I have had another baby since I saw you last, but she came so suddenly that I haven’t had time to make her any clothes yet. So I left her…. How is your husband?”

“Oh, he is very well, thank you. At least he had an awful cold but Queen Victoria — she’s my godmother, you know — sent him a case of pineapples and that cured it immediately. Is that your new servant?”

“Yes, her name’s Gwen. I’ve only had her two days. Oh, Gwen, this is my friend, Mrs Smith.”

“Good morning, Mrs Smith. Dinner won’t be ready for about ten minutes.”

“I don’t think you ought to introduce me to the servant. I think I ought to just begin talking to her.”

“Well, she’s more of a lady-help than a servant and you do introduce lady-helps, I know, because Mrs Samuel Josephs had one.”

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” said the servant carelessly, beating up a chocolate custard with half a broken clothes peg. The dinner was baking beautifully on a concrete step. She began to lay the cloth on a pink garden seat. In front of each person she put two geranium leaf plates, a pine needle fork and a twig knife. There were three daisy heads on a laurel leaf for poached eggs, some slices of fuchsia petal cold beef, some lovely little rissoles made of earth and water and dandelion seeds, and the chocolate custard which she had decided to serve in the pawa shell she had cooked it in.

“You needn’t trouble about my children,” said Mrs Smith graciously. “If you’ll just take this bottle and fill it at the tap — I mean at the dairy.”

“Oh, all right,” said Gwen, and she whispered to Mrs Jones: “Shall I go and ask Alice for a little bit of real milk?”

But someone called from the front of the house and the luncheon party melted away, leaving the charming table, leaving the rissoles and the poached eggs to the ants and to an old snail who pushed his quivering horns over the edge of the garden seat and began to nibble a geranium plate.

“Come round to the front, children. Pip and Rags have come.”

The Trout boys were the cousins Kezia had mentioned to the storeman. They lived about a mile away in a house called Monkey Tree Cottage. Pip was tall for his age, with lank black hair and a white face, but Rags was very small and so thin that when he was undressed his shoulder blades stuck out like two little wings. They had a mongrel dog with pale blue eyes and a long tail turned up at the end who followed them everywhere; he was called Snooker. They spent half their time combing and brushing Snooker and dosing him with various awful mixtures concocted by Pip, and kept secretly by him in a broken jug covered with an old kettle lid. Even faithful little Rags was not allowed to know the full secret of these mixtures…. Take some carbolic tooth powder and a pinch of sulphur powdered up fine, and perhaps a bit of starch to stiffen up Snooker’s coat…. But that was not all; Rags privately thought that the rest was gunpowder…. And he never was allowed to help with the mixing because of the danger…. “Why, if a spot of this flew in your eye, you would be blinded for life,” Pip would say, stirring the mixture with an iron spoon. “And there’s always the chance — just the chance, mind you — of it exploding if you whack it hard enough…. Two spoons of this in a kerosene tin will be enough to kill thousands of fleas.” But Snooker spent all his spare time biting and snuffling, and he stank abominably.

“It’s because he is such a grand fighting dog,” Pip would say. “All fighting dogs smell.”

The Trout boys had often spent the day with the Burnells in town, but now that they lived in this fine house and boncer garden they were inclined to be very friendly. Besides, both of them liked playing with girls — Pip, because he could fox them so, and because Lottie was so easily frightened, and Rags for a shameful reason. He adored dolls. How he would look at a doll as it lay asleep, speaking in a whisper and smiling timidly, and what a treat it was to him to be allowed to hold one….

“Curve your arms round her.