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cultivation. He had opted for a new life of his own which to him seemed quite daring enough.
    Tom Ogden was now a strawberry farmer, with long rows of plastic cloches stretching away across his fields and an influx of foreign pickers at the height of the season. Both of these developments had brought opposition from different sectors of the local population. This opposition had been accorded full voice in the Gloucester
Citizen
, which had many pages to fill each evening and was delighted to fan local controversy. The issue had then been taken up by local radio, and had even featured on Central Television news. Tom Ogden had been uncomfortable in the face of such publicity, but had affected to treat it with the sturdy indifference farmers customarily accorded to aesthetes and townies.
    Tom now had half his fields converted to the increasingly popular ‘Pick Your Own’ option for his strawberries. People came out from the towns and villages of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire to pick his produce, often treating the expedition as a family outing. They had caused a little damage at first with their clumsy fingers and clumsier feet, but Tom had soon learned to limit that. The important thing was that they paid almost as much for his strawberries as the retail price in the shops, and far more than he could get from the markets or supermarkets. Children in particular tended to eat energetically whilst they picked, but Tom treated that as a necessary but minor evil, to be set against the lower overheads of selling on site. He was delighted with his profits, whilst his customers enjoyed the warm glow brought by physical exertion and then the flavour of strawberries which could not have been fresher.
    On this bright April day, Tom Ogden was looking over the bent backs of his workers, as they weeded the rows and nourished the promising green fruits with a little fertilizer. He imagined the summer scene here, when he would be listening to children’s shrill cries to their parents, and congratulating himself on taking what had seemed an adventurous step into this new area of farming.
    Ogden went out into the field and exchanged a few words with ‘Spot’ Wheeler, his foreman. No one, not even the man himself, was sure how he had acquired his soubriquet. He was Henry on his birth certificate, but he had answered to Spot for so long that no one knew any other forename for him. Spot had rarely ventured outside Herefordshire and had an accent far stronger than even Tom’s very noticeable one, so that any Englishman from more than fifty miles away found his speech difficult to follow. Yet, in some strange combination of sign and sound argot, which perhaps even he could not have explained, Spot managed to communicate effectively with the variety of mainly Eastern European workers who came each year to work in the strawberry fields.
    Tom Ogden always enjoyed talking to Spot, feeling an affinity with a man who had the same roots as he had, whose family had worked the land as his had for hundreds of years. Though neither of them would have acknowledged it or voiced it, the bond between them was sealed by a sense of rank. Spot Wheeler accepted his lower station as labourer and now supervisor of labour as unthinkingly as Tom accepted his role as owner of the land and thus master of his workers’ destiny.
    Spot gave his employer a brief report on the progress of cultivation and directed two of his newest workers to a new area with a series of guttural sounds; they nodded and bent anew to their work with the forks. Tom scratched his head, then shook it once again in happy wonderment at his foreman’s ability to communicate with his workforce.
    It was at that moment that a cloud fell across his world. It was a metaphorical cloud, for the day was golden still with a steady sun, but a cloud nonetheless. Spot Wheeler said suddenly, ‘That chap be ’ere again, Mr Ogden,’ and Tom turned to see a figure outlined