The people are very good farmers. They drink cider. If they didn’t speak Frog they’d be just like us. It makes you think.’

Because I was there too, though at a different stage of the battle, I could just imagine George sitting and sucking his pencil beside that road between the orchards which was so optimistically signposted to Paris. Leafless poplars, although it was July, and greyish-yellow dust covering the poplar trunks and the thick hedges and the hedgerow flowers and George’s face, hair and hands; a notice on a gate, ‘MINEN!’ with a skull and crossbones underneath it, and a field behind the gate sown with poppies, corn and death; a cart-horse, to which the notice had meant nothing, lying shattered just inside the gate . . .

Not much like Brensham; but George saw the similarities and ignored the differences. Like most Englishmen abroad he expected to find everything strange and was astonished when he discovered things which reminded him of home. He was enormously impressed by his discovery of a little pink weed which turned out to be the same troublesome bindweed which crawled in the cornfields at home; he’d expected strange and unfamiliar and foreign flowers. And he felt at home among the apple trees, Pearmains and Pippins, with the fruit just forming. Like William Hart’s orchard. That made you think, too.

But a painful incident had happened to him which had made him think more than anything else. He set it down at great length and without much evidence of schooling; so I will paraphrase it. He had called at a farm, it seemed, to ask for some water. It was a smallholding really, not much bigger than Alfie Perk’s at Brensham. The soil was clean, the headlands were narrow, not a square yard of earth was wasted; but the land, he thought, could have done with a good dose of phosphates.

He met the farmer close to the cottage. He was tending a big dappled cow whose hind leg had been badly shattered by a bomb splinter. She was a magnificent cow; George became almost lyrical in her praise. At home you’d have to pay sixty pounds for such a cow. He wanted to tell the farmer how much he admired her, and to ask how much milk she gave a day and what she was worth in Normandy. But of course he didn’t even know the French for ‘cow’. He stood and grinned and looked a fool.

Then the farmer shook his hand and things became easier. They looked at the cow’s leg together and the farmer said ‘Bomb.’ George said ‘English?’ and the farmer nodded and shrugged his shoulders as if to say ‘It’s not your fault.’ But the leg was very bad, and it was awful to think that we had done that.

The farmer took him into the cottage. Inside it was just like home. The earthenware jug of cider, rough, raw, cool and sharp, was so familiar that it made him miserably homesick. He didn’t feel at all strange in the company of the farmer, his wife and the three children, and although he didn’t understand a word of French he often knew what they were saying. When the farmer’s wife turned to her husband and asked a question he guessed at once that she was asking about the cow; and he knew that the farmer’s reply meant ‘I shall have to kill her.’ He wanted to say ‘Have you any other cows?’ but of course he couldn’t and in any case he knew the answer. They had no more. They were poor people, you could see that, and the cow must have been worth a lot of money, especially in wartime when prices were high.

So to make up for the British airman’s bomb he took his assault ration out of his haversack and gave all the boiled sweets, which he’d been saving for the battle because he liked to suck sweets in a battle, to the farmer’s three children. Then he gave his slab of chocolate to the farmer’s wife and his cigarettes to the farmer.