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blow for swinging her feet at table and started to clatter about with the tea things.

    We washed up in silence, Lally washing up, we drying and putting away. She wiped her hands and lifted my satchel off the dresser and started to take out the roach. “Well, we’ll have to make haste,” she said, breaking a longish silence and handling the fish with a practised hand, “because Miss Angelica Whassername will be here directly. She’ll be on the six o’clock, and I’ve no doubt she’ll want her supper sharpish after that long journey.”
    The five roach didn’t look much after she’d done all the innard thing and cut the heads off. She smelt them deeply, mentionedthat they must be fresh, it was just the mud, and washed them under the tap and flipped them on to an old blue plate. The innards and bits we gave to Minnehaha. Lally told us to get out from under her feet.
    We went out and lay on the grass. If you looked straight up you saw the blue sky and one cloud: if you looked a bit to your left you could see the grass stalks as big as bamboos and a nodding scarlet poppy as big as a duster, and if you turned your head to the right you would see my sister wrinkling her eyes and picking her nose. I hit her.
    â€œMy finger was up my nose! I could have poked my eye out.” She lashed a fist at me and I rolled over and we fell into a struggling heap, laughing and howling and trying to sit on each other. In a little while we lay spent, breathless, giggling: our faces pressed into the grass, sniffing its greenness, and feeling the sun on the backs of our legs.

    The Seaford bus was just rumbling into the village as we got to the Market Cross and stood waiting under the chestnut tree. It used to stop for a second outside Bakers to deliver odd packages or papers, and then it would trundle up and start reversing round the Cross so that it was pointing towards Seaford and the way it had just come. It used to arrive every evening at about six and leave again at six-thirty, and in the morning it arrived at nine-thirty and would leave again at ten and that’s all it ever did. As far as we knew anyhow. Sometimes you could change buses at Polegate crossroads and go in a quite different direction, to Eastbourne, which was a very exciting thing to do. But usually we met it… and occasionally caught it in the morning, washed and combed with sixpence in our pockets from our father for shopping in Seaford. Which wasn’t so exciting but was quite decent really because there were one or two good junk shops, and sometimes you could buy bound copies of “Chatterbox 1884” for 2d. We used to take a picnic lunch and eat that on the beach after we had done our shopping and a bit of swimming, and then we’d have tea at the Martello Tower, which was a very curious and dampish place but where we got lovely raspberry jam tarts and sometimes lemon curd ones. Lally used to have bloater paste and toast. But my sister and I just had an American Ice Cream Sodaand our tarts. Two each. And a smell of tea from the silver urns hissing on the counter, and hot butter and varnished wood. After tea we’d walk along the front a bit, have a look at the shops in Sea Street, and then back on to the bus for home.
    The first person off the bus was Miss Maude Bentley in a grey wool frock and a black hat with a ribbon, and behind her, clambering down slowly as if she was being lowered on a rope, came Miss Ethel. And baskets and walking sticks which were handed down to her when she was safely on the ground by Fred Brooks the conductor. “There you are, my darlings,” he’d call out. “Off you go and don’t get into trouble.” They were the rector’s sisters and they had a little gift shop in the front room of their house. They sold writing pads and pencils and postcard views of the church and painted ones of Jesus and Mary and Mabel Lucie Attwell little girls. In the front hall, in