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well.’
    His listeners knew he was speaking the truth. Last week, Dr Lofts had relayed the news that a blanket factory in Winchester had let go forty men, and Bob Prosser came back from visiting his brother in Southampton with news of worsening hardship in the docks. You couldn’t dispute facts. You could only hope that with Ramsay MacDonald back in government he would do what he said and reduce unemployment.
    ‘I only need four of you to go for the present.’ Barnard shifted from foot to foot on his perch. ‘You can’t say I’m not being fair if I say I’m going to choose four whose men are still in work.’
    The joke of it, thought Ellen, was that Barnard’s suggestion was fair. You had to hand it to him. What was not so funny-ha-ha was that she was in the firing line. Beside her, Madge stared down at the floor and refused to look at her friend. Alf, the daft bugger, had been gassed on the Somme and hadn’t done a day’s work since he was carried, wheezing and bubbling, back home. Out of sight, Madge’s fingernails dug into the fluff that lined her pockets.
    Ellen flexed her leg: the kneecap felt like a badly fitting lid. ‘Well, that’s me gone,’ she said quietly.
    Madge did not look up but said, ‘It could be worse, love.’
    After she had collected her wages, Ellen began a painful progress home. Every so often she was forced to stop and rest. She had been paid off, all right. Barnard had even pressed an extra ten shillings into her hand, which, after two seconds’ reflection, she had accepted on the principle that if Barnard wanted to buy himself a washed-clean conscience she was not going to quibble. Outside Pilgrim’s Cottage she stopped to take a look at the knee and what she saw frightened her a little. The skin had puffed up into a flecked purple ruff like a plum tart at harvest. Ah well, she thought, at fifty-four nobody cared about her knees any more. She let the skirt of her frock drop.
    At the end of Croft Lane she stopped and looked up towards the ridge where the Roman villa was said to have been. The sky was lashed with azure and cream, and Hinton Dysart gleamed in the sun.
    June was a funny month: full of milestones and pointers. Her mother had died in June – just given up, Ellen always considered, tired of hard work. That was before the Great War. She and Ned had married in June and produced Betty who had been coaxed into the world just before midnight on the 30th. Exactly seventeen years later Betty left to marry Sam Ellis who ran a grocer’s shop in Winchester, leaving behind a space; an uncomfortable space, that neither she nor Ned referred to much.
    Clifton Cottage stood by itself in the field to the south of Hinton Dysart. Up on the ridge behind it was the old Harroway where Ellen and Ned had often walked when he was trying to make up his mind whether to marry her or not, to touch her or not.
    He was a careful man, her husband.
    Caution routed by need, Ned had eventually pulled Ellen to him. She had pressed her face into his shirt which smelled of soil and strawberries, and allowed him to kiss her hand and then her mouth.
    Ellen was in the outhouse, pushing the washing through the mangle when she heard Ned walk up the garden path. Glad of the excuse to stop, she stacked the clothes into the basket and went through to the kitchen.
    ‘Ellen.’ Ned sat down in the chair by the fireplace to unpick his laces. ‘Where are you, girl? I’m hungry.’ A boot fell to the floor, and he kicked it into the niche beside the range. Ellen watched him from the doorway.
    ‘You get more like your father every day,’ she said rather sharply. ‘Worse.’
    Ned gave his wife one of his slow stares. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘are a terrible woman.’
    ‘Do you want me to light the copper for a bath?’
    ‘No need.’ Ned watched Ellen limp across the room. ‘What on earth have you done?’
    Her reply was muffled by the oven door, and Ellen explained as she was dishing up. ‘It was