walk and see it all up close. So we bolted our breakfast which was very good but more earthenware and wooden-handled knives – and then we were out in the High Street of Northleach, feeling proud of the wind on our faces and the glaring poster by the town hall saying “A Protest Against the Militia”. We decided to try to come back, if our money would last us, to see how the local peasantry approached a basic political issue. Then off on the right, and suddenly across a lovely wavy stretch of country draped in snow, with the grey-brown tower of Hampnett Church sat deliciously in the distance. We knelt by the side of the road and pressed our faces in the snow, leaving little inverted death-masks for some yokel to wonder at. After Hampnett, which was wet and low, we walked along a two-mile stretch of level cart track, through fields and fields of clean snow like a dairy or perhaps a medical ward. We were silent with joy.

Turkdean was a clean little village, the houses stupidly dropped in a hollow, as toy houses fell into a crumple of the eiderdown when I moved in bed on Christmas 1924. The farmers and hands were all pleasant, and after the surly manners of Oxfordshire it was grand to have an unsolicited “good morning”. We walked along the long clean ridge to Nutgrove which again was brown and undecorated houses on a white cloth. Here I tried to buy a pipe and tobacco, finding cigarettes expensive and tasteless in the cold: but the only village shop was a tiny cottage with peacocks made of yew as sentinels, and the tobacco drawer contained only a heap of wrapped ounces of the most loathly shag in living memory. So we bought two large oranges, and spat the pips onto the roadside ridge of snow. Diana and I exchanged a few sarcastic words when I dropped, inadvertently, a piece of orange peel on the road, and I was very bitter at the expense of the Tidy Fiends. But this blew over soon, and we saw a coal-tit and heard its ethereal little call, and later saw a little brown mouse of a nut-hatch chasing up a tree at top speed.

We visited Nutgrove station to find the way and a pleasant clerk took one of the cigarettes in our luxurious box of a hundred (there are at this moment exactly four left) and directed us all wrong to Roel Gate, but was corrected by a nice porter with a creased face and a cheerful eye who really knew his stuff. We stayed just long enough to have a delicious cigarette and