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King’ cabbages while lines of sugar beet and potatoes under straw and earth clamps shone in the frost. In summer flies rose in clouds over swaying crops, stooked cornfields and herb-rich meadows. The sweet smell of greenish flower-strewn hay and drying hops tickled the nose. Pigs rooted on the grasslands, poultry foraged under the sodden grass and fruit bushes, and the streams feeding the watercress beds ran clear and cold.
    On a windy day, like this June afternoon, it was possible to hear the corn soughing, the crack of elm and oak branches over by the hopfields and the rusted tin-can caw of the rooks. And from Well Road, sheep and cattle dotted the horizon like the colourful, quirkily drawn images from a medieval book of hours. It was plain, unadorned southern England, content to be so.
    The bakery at the top end of the village (known as Top Taylor’s’ in contrast to ‘Bottom Taylor’s’ at the other) was over-warm, and flour dust hung in the air. The shelves were stacked from the morning’s bake, and Jacko was loading up the oak wheelbarrow for the deliveries. In the back room, Mr Taylor was plastering strips of dough around the oven door to keep the heat in for the Coburg bake.
    Mrs Taylor was coughing when Ellen Sheppey ushered Simon Prosser inside. She and Ellen exchanged a look over Simon’s head.
    ‘Slice of your rice pudding, please, Mrs Taylor,’ said Ellen and mouthed over the boy’s head, ‘Hungry again.’ She looked for her purse in her bag. Simon was half blind, had one foot turned inwards from a birth defect and a mother who did not care very much.
    Mrs Taylor stopped coughing and reached under the counter for the circular baking tray in which she baked the rice pudding which had saved some of the villagers from absolute hunger in bad times. ‘I’ll give you an extra wedge to take home, Simon,’ she said, sweat glistening on her scraggy wrists. ‘But mind you eat it all. Don’t give it away.’
    Simon took the pudding, pulled back the waxed paper, sank his teeth into the slab – and vanished. Wrung by the pity which always made her feel useless and disturbed, Ellen watched his progress along the street and longed to take him in her arms, absorb him into her sagging, generous body.
    ‘Those kids were having a fair old go at him,’ she said. ‘I gave ‘em what for.’
    ‘Thank you is a foreign word in some places,’ said Mrs Taylor, replacing the baking tin. ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t expect anything else.’
    Ellen laughed and the two women spent fifteen minutes or so gossiping: a minute analysis of the Dysart wedding and the forthcoming jam-making session at the bakehouse.
    ‘I’ll be seeing you, then,’ said Ellen. ‘But I’ll take one of your best lardy busters for the old man.’ Mrs Taylor put her hand over her mouth and coughed, creating another haze of flour dust. ‘Take care of that cough, then.’
    Run these days by his middle-aged, and less popular, grandson, Mr Barnard’s brewery lay adjacent to the blacksmith’s yard, housed in a one-time corn-drying shed, a section of which had been set aside for making ginger beer and lemonade. The women, dressed in identical overalls and buttoned shoes, were already at work – a multiplicity of curves cancelling any pretence at uniformity. They talked quietly among themselves with an occasional rise in volume whenever someone made a joke. Clean cod bottles and their marble stoppers were stacked ready beside them.
    Fastidious at all times, Ellen tied a calico square around her head and pulled the knot tight: it made her feel queasy to think of anything joining the ingredients in the vats. Kat Harris chose that moment to shake with laughter and the marcelled ridges on her head bobbed up and down like wood shavings in water. Ellen frowned and looked away.
    She scoured out a red earthenware pan ready for mixing up the big order for ginger beer that had come in from Farnham. Into it she measured root ginger, cream of tartar, yeast and