Chapter 12

“Need any help in here?” asked Eddie, coming through the kitchen door. None of them knocked any more. All four horses had been exercised and watered, and Keir was in the stable with the other three men, holding a prayer session. Sonia had persuaded him to move the folding chairs and a picnic table into the already cramped space, though Derek, and occasionally Gerald, preferred to both pray and study sitting on a spartan blanket on the floor. Eddie had excused himself on the grounds that he needed the toilet, but he really needed to be out of Kerr’s company and into Sonia’s.

“You could chop those tomatoes for me, really small. I’m making a spaghetti sauce. No, better still, go round the corner of the house, opposite direction from the stable, and you’ll see a couple of long herb planters there. I’m afraid I’ve let them get a bit overgrown recently, with all this business. Would you recognise basil and thyme? And there’s a rosemary bush just next to the planters. I only need about a couple of sprigs of each.”

Eddie was back in a couple of minutes, carrying a couple of handfuls of greenery.

“Not sure if these are right, Mrs Swift. I’ve never been into gardening or cooking,” he admitted.

“The thyme and rosemary you’ve got right, but that’s mint you’ve brought. I’ll go and get the basil… no, on second thoughts, you come with me, and I’ll show you which is which: could be useful for the next time.”

“Next time? You sure there’s going to be a next time? World’s going to end any minute now, isn’t it?”

“Oh, don’t you start! I know you don’t believe in any of it, and you haven’t answered my question from a couple of days ago: why on earth are you here?”

“I think you could say, first, I’m lying low, and second, I’m licking my wounds. Trying not to let things hurt me. People I get close to, I lose them, one way or another.”

“You seem to me to be getting quite close to Ron, in all that little circus out there.”

“Yes. Odd, isn’t it? I mean, apart from the horses, our backgrounds don’t seem to touch at any point. But I find him, let’s say, refreshingly simple.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Eddie. I thought he was a halfwit when I knew him before, but he’s shown a lot of depths I hadn’t expected to find in him.”

“I didn’t mean simple as in stupid. It’s just the way his mind seems to work: takes the most direct route. Takes things literally and doesn’t over-think. He was telling me about his childhood. Did you know he was a gipsy? Sorry, I should be calling him a traveller.”

RON’S STORY

Zillah Majorski had arrived on a ship from New York a little over a week ago. She was seventeen, and she’d eloped with her boyfriend, the strangely named Forster Boot, after her parents had refused to allow her to see him any more, and had in fact they’d done the complete Never Darken Our Doorstep Again when she declared her intention to marry him. Forster had paid for her ticket and promised he would marry her as soon as they got to London. But halfway across the Atlantic, Zillah had decided that Forster Boot was a complete jerk. Not only because of the plans he had outlined for their life ahead. Which more or less entailed her being tied to a kitchen sink and popping out at least seven babies, but because of some of the less savoury physical and sexual things he was trying to persuade her to do. Zillah was what would come to be called, in later decades, “very highly sexed”, but she drew the line at sado-masochism and doing unspeakable things with vegetables.

So she had “slipped her chain” one afternoon in the Kent countryside, and after running for two miles in sandals and a floppy summer hat, and with most of her belongings in a large canvas bag slung over her shoulder, she was attracted by the sounds and the smells of a fairground. She realised she was gnawingly, desperately hungry. The best way to get fed, she decided, was to switch on the charm. Thus she caught the attention of the snake-hipped John Percy. Dark-haired, dark-eyed and as grimy as a blacksmith, he was incongruously manning a stall that sold cheap, bright necklaces. She learnt later that he was only minding the stall for a friend, and his usual work was the oily dirty maintenance on the king-sized roundabout and the big wheel.

Zillah tried on a long string of beads, having to pull off her hat to get it over her head. She posed in front of the small mirror, aware that the man in the vest and the tight black trousers was watching every move. She tilted her head this way and that, removed the necklace and tried another, and was about to take off that one too when he put his hand on hers to stop her, and added two more strings, then a third.

“That blouse was meant for a whole crowd of necklaces,” he said, “and you should add a scarf, too,” and he wound a long silky yellow scarf loosely around her neck. “Now, what do you think of yourself in that lot, then?”

“I can’t afford it.”

“I’ll buy you one — which would you like?”

“I’d sooner have something to eat. I’m starving.”

“I’ll buy you a necklace and something to eat, then. That’s if you’ve got anything to offer me.”

Now, if Zillah was highly sexed, she met her match that day in John Percy. Their eyes flashed the message to one another, and he led her by the elbow across the fairground to an area where a lot of caravans were parked. If she’d expected a gipsy caravan to be made of wood, painted with flowers and with a gentle horse dozing between the shafts, she’d have been disappointed. It was an old trailer such as families towed behind their cars on trips to the seaside. Didn’t even kiss her, nor did he ask her name, just took her, strenuously, on the floor of his van. And she loved it. Many would have said that John Percy raped Zillah that afternoon, but she would have denied it. For her, it was completely transactional. No, better than that, since she scored on both the credit and debit sides: she got the deep satisfaction of pleasure with a man, and also a meal. A meal and three sets of beads and a scarf. And indeed a hat to replace the one she’d put down when trying on the beads, even bigger and floppier than the one she’d lost.

So she stayed with him, travelling from fairground to carnival to horse-market, making him the envy of the other men of his age by looking as enticing as hell, but making it quite clear that she was his and his alone. Within a year she was expecting a child, and John, for all that his morals in some directions were dubious, immediately did the honourable thing and whisked her off to the nearest register office. There was no colourful Romany wedding ceremony, with flowing wine, dancing and fiddle playing, just a swift entrance and exit, an iron ring procured, from who knows where, by his cousin, who was one of the two witnesses, and two names signed.

Signing his name was almost the full extent of John Percy’s literacy. He was very good with numbers, but had never learnt to read, and was almost proud of the fact. Zillah, by contrast, had been educated up to the hilt before running away with Forster Boot, and gladly read for him anything that was needed.

Several families in their little pack of travellers got housed in a row of prefabs in a tired suburb in the north of Kent, and it was there, on the kitchen floor of her next-door neighbour, that little Ronald was born. John was still travelling to work in fairs and carnivals, and often only home once every two or three weeks, particularly in the summer. He had changed a lot over the space of a year, growing resentful of this small boy who caused his woman to divide her affections and loyalties, and he started drinking more heavily, and she suspected there were plenty of encounters with women along the way. He deprived her of money, so that she regularly found herself needing to beg for food from her friends, and if there was not enough food, what she’d got would go to Ronald before herself.

For all her hedonistic ways, Zillah still believed in God and the Christian tradition her parents had instilled into her. She had no money to buy books, so she enrolled in the local library and changed her two books every week, and the one book she possessed was a large purple-bound hardback called The Bible Picture Book. Each left-hand page told one of the important stories from the Old or New Testament, and opposite was a full page colour illustration. There were a hundred stories in all, told in words that the author had probably thought would explain things to young children, but the language was old-fashioned and often flowery, and in print smaller than most children’s reading books. She began reading these stories to Ronald when he was barely three, at the rate of one a day, and it was a special time for him, this story time with his mother. After about a year, by which time, of course, he had heard all of them at least three times, he began asking her for his favourites, like The Baby in the Bulrushes, The Angels and the Shepherds, or the one where Jesus knocked over the tables of the money-lenders. He had laughed at that one, and was convinced that this was the only naughty thing that Jesus ever did, and that was why they put him on the cross.

He would spend a long time looking closely at the pictures. It was only with hindsight that she realised just how close his face had always been to the page.

At five, Ronald started school. When his infant teacher drew big bold letters on the blackboard, he was able to copy them on his own little slate, but beyond that, everything was just confusing. He learnt how to hold a pencil, but his writing was uncontrolled and unreadable, and everything that was done in class was just a puzzle to him. His teachers were not kind. He was smacked for getting his sums wrong, smacked for not finishing the small amount of colouring that everyone else had completed long ago, kept in at playtime for failing to copy a simple sentence which, to him, was just disjointed shapes. He frequently truanted, and words like “dyslexic” and “low IQ” were mentioned to Zillah when she turned up to parents’ evening.

Eventually, John took him on the road with him whenever he had work; it was mostly farm labour and carnie work, with the odd bit of market trading thrown in. “He’s much more use to me on the road,” his father would say, “than stuck behind a desk not knowing what the hell is going on. He’s learning more this way.”

What fascinated Ronald more than anything was the business of the Malley brothers, who were often camped up in the same field or byway as John. The Malleys, three of them living in one van, were horse traders, and they were of an entirely different order from John and his family. They knew their trade inside out, and were held in high repute over two or three counties. Wherever they were selling a couple of horses, there were always a couple more to buy, and the Malleys owned three old cars, one to pull the caravan they slept in, and two to pull the horse-boxes they used to transport their merchandise from fair to fair.

It was Gregor Malley who first taught Ronald to ride, finding it an interesting selling point to parade an animal with a delighted seven-year-old child on its back. By the time he was eight years old, he was travelling with the Malley brothers more often than with John, and learning how to put on a saddle and bridle, and to adjust the stirrups for his little legs. John found this quite a relief, as he was frustrated trying to get Ronald to understand some of the instructions he was giving him. He never seemed to misunderstand anything the Malleys asked him to do.

There was a day when he was on a horse that bolted. The brothers were moving four horses out of a farmyard, with Ronald bringing up the rear on the smallest. It was probably the backfiring of a car nearby that startled the horse, which first reared, then turned, and set off in the opposite direction at a gallop.

He was nine by this time. He’d never had any advice about dealing with such a situation, and he struggled to keep his balance. He’d been some way behind Gregor and his brother Logan, and they hadn’t been looking back at him, so they’d failed to notice that he wasn’t with them for almost a minute, while his horse was frantically hurtling along a cart track between fields. Instinct made Ronald shorten the reins in his hands, which finally slowed the horse down enough for him to turn it into an opened gateway.

Colm Malley, the youngest brother, called to him from somewhere; he couldn’t see where. His name was called again and again until Colm’s horse cantered up to him.

“You did all the right things,” he told the boy, “but why didn’t you come to me when I called you?”

“I couldn’t see where you were.”

“Right, will you now go and join Logan and Gregor, just over there.”

One simple word set off a chain of events: “Where?”

They told him later that Logan and Gregor were a mere fifteen feet away, right in his line of sight. The Malley brothers quickly hustled him back to John, who in his turn rushed him home to his mother, who arranged for an eye test within two days.

“Had you known that your son was extremely short-sighted?” the optician asked her. She had not. Neither had he. Nobody was quite sure whether this was something that had suddenly deteriorated in a space of a few days or hours, or if he’d always been unable to see very far. Ronald, of course, had never known things could be any different. It did explain why he could copy the gigantic letters his first teacher wrote on the board, but never understood anything that was going on all round him after that.

He was given a pair of very thick glasses to wear, which transformed the world for him. Zillah at first thought this would mean his problems with school would be at an end, but it soon turned out that he still couldn’t make sense of words on the page, even when he could see them clearly. He tried reading some of the stories out of The Bible Picture Book, and she would think there was a breakthrough, only to find that he was telling them from memory, having heard them three times a year while he was at home.

So she managed to get him enrolled in a special school, where a lot of the children were disabled, blind or deaf, but where all of them were treated with regard to their individual needs. He settled well there, learnt to socialise better, and managed very basic reading. Three years later came the blackest day of his life.

Zillah had two more young boys by that time, whom she’d named Gabriel and Caesar. Ronald recognised both of those names as appearing in the Bible stories he knew. John had not been present at the birth of either of them, but their dark hair and dark eyes served to confirm that he had undoubtedly been present at their conception. They were aged four and five by this time, both bright and inquisitive, and could read and write far better than their big brother.

They’d struggled to get by in their prefab, with Zillah taking on cleaning jobs whenever she could find them. John came home more and more irregularly, and sometimes without much warning. On this occasion he’d parked his old car and his caravan in a nearby park, and arrived at the house to find Zillah standing on the doorstep chatting coquettishly with a stylishly dressed young man who was leaning against the door frame. John was already drunk, and didn’t take at all kindly to seeing his wife flirting with another bloke. He stood toe-to-toe with him and shouted in his face to get away from his woman or he’d…

“Or you’ll what?” was the cocky reply, and John completed the sentence by punching the man hard in the stomach.

“You’re gonna regret doing that,” gulped his victim. “It’s gonna be three on to one, very soon, mate. Four on to one. Maybe five. Hope you know some good prayers!” He hobbled away gasping out all the bad names he could muster.

“What did you want to do that for?” asked Zillah. “That was just somebody who saw me drop my purse in the street on my way home, and he’d come to return it to me.”

“And no doubt negotiating how you could pay him back!” John stamped into the house, glowering and ignoring the three children who had come out into the hall hoping to greet him.

Two hours later, there was an aggressive thumping on the front door. The prefab had both a doorbell and a knocker, but this visitor preferred to use fists.

“Get in the back,” said Zillah to John, “I’ll answer it and tell them you’re not here.”

Through the frosted glass panel in the door, she could see there were at least four men. She opened the door slowly, and was about to speak when she recognised that she was face to face with Forster Boot. Thirteen years older, thirteen years more handsome, and thirteen years nastier.

Time stopped.

When time resumed, Forster Boot had snatched her by both shoulders and dragged her forwards with such force that she fell to her knees. He wrenched her back up again and she screamed so loudly that despite his banishment to the back room, John Percy rushed out towards the front of the house and lurched into the middle of the group of men surrounding Zillah. His heavy boot found its way into Forster’s crotch, forcing him to drop Zillah back to the ground again, but three of the men, including the one who had been chatting with Zillah, grabbed John by the shoulders, while another punched him around the face a couple of times.

Then he saw that Forster was carrying a knife, and, using the strength of his three captors as a fulcrum, managed to leap into the air with both feet aimed at Forster’s chest.

The three children — two terrified little boys and the bewildered, bespectacled Ronald — cowered in the hallway, scared to go any further forwards, scared to go backwards and not see what was happening. The knife, kicked out of Forster’s hand, lay on the ground, and he and John went for it together. John was the loser in that race. Now Forster Boot raised it above his shoulder and swung it down fast towards John’s chest. Not so fast, though, that Zillah couldn’t come between them. Loyal to a bully and a sot of a husband, she caught the full blow of the knife in the side of her neck, and died within seconds.

The four men took off in haste, leaving John kneeling over his wife’s body, three loudly crying children clinging to one another in the doorway, and several neighbours running out to stare in horror. None of the prefabs was connected to a telephone, so the wife from next door — she on whose kitchen floor Ronald had been born — ran two blocks to find a phone box and summon the police.

John couldn’t give them any names to begin with, until he remembered hearing one of the men being addressed as Boot, and he’d learnt that name from Zillah soon after they’d met, and that, together with the American accent that was still in evidence, was enough to find him and bring him to court. Forster Boot was tried for the murder of Zillah Percy, but convicted, through a clever and probably expensive lawyer, of her manslaughter; nevertheless he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

John could see no way that he could look after the two youngest boys; he scarcely knew them, and couldn’t even remember which name belonged to which. His dilemma was solved by his cousin, Darby Percy — yes, the same cousin who had provided the iron wedding ring and stood as a witness to his wedding. Darby’s wife was childless, having had two miscarriages, one stillbirth and one daughter who had died at only a few days old, and she longed for the children she’d been told she could never have. Caesar and Gabriel were sent to live with Darby and Christina, and disappeared from Ronald’s life.

Ronald himself was taken back on the road with his father, who relinquished the prefab and lived solely in his caravan now. For two years he did his best to teach Ronald the mechanics of working in the fairs, but his son was slow, very slow to learn, and John’s frustration would boil over when he’d had a drink or two. Ronald learnt to dread the sight of John unbuckling the heavy belt from his waist.

At fourteen he was sold into slavery — at least, that’s how a friend described it a few years down the line. He was still showing a hankering for working with horses, although the Malley brothers had not taken him back. John heard from a friend that you could get an apprenticeship at some of the riding stables near Newmarket racecourse, although you had to be at least sixteen years old. He made the long trip to Suffolk, hoping to find a place for his boy, but all the reputable managers twigged that he was not old enough, and one or two refused to take him on the grounds of his eyesight. Things changed when John met Victor Wragg in a pub outside Newmarket, and was offered forty pounds in exchange for six months’ free work, with only bed and board thrown in. The deal was struck, and Ronald began eight years of misery working for Wragg, living in a shabby dormitory with two other boys who had also been, effectively, bought.

His two room-mates were both called Nicholas: Nicholas Brown, known as Brownie, and Nicholas Fry, who preferred to have people call him Nick Friday, like some Hollywood detective. They just called him Ron, and they were a year older than him and, considering the brutal treatment they themselves were subjected to, extremely kind. They recognised his lack of mental agility, and instead of teasing or bullying him, did their best to support him. It was Brownie who did more than anything else to help him to learn to read. He had brought with him his treasure, The Bible Picture Book, and it helped his reading that he could almost recite those stories word for word, so that he recognised the jumble of letters he was looking at.

If working for Wragg was a miserable existence, Mrs Wragg made it that much worse. Her cooking, which they experienced only in the evening, was atrocious. Breakfast was only ever cereal and toast, and lunch was usually a stale sandwich. But she was, as Nick Friday put it, “a religious nutter” and insisted on bundling the three boys off to church every Sunday morning, saying a long and tedious grace before their supper, and fining them, by the use of the Swear Box, if ever they took the name of the lord in vain. This included words like “bloody” and “blimey” and several others that she instructed them had some obscure holy connotation. The upshot of this was that whenever they were in the stable, where she was rarely to be seen, the boys resorted to profanity for the sake of it, sometimes even inventing new swear words, which became a bit of a contest at times.

Because of this enforced churchgoing, the three lads were never taken to race meetings on a Sunday. Wragg only trained about ten horses at any one time, employing two adult grooms, both sophisticated young ladies, and an assistant trainer, who would all be called upon to attend races on Sundays. But during the week, one or maybe two of the boys would be taken too, and even allowed to parade a horse in the paddock. This was rarely assigned to Ron, who was clumsy and flat-footed, and frankly was not considered to inspire racegoers to fancy the horse he was leading; by seventeen years old he was not attractive to look at, with a big nose and a bit of an underbite, and of course, the extremely heavy glasses. He couldn’t get himself tidy, despite the ministrations of Diana Wellesley-White, the girl groom who led the horse behind his on the first time he walked in the paddock. He had a skittish little mare called Paper Bird, and he knew, and Diana knew, that he was actually managing her pretty well considering her temperament, but she looked out of control compared to the elegant Serpent Moon who followed her, and with that and the shambles of a boy leading her, she started the race with very long odds, and made a few punters delighted when she finished a close second.

Ron admired the jockeys, tiny-hipped and girl-sized, and harboured unrealistic ambitions to train as one, but he only had to suggest it, and he would be told not to bother applying as he was already too tall, his physical condition left a lot to be desired, and despite the compulsory goggles, his glasses would be a drawback. He could ride fast, though: when he exercised Wragg’s horses, he often pushed them to the limit, with no ill-effects later. Of course he fell off. He fell off quite a lot, and broke, at different times, a collarbone, a wrist and three ribs, but mainly his glasses. Unless the lenses were damaged beyond repair, Wragg just patched them up with sticking plaster, making them look more unsightly than ever.

At twenty-two he had developed a mind-consuming crush on Diana, and, mistaking her usual protective behaviour towards him for affection, had attempted to kiss her while she was brushing the coat of Serpent Moon. This was not welcome, and she told him as much, but she never reported it to Wragg. She did, however, confide in Celia, the other girl groom; Celia told Mrs Wragg, and Mrs Wragg told Victor Wragg, and Ron was out of a job and out of a home by the next day.

He wandered, with his few belongings in a kitbag, into Newmarket, eking out his small amount of cash on as little food as he thought would keep him alive, and wondering how a person went about sleeping rough, when he bumped into Nick Friday, emerging from a pub. To be precise, Nick Friday bumped into him, since he’d just been physically ejected from the premises for arguing with the landlord about being short-changed.

Nick had left Wragg’s employ just two years earlier, having found a more congenial workplace a few miles further out. He gave Ron a floor to sleep on for the night, and even managed to get him a week’s temporary work, mainly mucking out and feeding. If Ron would not have made it as a jockey, this was doubly true of Nick, as he’d grown in bulk and vigour. His stable owner found him valuable for exercising horses who might have to carry extra weight in handicap races. He was running an old banger of a car, and told Nick he’d recently got engaged to a local girl whose family had moved away, taking her with them. Whether or not this was intended to break up her relationship with Nick, Ron couldn’t tell, but as Nick had a few days’ leave, and was off to visit his fiancée, Ron cheerfully accepted the invitation to come along for the ride.

“You’ll have to pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,” warned Nick. “You can’t stay here on my floor without me, and I’m not entirely sure whether I’m coming back. It depends on what Frankie wants to do.”

“Frankie? Who’s he?”

“Frances, you dumbo. My girlfriend. My lady-wife-to-be. We’re going to a place called Woodbeck. Her dad’s just moved to become the new vicar there.”

At first, Woodbeck received Ron with open arms. Frances’ father, a benevolent and progressive-minded clergyman, and not at all the forbidding monster that Ron had imagined, not only relented over his daughter’s relationship to her horse-trainer-in-training, but offered Ron work doing odd jobs in the vicarage and around the parish, and even found him some digs at a reasonable rent with one of his elderly lady parishioners.

And there he stayed, for the next twenty years. He attended Woodbeck Parish Church regularly, and stood as best man when Nick Friday married Frances in her father’s own church. When the odd jobs dried up and old Mrs Roberts, his landlady, passed away, he drifted from one casual employment to another, and found a bed in various hostels.

He failed spectacularly at most of the jobs he did. He failed as a car-park attendant, a dog walker, a road-sweeper and a delivery cyclist. He failed as a Christmas postman, though they asked him back time and time again because, for all his ineptitude and his near-illiteracy, Ron was unfailingly genial and openly friendly. Someone suggested farm work. He answered an advert in a shop window for help at a place called Frayling Farm, run by a couple called Mr and Mrs O’Dwyer. In the space of two days he had managed to drop all the eggs he had collected after careful instruction from Mrs O’Dwyer, failed to secure the hen house after even more careful instruction, resulting in their losing four hens in one night to a fox, and when put to picking soft fruit, had managed to completely strip the wrong bush of unripe berries. Mr O’Dwyer gave him his marching orders, and he trudged up the hill until he saw the entrance to another farm, with a sign on the gate which he could just read as “HELP WANTED”.

The farmer was a bluff, bearded man called Mr Swift, and he told him they needed some help getting in the barley harvest. “Have you ever done anything of this kind before?” he asked Ron.

“Not exactly,” replied Ron, meaning “not remotely”, though Mr Swift clearly interpreted it as meaning “something similar”.

“Well, Martin’s in that field with the combine harvester, and it’s going to end up with about three hoppers full of grain today. He’s got two detachable hoppers on that machine, so one of the loads needs to be bagged up; that lot will get sold for animal feed, but the rest will be collected tomorrow or the day after by a company that buys it from us; we don’t do our own storage here, there isn’t the space.”

He went on to explain how, after the first hopper had been detached, it would be emptied into three or four grain sacks which would each be held on a frame while the right amount of grain would tip out of the hopper when the lever on the side was pulled. Control of the lever would ensure that just enough grain poured into the sack so that it didn’t overflow. Ron nodded, doing his best to follow the instructions, and was led out to where the bag frame was waiting for Martin to return with his first load.

By the time the hopper was detached, Ron could not remember the sequence of instructions, but by then Mr Swift had gone indoors to make some phone calls, and Martin was off again cutting some more barley. The first sack fitted comfortably on to the frame, and Ron pulled the lever forwards. The grain flowed out faster than he’d expected, and he jerked the lever up again. Then slowly down, stop the flow by pushing the lever up — he was getting the hang of this. Sadly, if you forced the lever too far up, it served to open the bottom end of the hopper, and in no time there was almost an entire hopper full of grain lying loose on the field.

He stood helpless until Mr Swift came out to see how he was getting on, at which point he received a furious mouthful, was called a four-eyed idiot and far worse, and told that he’d already cost the farmer far more than he would have paid him, so that he couldn’t expect any money for this shambles.

Disconsolate, he walked back into the farmhouse to be greeted by Mrs Swift, who had watched from the kitchen window as her husband raged and fumed and took over the task. She was a more sympathetic person than Mr Swift, and offered to give Ron another chance, sorting the apples that had recently been picked up from the ground and were waiting, all mixed up, in a deep basket. There were boxes ready, each labelled with the name of the variety. She introduced him to the Royal Velvet, the Braeburn, the Bramley and the Rochester Red, and handed him a laminated card with written instructions on how best to space the different varieties of apples in the boxes.

He spent a happy hour sitting on a bench handling fruit, and felt that he was doing a better job here than he had out on the barley field, but when Mrs Swift came to take in some of the boxes, she found Rochester Reds mixed with the Velvets, and Bramleys with Braeburns, and a lot of the instructions for spacing disregarded. She told him she would need to re-do the job herself, just as Mr Swift had to take over the grain bagging, but she looked closely at his face for a few moments and told him to come inside.

“I’ll pay you for what you’ve done,” she said, opening a cash box, “even though you failed at both jobs, because at least you were here. But, Ron, tell me the truth: you can’t read, can you?”

“Oh, I can, Mrs Swift, I can. Just… not very well.”

She picked up a notebook and flicked the pages back and forth, searching. “I’m afraid you’re not going to be any use to us here. But I’m going to give you a phone number to ring — you can use a phone, yes? This is a man who works with the local education department, but with adults; he provides support to people like you. He can arrange things like adult literacy classes. Don’t lose this piece of paper, and promise me you’ll get in touch with him tomorrow, all right? His name’s Mr Bradley. Japheth Bradley.”

“Like the one in the ark?”

“I can tell you know the Bible. You’ll get on well with him, then. He likes the Bible as well.” the Rochester Red, and handed him a laminated card with written instructions on how best to space the different varieties of apples in the boxes.

He spent a happy hour sitting on a bench handling fruit, and felt that he was doing a better job here than he had out on the barley field, but when Mrs Swift came to take in some of the boxes, she found Rochester Reds mixed with the Velvets, and Bramleys with Braeburns, and a lot of the instructions for spacing disregarded. She told him she would need to re-do the job herself, just as Mr Swift had to take over the grain bagging, but she looked closely at his face for a few moments and told him to come inside.