Let’s get inside.

It’s a farmer’s house, so the main door goes straight into the kitchen. The kitchen itself is kind of stuck on the side of the original main building, as they often are in these old places.

The lads were wrong, the door’s not locked at all. That makes things a whole lot easier. Good.

—

Going through the door into the house, there’s that smell. Not the smell you might expect. Sure, there’s the smell of must and dust – no surprise about that, after a house out here has been left empty for a few weeks. But no damp, no mould. No rats.

Instead, it’s more the scent of flowers. Delicate. Sweet. Welcoming. Everywhere.

More memories…

—

The smell of a farmhouse kitchen in full swing. A loaf fresh out of the oven. The dough for another, rising on the warm-plate above the stove. A vegetable stew bubbling away. Kitchen-table laid for lunch. And the scent of flowers all mixed in with it. When you’re nine years old, a long way from home, there’s nothing like that smell.

No electric light, I remember. Not that unusual back then, perhaps, in a place this far out from the main line. But it wasn’t gas-lights, and it wasn’t oil-lights either – again, I can remember the smell, and there wasn’t that sickly stench of oil that I’d known from other places like this. No. The light came from those bulb-like blobs, that looked like pot-plants. Except they couldn’t have been, of course.

But there’s some of those here still, on the windowsills in the kitchen. And they do look like pot-plants.