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clamped a hand around Bobby’s throat.
    “Open,” he said.
    Finn and Hector put their faces up to Bobby’s and said a great many threatening things. The word “mole” was mentioned several times and one of the boys asked Bobby if he knew what moles had for their tea. Then the worm was dangling before Bobby’s eyes, with a few flecks of earth still clinging to it.
    “Open up,” Hector said.
    The same worm now wriggled and twisted between Miss Minter’s fingers. She was beginning to appreciate how a boy from London might take some time to get used to being out in the country. She looked at the worm, then down at Bobby, still hunched over the doormat, and shook her head most sternly.
    “You mustn’t eat worms,” she said.

Gas
    B OBBY’S FIRST few days at Miss Minter’s were thoroughly disorientating. The whole place was an absolute puzzle; nothing was where it was supposed to be.
    The house had its own peculiar rules and rituals. Boots had to be removed at the front door and carried to the fireside; any scraps of food were scraped from the plate into a swill bucket under the sink. Treacle toffee only came out in the evenings, to be eaten while listening to the wireless. The milk was delivered every couple of days and kept in the pantry, in a can which clanked as the milk was ladled from it and with a lid so snug that Bobby always worried he was going to unleash the lot.
    But he slowly began to develop some sense of which nooks and crannies he was allowed to poke his nose into and the few which were out of bounds, not least the small door in the flue over the range whose key he once turned to see a heap of soot fall into the pot of carrots below.
    The more time he spent in Lillian’s company the more he found her to be an unlikely combination of frailty and strength—forever turning her good ear in his direction and dozing off in her armchair, yet capable of splitting great logs with the axe by the back door and heaving huge pans up onto their hooks.
    But by far the most significant discovery of Bobby’s firstweek in Devon was that thinking about his mother or father, far from bringing him any comfort, actually stirred up in him the most dreadful misery—a homesickness of such depth and breadth, of such debilitating terror, that he was convinced that he was going insane. So he began to steer any thoughts which seemed to be headed in their direction around to something else and make his way through the day from moment to moment, and with great deliberation, as if carrying a sleeping baby to bed. It seemed to spare him any pain on top of that which was inevitable. Yet the first sip from a mug of sweet tea or the warmth of the bathwater had a way of sidestepping his resolution and bringing home to him all the good he was going without. Then he would have to rein himself in and concentrate on something cold and dead and unyielding—would have to hold on tight until the danger passed.
    Bobby’s second bath didn’t cause half as much fuss as the first one or use up anything like as much fuel. Lillian washed his hands and face with a flannel, then let him soak for a couple of minutes. But as she sat on her stool, with the towel in her lap, looking forward to having the bath after him, it occurred to her that she couldn’t very well ask him to sort out the soup mix again when all the peas and beans and lentils were still perfectly sorted from the time before.
    As she buttoned up his pajama jacket Miss Minter asked Bobby if he was allowed to use scissors. He said he thought he probably was. And once he put on his dressing gown he was led around the back of the settee, wondering what kind of things the old lady might need cutting up. He watched as she dragged open a sideboard drawer and handed him a pair of ancient scissors. He inserted his finger and thumband tried them out and was still snipping at the air when Lillian dropped a stack of newspapers on the rug and knelt down beside them. She opened one up and began