I don’t blog every day. I don’t want to bore the pants off you (or me) with descriptions of washing up or cleaning the lavatories. It’s why I haven’t described the minutiae of the van coming from W*** with our furniture and rugs - although I have to say they look very fine, especially as I have spent yet more time on my hands and knees scrubbing so we now have acres of gorgeous flagstones. I have skipped the bit where the window cleaner came and spent about five hours cleaning the windows and drank me out of milk with all the cups of tea. The man can gossip for England and I’m not remotely surprised that his wife sounds like a granny with Alzheimer’s – the poor woman would have lost the will to speech years ago.

I suppose I could wax lyrical about the sunlight brazenly shining its heart through the newly cleansed windows. I suppose I might tell you about the three further rats Rommel has dispatched to the great compost heap in the sky. Then again I could ramble on a bit about the organic delivery man (forty-something, thinning on top, doesn’t like this village because of the narrow lanes). Or the contents of said box – carrots, onions, garlic, potatoes, turnips, greens, greens, more greens, a card with some foul-sounding but deeply worthy African bean and root vegetable stew. I could blog about the moon, or the mud, or the funny thing that happened on the way to the shop, or What the Sheep Did Next.

Then again I could regale you with an awful visit from the truly grim Judith, trying to get us to join the 100 Club (you pay out a tenner in the slender hope that you might - though probably won’t – win back a fiver). Having failed dismally there she then had a shot at cajoling us to buy a number for the new church clock (£100? I don’t think so – and it was a choice of either two or eight, neither of which are numbers which particularly call to me). I felt honour-bound to make her a coffee to make up for the disappointment and she did that thing of looking at the mug as if it were an alien species, about to sprout tentacles and bite her.
‘A mug? How delightfully earthy.’ Earthy, my arse.

She was desperate to nose around but I bundled her out into the garden, where Aidan was attempting to dig. It won’t last long – he’ll be hunting for a gardener before long.

Judith didn’t make much headway with him (he doesn’t have a lot of patience for frumpy women) and wandered back inside, asking about the aforementioned sheep. I told her they belonged to Bodger/Badger/Bundle and little girl Hazel. Her eyes opened wide and you could just tell she was dying to Tell a Story. So I asked (it would have been rude not to) and she said, ‘Oh I shouldn’t really,’ and I said, ‘Yes, but why not? I need to know the neighbours’ and we ended up having another mug of coffee and I even broke into the biscotti, and she told me all about Hazel.

Turns out Badger is full on thirty years older than Hazel. Judith couldn’t wait to tell me what is obviously a well-honed village tale: how mean-tempered Badger Shaddacome had caught the sprite of a girl from over the hill. It wasn’t a happy tale – but I think we all knew that. I’m just stunned it can still happen in the modern world. But then usual rules don’t seem to apply down here.

Badger had lived alone since his mother had died and, as I suspected, scratched a living in the old-fashioned way – a small flock of sheep left mainly to fend for themselves on the bracken-choked hills. A cow, a few chickens and a scrawny cockerel. His mother’s vegetable patch had grown a fine crop of waist-high weeds, though the potato bed was kept neat and clear. Badger’s finest product was the potato spirit he distilled in the stone outbuilding that listed as if it too were befuddled by spirits.
‘I know about that,’ I interjected. ‘Or, at least, Aidan does.’

One evening in autumn, an Indian summer, she said, Badger went out with his gun for a little rough-shooting, a couple of rabbits for the pot or maybe a pheasant that had strayed from one of the fancy shoots. Instead he met a different prey: Hazel Lisbrooke, following dust motes, fragile as a moth, barefoot and wearing only her nightie. She smiled at the rough man, smiled gently even though he was a giant of a man, unshaven and rank with sweat, his hands thick with grime, his breath heavy with drink.
‘Good evening, Badger,’ she’d said softly, her voice a mere whisper on the light autumn breeze.
‘Good evening, Missy,’ he’d said, lust prodding in his groin, seeing her body etched against the sky, plainly visible through the thin cheap cotton.
He’d taken her quickly, like a dog, ramming himself into her hard and fast, one hand over her mouth. He didn’t want to see her face so he pushed it into the thick wet grass. She didn’t fight; she barely whimpered. When he was finished, she got up unsteadily and limped away back over the hill. She was sixteen years old. She had been a virgin, had never even been kissed.

(OK, hands up, I did embroider that last bit. Judith just said that he’d more or less raped her when she was just sixteen and a virgin. But I like my version – especially the nightie bit).
Badger had stumbled home, drink fogging his memory. Three months later, he had vigorously denied their coupling when the posse of farmers from over the hill had come banging on his door. Jim Lisbrooke and his three big sons, quiet stolid men who worked the land and went to church on Sundays. No shotguns, but they carried a quiet menace in their eyes.
Badger and Hazel were married two weeks later, in a rare flurry of snow. On their wedding night, in the narrow iron bedstead (I’m guessing), she miscarried.

Since then, she’d miscarried again and again, as if her womb refused to carry a child conceived in such brutish ways; as if they were a mis-mating, of different species. Badger took it badly, as if she did it on purpose to make him look stupid (or so Judith surmised). Anyhow, each time Hazel lost her baby, apparently she gained a few more bruises. And another pair of baby feet appeared on the fence – in memory of the child that never was.

‘She’s a bit simple, dear,’ said Judith, shaking her head disapprovingly.
I mentioned that there seemed to be a fair herd of cattle now and a pretty good vegetable plot too – so she obviously wasn’t that daft. Stiff intake of breath and a hasty, ‘Must get on. Now if you’re SURE you don’t want number two?’

I’d forgotten the clock numbers and for one ghastly moment thought she was suggesting I needed a bowel movement. Luckily I caught her drift in time to mutter something about ‘thinking about it’ and bundled her out of the door.