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that fast.’
    Abbie did not hear these last words; she was already out and running from the cottage. She had seen her father’s tall, lean, slightly stooped figure as he entered the lane. Now as she drew near him he bent to embrace her and she threw her arms round him and took his large, calloused hand in hers. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I got a place! I start in two weeks in Eversleigh. A doctor’s house. Dr Curren his name is. I’m to get a shillin’ a week and all found.’ Looking up into his face she waited for his smile. ‘Aren’t you glad?’
    He stopped and she came to a halt beside him. He was looking down at her with a quizzical expression on his lean, rugged face, his blue eyes shadowed now not only by fatigue but also by concern. He had a strong, curving nose and full-lipped mouth. As Abbie looked up at him he drew his lips back a little over his teeth and heaved a sigh. His coarse fair hair, Abbie noticed, had fine streaks of grey in it.
    ‘Aren’t you glad?’ she asked again.
    ‘Are you glad?’ he said.
    ‘Well,’ she shrugged, ‘I’ve got to get a place somewhere, haven’t I? And Eversleigh’s not so far away. Mam says it’ll do for me for a year for my petty place.’
    ‘It’s not what I wanted for you,’ he said after a moment.
    She knew what he meant. In spite of the fact that most children of her generation left school at the age of ten, her father – and he had never made any secret of it – had hoped that she would remain on beyond twelve, at least for another two years or so. And she had hoped for it too. But it was not possible. She had already stayed on longer than Beatie and Eddie, and therefore it was only right, as her mother had said, that she should now go out into the world and start to earn her living.
    ‘Anyway,’ Abbie said, ‘it’s done now. And per’aps in time, after I’ve done my first year, I can study some more.’
    He squeezed her hand. ‘Perhaps so.’
    Her father, she had learned not so many years before, had never had a day in school in his life. In the years he had been a child, growing up as one of a large family, education was only for the privileged – the wealthy ones and the lucky ones. When the government had first donated public money for education in 1833 he had been thirteen and too old to take advantage of the new benefits. So, like most other children of his class and age, he had spent his childhood working.
    Abbie, thinking herself fortunate in that she had attended school till the age of twelve, found it hard to envisage her father’s early life. A childhood without schooling? She could hardly imagine it, though she knew that even now there were areas in the country where education was still not compulsory.
    Her father, though, had miraculously risen above his peers for, in spite of everything, he had learned. And what learning he had acquired had begun when, at seventeen and doing manual work for a schoolmistress in Trowbridge, he had persuaded her to give him lessons in reading and arithmetic in exchange for his labours. He had gone on from there, studying in whatever spare time he could find.
    Abbie’s mother had had a more fortunate start. Taught by her own mother, who had also once been a governess, she had had schooling from an early age. Abbie – when the realization had come to her – had been not a little thrilled to learn that in having both a father and mother who could read and write she was, in Flaxdown, something of a novelty. Not that her mother made much use of her education. Neither did Mrs Morris set much store by its usefulness when it came to her daughters – or even her son for that matter. Abbie’s father, though, was different. Not only did he love knowledge for its own sake, but he was always happy to use his learning for the benefit of others. Many was the time some illiterate neighbour would come to the cottage for the purpose of getting Frank Morris to write a letter or read one just received. At such times