News from Norfolk

“Where did they hang people here?” asked Jack, pleasantly, looking up from his iPhone.

“Mummy, Jack’s being disgusting again!” wailed Margaret.

“Disgusting? I’m showing an admirable interest in local history,” replied Jack. “This was always a big village. There must always have been bad people here, and there must also have been people who wanted to execute the bad people. So there must have been executions. It stands to reason.”

“Ah, there might be other features of local history that are slightly more wholesome, Jack” said the children’s mother, Kathleen, passing through the extremely cramped but otherwise bright and cheerful room, which, alongside an even more compact loo, comprised the entire ground floor of the tiny cottage the family had hired for a week. “Can you not develop an interest in the local fishing trade, for instance? It never ceases to amaze me that back in the medieval times, people used to sail all the way from Norfolk up to Iceland, and caught the cod that swam in great shoals out there, and then salted it all and fetched it back. They sailed everywhere — the Baltic, Spain, Portugal — even Ireland — all from right here. And the ships were miniscule!”

“Like Margaret’s brain?” enquired Jack. 

“Jack …” began Fred, the children’s father, who had only just finished unloading the car and had already twice managed to knock his head into one of the kitchen beams, and even before that, had manifestly been in a uncertain mood ever since they arrived. 

“Sorry, Margaret” said Jack. 

“What I was going to say, Jack, is that the gallows was bound to be on a hill. And probably on a main road, too. So the challenge is to find a road that would have been there in medieval times, preferably one located near to a hill. Then Bob’s your uncle.”

This was a sort of oblique family joke because, as it happened, the children had an actual uncle named Bob, whom they were due to see that very afternoon. In the wake of the covid lockdown Bob had moved up from Cambridge and bought a house in the village, along with some land, which was why the family had come to Norfolk for the half term holiday. 

Jack and Margaret had never been to Norfolk before. 

Kathleen had only been to Norfolk once — and that was to the Broads. The Broads, she reflected, were very unlike north Norfolk, with its endless acres of sun-bleached marsh, its mournful birdlife, the precipitous little lanes flanked with flint — a sort of wind-dried quality affecting everything from the holm oaks and roadside gorse to the ageless, inscrutable yet eagle-eyed local inhabitants. And because Kathleen had grown up in Ireland — Co. Wexford — it was this dried-out, east-facing greyness that affected her most powerfully, at once familiar and unfamiliar. 

As for Fred — and, indeed, Bob — north Norfolk was nothing more or less than childhood, in a form one might literally revisit — or not — for the simple reason that their maternal grandparents had retired to a village here on the coast. As children, back in the 1970s, summer holidays meant Norfolk: boats, rather spartan picnics enjoyed on wind-scoured shingle beaches, sunburn, Gray’s funfair at Blakeney, volatile friendships with local children, and of course the truly terrifying tales told to them by the grandmother’s gardener, who had one eye, very few teeth, and was constantly being sacked then grudgingly reinstated. 

The grandparents were now, of course, long dead — resting peacefully, one hoped, in a churchyard overlooking those stern grey marshes. The family house long since sold. Yet enough remained unchanged, even now, driving through these little villages that he had avoided for so many years, Fred could feel himself becoming younger, less complicated — but also less reliably protected by the carapace of adulthood. 

* * *: Galley Hill Farm

The four of them wanted to stretch their legs after the long drive up from Fulham, so they went for a walk to the quay.

“It seems very odd to have a holiday at the seaside when there isn’t any actual sea,” opined Margaret.

“There’s a perfectly good sea” replied Jack. “The North Sea is objectively one of the better seas. It’s just … not very nearby.” 

And indeed, it wasn’t. The four of them looked northward. It was still only March, so what they saw before them was a vista unrelieved by sea lavender, marsh mallow, samphire. Although the wind was out of the southwest that afternoon, it felt cold and spiteful, as if it would push them off the edge of the quayside if it could. The tide was out, trickling in a desultory way along its wavering channel, passing the time until it could turn in again. In the carpark there was a caravan that might have sold hot drinks, except that it wasn’t open. 

“Perhaps this explains why they were all so keen to leave for Iceland,” reflected Jack. “Compared with this, the frozen north must have seemed positively inviting.”

Kathleen looked around her. Dutifully, she tried to repopulate the empty scene with all the colour, bustle and coarse vitality of some closely-imagined medieval market-day — the cries of the fish-sellers, the sailors trading banter in all their different accents and languages, the Carmelite friars, the crown agent making his orders for salt cod in a self-important manner, the respectable burghers’ wives holding their linen head-coverings in place in the face of that wind, the friendly demotic whores — but it was as if the wild blew it all away again, as fast as she could dream it — even the bobbing of the masts further out towards the sea, or the grey gulls crying their seaside lingua franca. 

“If this is the seaside, then why isn’t there a fish and chips shop?” asked Margaret. 

“Pure social snobbery,” replied Fred. “If this were Hunstanton or Cromer, there would be fish and chips, and we could eat them out here in the wind, and they would taste a thousand times better than they ever do inside. But then the paper and the boxes would blow about, and there would be spent ketchup packets underfoot, and the air would smell of old chip fat, and, in short, the whole scenario would attract the Wrong Sort of People.”

“Like Margaret?” asked Jack, innocently. 

Fred either hadn’t heard, or, slightly childishly, pretended that he hadn’t heard. He was warming to his theme now. “There used to be a funfair here in the summer. I can hardly imagine they’d allow it now. It would spring up overnight, apparently out of nowhere — right out here in the carpark! I suppose they must have had to be incredibly careful about the tides. There were all sorts of rides, and stalls with unwinnable games — you could hear the music echoing for miles across the marsh — bad 1970s pop songs, of course, but for some reason when you hear them in the dark, out along the coastal path or on the creeks, they take on all the pathos of “Der Leiermann” — you know, that Schubert thing ….” 

At which point, Fred and Kathleen started humming, while the children covered their ears and began to make performative wolf-howls. 

Having convinced themselves that there was absolutely nothing more to be gained from admiring the view, the four of them headed back up towards their holiday cottage. They had walked down along the high street, but on the way up, they followed a different winding lane. 

“It’s funny how many of the places here aren’t what they really are,” said Margaret.

“That makes literally no sense” replied Jack.

“On the contrary, it’s a perfectly valid observation” said Fred.

“Thank you, Papa!” said Margaret, skipping ahead up the strangely deserted road.

“The Friary isn’t a friary,” explained Fred.

“Nor is the Old Bakery a bakery,” added Kathleen. “Nor is Granary Loft a loft above a granary. Nor is Bank House a bank, although it clearly used to be.”

“Oh, I see,” said Jack. “Marsh View … doesn’t have any views of the marsh. The people in Woodpeckers … cut down all their trees, so the woodpeckers probably died, or something.”

“And this isn’t even a house any more, the poor thing!” This was Kathleen, pausing before an only slightly overgrown building site, standing behind a chain link fence to which a number of site safety notices had been affixed. 

It was, admittedly, about the fourth building site they’d passed on the lane in the course of a two-minute walk, but it was the first where there had only been a demolition — not any attempt to rebuild. Over the rockery that had once marked the transition between the lane and the gravel drive straggled a few windblown, disregarded early daffodils. There was something about the whole scene that looked terribly forlorn — the daffodils in particular. Kathleen bowed down and stroked one of them. “Someone planted you, did they not, all those years ago? And marked the seasons and the years by your blossoming, you cheerful wee thing?” 

“If we knew who had planted them we could pick them and put them on her grave, if she’s in the churchyard there” remarked Margaret, always the practical one.

“More likely,” objected Fred, suddenly really vehement, “she’s in a care home somewhere, while her worthless, short-sighted children burn through the cash they got, selling the site to a developer who’s now got permission to put five prestige executive homes on the site of her harmless midcentury bungalow. Monsters! If you ever do that, you two, I swear I will haunt you both to your own dying day, and possibly beyond.”

The two children looked at father, equitable but curious. They were not entirely sure whether he was joking.

* * *

Later that afternoon, with the wind still blowing quite hard, they walked up to Bob’s new place.

Bob’s house wasn’t really what people think of when they imagine the north Norfolk coast. It was a small, nondescript brick farmhouse, built in the 1920s, onto which had been added various practical accretions — outshuts, a kitchen, a conservatory — making it even more shapeless and nondescript than it had been previously. But at least it had rather magnificent long views down over the village and then out towards the sea, shimmering engimatically in the late afternoon light. 

Inside, the house had already started to look like everyplace else that Bob had ever lived — which is a polite way of saying that it was a mess. There were half-unpacked boxes lying about (Bob had been there for more than a year), plenty of books, a hand-written musical score available in various drafts, a telescope, cats, the battery for an electric strimmer, a Mesolithic axe head. Under a reasonably valuable early David Jones drawing, hanging rather unevenly on the wall, sat a half-forgotten bag of crisps. 

Rooms were not distinguished by function they way they were in more normal houses. One of the bathrooms seemed to have been turned over to propagating heritage seed for the garden. Several cats lay on the kitchen table, unselfconscious and sleepy. 

Bob was extremely pleased to see them all. He leaned down to give Kathleen a kiss on the cheek, enfolded Fred in an awkward embrace, and exhibited a delightfully realistic mock horror and revulsion on seeing Jack and Margaret. 

When he had lived in London and Cambridge, they had seen Bob all the time, almost every week — and now, after all these months, they fell back with relief into the well-worn patterns of familiarity. Fred picked up the hand-written score and examined it with real interest, while making dismissive comments about it. Kathleen wanted to know about the garden. The children went round the house, locating all the cats, greeting them by name and, where possible, fussing over them. And Bob, quite transparently, luxuriated in being surrounded by people whom he liked, and who understood him.

Dinner was, as they knew it would be, very early, extremely casual and also very satisfying. They were served one of Bob’s nameless vegan concoctions, a sort of vegetable stew with homemade bread, almond butter and, for the adults, quite a lot of some sort of organic English wine about which Bob spoke at enormous length. Some of the veg had actually been grown by Bob himself, which was no small achievement, given the time of year. Pudding was an apple cake with brandy. 

Although the wind had dropped, the late afternoon was cold. Many of the cats had gravitated to the vicinity of the wood-burner which Margaret, who enjoyed fires, had been feeding conscientiously. Jack, who got bored easily, had drifted away from the table. He was too well brought up to consider looking at his iPhone, so instead he was fiddling with the telescope — at least until a part fell off it and rolled loudly across the floor. 

Kathleen, noticing all this, suggested that the children might want to go outside. 

Out they went. Dusk had started to gather around the little house. Below them, on the hillside, the land swept down past some vegetable plots to the orchard. Above them reared the curve of the hill. On the road just to the east, beyond the hedge, they could hear cars driving past, but to the west, where the sun was still poised just above the horizon, there was a path through tall grass, and then a gate. 

“Bet you can’t catch me” said Jack, breaking into a sprint, as Margaret dashed after him, right into the last of the sunshine, light-blinded and thoroughly gleeful. 

* * *

In the house, silence reigned, and for a little while the three adults basked in it. Then Fred poured them all more brandy. 

“Are you happy, Bob?”

Kathleen was resting her lovely, slightly wistful face on her hands, gazing across the plate-strewn kitchen table at Bob, radiating kindness and concern. Fred looked up, eyeing his brother almost critically, waiting for an answer. 

Bob, in turn, looked from one of them to the other, then out the window where dark was just starting to fall, before contemplating for a moment his empty plate.

“This isn’t entirely a happy place.”

There followed a long pause. Kathleen was the first to speak.

“What’s wrong with it, exactly? It seems a fine house. And you’ve got such a big garden now, too! That must be good?”

“Oh yes, it’s a good house. And the garden is very good, too. It’s four whole acres — almost a proper smallholding. I’ve got a little orchard down at the bottom, and the meadow has really taken off. Up at the top, where it’s far too exposed for fruit and veg, I’ve made a gravel garden. You’d like it, Kath. That’s where I set up the telescope. Say, shall we give that a go tonight? It’s finally come clear after all that rain this morning —”

“Don’t change the subject, Bobbo. What did you mean, ‘this isn’t entirely a happy place’? You can’t just say that and then leave it.” This was Kathleen again. Her cheeks were a tiny bit flushed from the brandy and the heat of the wood burner.

Strangely, though, it was Fred who answered. “It’s this place. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? It’s not the house, it’s this village.”

Bob nodded, silently. 

“It was different before,” said Fred, addressing himself mostly to his wife. “It used to be such a nice, simple, down-to-earth place! Everyone knew each other. Most of them were related to each other. There were holiday makers, of course — there always have been, ever since the railways came, it’s that whole ‘Poppyland’ thing — but we had our own place in the ecosystem, too. Now, though, just look at it! You saw it this afternoon — hardly a single proper shop for local people, hardly a single normal business of any sort. 

“And so much of it has been rebuilt, too. You saw all those grim, gigantic, identikit ‘homes’ made up of glass and steel, with just enough flint — non-structural, obviously — to get a generic design past the district council. And they’re packed in like sardines, sitting in their tiny patches of scraped away, sprayed-off earth, planted with the odd token lavender, ‘for the pollinators’, no doubt. 

“Oh, there used to be such pretty cottage gardens — gloriously vulgar, but incredibly well-loved — full of aubretia, daisies in every clashing colour under the sun, old elephant ears, gaudy hyacinth bulbs, the works. And you should have seen our grandmother’s garden! Now, though, what is there? The lone stray daffodil that the landscaping contractor hadn’t quite managed to kill, at least not on the first try, and a plot for yet another joyless, character-free, sanitised, sanity-wrecking glass cube. 

“And the people! This whole afternoon, I didn’t see a single soul I recognised. Why, I …”

“Stop it!”

They both looked at Bob, who was sitting there at the table with his hands clapped close over his ears, his eyes shut tight.

“Stop it!”

“Ah, Bobbo, don’t fret, Bobbo — Bobbo, what is it? What’s wrong? Will you not tell us?” Kathleen reached out towards Bob, speaking gently, as if she were comforting one of the children. “Bobbo, please tell us what’s wrong.”

Bob took his hands away from his ears, and then wrapped his arms around himself, rocking slightly in the battered old chair on which he sat. It took him a moment to collect his thoughts.

“Sorry. It’s just that you sound … you sound like … like them.”

Kathleen, again, spoke very softly. “Who do you mean, ‘them’?”

Bob looked around sightlessly. “Them. The people here. The people in this village. Not the new people — the old ones. The ones whose children we knew, Fred — well, some of the children too, now, although the old ones are the worst. I can’t stand them! Because that’s all they ever do, all they ever say. 

“Apparently, the past was always perfect. This place was paradise! Never mind that in the 1960s, not all the houses had water, people still died of stupid things like tetanus and mastitis, people our age looked about 80 years old through sheer hard work, half the children dropped out of school by the time they were Jack’s age. Never mind that the cottage you’re staying in was heated by coal fires, had a dirt floor and housed a family of twelve. Never mind that it was fine to mock the literal village idiots, that domestic violence was an everyday thing, that rape was basically fine — but that if you fancied other men you literally had to move to another place and drop all contact with everyone you knew, so as not to disgrace the family. 

“No, it was perfect here! Everyone knew each other, everyone knew each other’s business — it was like living in some fucking never-ending improvised version of Peter Grimes. You remember that, Fred! You know it as well as I do. And it was okay for us, because at the end of the holiday we went back to school. For us it was quaint and funny and all good fun — up to the point that it wasn’t, of course. And that was because we could get away from it. Isn’t that true, Fred?”

Fred, a very fixed look on his face, slowly nodded his head. “Yes, okay, that’s fair. Sorry.” 

“Surely all old people are like that, though,” objected Kathleen — although again, very gently. “Isn’t that just nostalgia, a longing for the old ways? The old folk in Hook, where my Nanna lived, do the same. Isn’t that just human nature?”

“No, Kath,” said Bob. There were tears gathering in his eyes. “It’s different here. You just don’t know what these people are like. They hate outsiders so much — and incidentally, Fred, by ‘outsiders’ they mean us— anyone who wasn’t literally born here. Or anyone else who doesn’t quite fit in, for whatever reason. It’s all they ever talk about. 

“Because it’s all our fault, you see. Oh, some of the folk here are all right — perfectly normal, even. The younger ones are mostly fine. A few them have the wit to realise that their own parents, maybe even their grandparents, came here from somewhere else. Perhaps they still have something of those old Iceland fishermen about them, a bit of curiosity, a bit of empathy. They’ve seen a wider world and, actually, they quite like some of what they see.

“So they’re friendly. I like them. You probably think I’m talking like this because I’m lonely and don’t have any friends here, but that isn’t true. I see friends here every day! I’m not lonely at all.

“But somehow at the heart of the village, there’s this terribly dark, bitter, unhappy thing — this sense that we’re all to blame — anyone who wasn’t born here, anyone who doesn’t fit in — for all that’s wrong in the world. And that includes the people in those awful new houses — but it also includes me. I know it does. 

“It doesn’t matter that I didn’t demolish this place, didn’t put up an ugly new house, that I know the history of this village like the back of my hand — better than most of them do! They don’t make that kind of distinction. They hate me as much as they do the people who built those new houses, because we’re not entirely part of their little tribe, their little world, their little way of being.

“You are going to say I’m imagining it, because that’s that sort of thing other people always say to me. They’ve said it all my life. But I know that I’m right. Oh, sometimes it’s all fine. I’m out in the sun, the fruit trees are coming into bud, there are hares in the meadow. It’s all okay. But then there are other times when everything they think about me — I mean them, all the people here, all those people — sweeps across like a huge dark cloud, blotting out the light — the pressure of all that resentment, the anger, just waiting to burst out. Oh, I know you won’t understand. No one ever understands.”

And indeed, Bob had spent a lot of his life not really being understood by the people around him. Fred and Kathleen both knew this, and Bob knew they knew it, all of which rendered any easy, glib words of consolation impossible. 

But Bob, as it turned out, wasn’t seeking consolation. He stared directly at Fred. “You won’t like me saying this, Fred, but that’s what went wrong with Gemma, wasn’t it? She loved you, and you loved her — but at the end of the day, she lived with her enormous, frankly terrifying family in that tiny bungalow on Low Lane — do you remember her father, with one eye, like Wotan? — and you had to go back to Westminster, A Levels, being the superstar chorister at the Abbey, the place at New College, practicing your lieder with Fischer-Dieskau and finishing your PhD, and all the rest. You had to go back to your world, because you couldn’t escape your little world any more than she could escape hers. You loved her, but it never would have worked, would it? Oh, you can dream all you like, but she was the one who understood that, not you. And she was right. Because this isn’t a happy place. This was never a happy place.” 

Kathleen looked at her hands, pretending that none of this was happening. Fred started to say something and then stopped. 

Fortunately, just at this awkward point, there was a lot of noise right at the kitchen door, from which, after a short interval, Jack emerged, with Margaret trailing breathlessly in his wake. 

“We found where they hanged people, Daddy!” said Jack, looking quite triumphant. “We have definitely found it and I’m 100 percent sure that we’re exactly right.” 

“We are,” confirmed Margaret. “Jack found it and I helped.”

Kathleen, in despair, was about to apologise to Bob, but rather to her surprise, she saw that he now had a big smile on his face. The atmosphere in the room changed. It was as if a messy dangerous storm had passed, leaving sunshine in its wake. 

“You’re quite perceptive, you two, aren’t you?” Bob was saying. “There are people who’ve lived in this village for whole lifetimes who never manage to work that one out.”

“Do you want to see, Mummy? Daddy, will you come out? It’s still a little bit light.”

Wordlessly, yet with a sort of shared relief, the adults all filed out, onto the little terrace, cluttered with planters, a picnic table and an old lawn roller, right outside the kitchen door. After the warm glow of the kitchen, the evening was both surprisingly cold and very nearly dark. 

“It’s not dark really. You just have to let your eyes get used to it,” said Jack, loping off confidently into the night.

“He’s right,” said Bob, following him, as Margaret gambolled along next to her uncle. Kathleen and Fred followed, groping their way forward, far less swift and less certain. But in a minute or so they found they could see very well by the glow that still lit up the west. 

Above them curved a vast, velvety, arching sky packed full of glimmering golden stars — so much brighter than either of them had seen for years. 

Together, the little group strode across the back of a sharp escarpment. To the left of them, which is to say the north, they could see the lights of the little village below — the high street, the lane, even their own little tiny hired cottage — and then just beyond, the vast black emptiness of the marshes and the sea. To the right, the land rolled away from them, punctuated by a few other more distant villages, and the faint amber glow of the local market town. 

“On a really clear night you can see the glow from Norwich,” called Bob over his shoulder, reading Fred’s thoughts. “But that’s just Holt.” 

“Ah, I had forgotten there were so many stars in the sky,” said Kathleen. 

Once again, she tried to imagine those people in the village, five hundred years before. They would have stood outside their wattle-and-daub cottages, the air acrid with the smell of burning dung and sea coal, the masted ships bobbing up and down at the the quay, the farmyard animals making their own soft companionable sounds, and they would have seen this same sky. But then, unconsciously, she found she was thinking of the quayside at Hook, with the old lighthouse in the distance, and her little brother and sister were running ahead of her, there in the dark.

And she thought of her Nanna and missed her, and there was an sudden sharp ache in her heart at the thought of Hook, the dead she had loved, the fact that someday, beyond the point where even her imagination could possibly reach, they’d all of them be dead. And the sadness clung to her heart like a lonely thing, looking for comfort.

Before them, a little copse of trees reared up suddenly from the bare ridge.

Jack had stopped and turned around. “This is it, isn’t it? It’s on a hill, it’s near a road, the road goes to the next village so I can’t see why it shouldn’t have been there in medieval times — this was where the gallows were, right?”

“Which is why they didn’t try to plough it, even during the last war,” replied Bob, evenly. “And that’s why the copse of trees grew up.” 

“Argh, what an idiot I am!” exclaimed Fred. “It’s just as well you two take after your mother. Galley Hill Farm! Which of course is a genteel version of …”

“Gallows Hill Farm!”

“You never told us it was called that!” complained Margaret. “You only ever said ‘Bob’s big new place’. Well, if you’re just going to hide all the clues — you might have said!”

“Oh, but your father knows this place too well to think about it very much,” said Bob. He wasn’t trying to be unkind, just speaking his mind, as he always did. 

Kathleen felt slightly unsteady, not because of the brandy, but because somehow the Wexford coast and the Norfolk ones had folded themselves together, and she couldn’t quite untangle them, and because that sadness was still there, as it so often was these days, curled up inside her like a sleeping cat in a basket, quite comfortably settled now. 

Still, she was worried for Bob. “Is it all right, having that here?” she asked. “It’s a dark thing, a gallows — a place of execution. It’s a dark thing, surely, to have that as your neighbour?”

“I expect there are burials here,” pronounced Margaret, crisply. “Lots of dead people. Lots and lots of hanged, bad, dead people.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Jack. “They’d have buried them down in the churchyard, same as everyone else.”

“You’re both right, in a manner of speaking,” said Fred. “Margaret is right for the early medieval period. Jack’s right for the Anglo-Normans onward. But of course anyone who was gibbeted would have ended up somewhere around here — what was left, anyway. What the birds didn’t take away.” 

Margaret was pleased by this, and was dancing around happily in a circle, humming to herself, while Jack, who was fearless, ventured down into the clump of trees. 

“You haven’t answered my question, Bobbo.”

Bob was looking down towards the trees, with Fred by his side. Kathleen followed their line of sight. Standing there, she could see something moving in the dark. At first it just felt like the motion of the corn in the wind, which had come up again, until she remembered that there were no crops in the field — that now in mid March, a month before Easter, the land was still raw and bare. 

“The answer, Kath, is that I positively welcome these folk as my neighbours. It’s these folk, not those down in the village, who’re my own people. Look at them! All the outcasts — not just the murderers and the smugglers, the one who stole a horse or broke down a hedge — they weren’t all saints, obviously — but the ones who were simply a bit wrong in the head, a bit off target. You know, the ones who fell in love with the wrong people, who believed the wrong things and couldn’t shut up about it. The strange ones. The outsiders. The ones who heard music that no one else heard. The ones who could see what others don’t.”

The motion continued. Sometimes it felt a bit like a crowd, and indeed it made a hushed sort of murmuring sound, which floated through the air, but then got lost in the trill of Margaret’s random song, and the noise of the road behind them, perhaps even the sea, far beyond all of that. Sometimes Kathleen could almost pick out individual figures — a woman with a cloth over her head, a man dressed in rags, a child with darkness where his eyes should have been — but at the same time, it was hard to be certain what she was seeing. She took hold of Fred’s arm and pressed close to him, but he didn’t turn to look at her. 

“No, it’s not these folk who make me unhappy. It’s the ones down in the village. Because I know they’d do it again, you see. They forget this place, they forget what the name means, or why the copse of trees stands where it does, and why they always had to plough around it — but in their hearts, in their DNA, they remember what it all was for, and the joy that they had from it, and in their hearts they long to do it again, too.”

Down in the wood they could hear Jack’s voice. Although it sounded surprisingly distant, it rang with pure joy. “You won’t believe this! Haha, I knew I was right! I knew I was 100 percent right!”

Margaret stopped dancing around, reeled a bit — “I’m so dizzy now!” — and then ran away from them, off towards the copse of trees.

Wordlessly, silently, without pausing to think about what they were doing, the adults followed.