ere ploughing time and the time for sowing:
wheat first, and turnips after the wheat, barley after the turnips,
sainfoin, grass and clover after the barley. Oats in the five-acre field
this year; in the seven-acre field the next. Lambing time, calving time,
cross-ploughing and harrowing, washing and shearing time, time for
hoeing; hay time and harvest. Then threshing time and ploughing again.

All summer the hard fight against the charlock, year after year the
same. You harrowed it out and ploughed it down and sprayed it with
sulphate of copper; you sowed vetches and winter corn to crowd it out;
and always it sprang up again, flaring in bright yellow stripes and fans
about the hills. The air was sweet with its smooth, delicious smell.

Always the same clear-cut pattern of the fields; but the colors shifted.
The slender, sharp-pointed triangle that was jade-green last June, this
June was yellow-brown. The square under the dark comb of the plantation
that had been yellow-brown was emerald; the wide-open fan beside it that
had been emerald was pink. By August the emerald had turned to red-gold
and the jade-green to white.

These changes marked the months and the years, a bright patterned,
imperceptibly moving measure, rolling time off across the hills.

Nineteen-sixteen, seventeen. Nineteen-eighteen and the armistice.
Nineteen-nineteen and the peace.

iii

In the spring of that year Anne and Colin were still together at the
Manor Farm. He was stronger. But, though he did more and more work every
year, he was still unfit to take over the management himself.
Responsibility fretted him and he tired soon. He could do nothing
without Anne.

He was now definitely separated from his wife. Queenie had come back
from the war a year ago. As soon as it was over she had begun to rage
and consult lawyers and write letters two or three times a week,
threatening to drag Anne and Colin through the Divorce Court. But Miss
Mullins (once the secretary of Dr. Cutler's Field Ambulance Corps),
recovering at the Farm from an excess of war work, reassured them.
Queenie, she said, was only bluffing. Queenie was not in a position to
bring an action against any husband, she had been too notorious herself.
Miss Mullins had seen things, and she intimated that no defence could
stand against the evidence she could give.

And in the end Queenie left off talking about divorce and contented
herself with a judicial separation.

Colin still woke