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sing.
    They had a milk cow, but no horse. Joseph said they would not be able to afford a horse until the following year, when they would have wheat and corn and young animals to sell. So the plough was yoked to a donkey, heavily blinkered, and Joseph and the donkey walked up and down and back and forth all day and the tussock grass was slowly lifted and turned in wavering lines.
    Lilian said: ‘I thought a field was meant to be a straight and square thing.’
    â€˜I am trying to make it as straight and square as I can,’ said Joseph.
    â€˜Well,’ said Lilian, ‘it looks a drunken shape to me. I’m glad that we have no neighbours to remark upon its peculiarity.’
    Joseph allowed himself to smile. He reminded his mother that ‘everything we’re undertaking here, we’re undertaking for the first time, but slowly, we shall learn’.
    â€˜I am not at all certain,’ said Lilian, ‘that I shall ever learn to cook on this range.’ And she gave the old iron cooker, on which she was boiling a kettle, a spiteful kick. Fired with smouldering lignite, the range didn’t seem eager to bake the loaves that Lilian put into it, only to steam them. They barely rose to the top of the tin and could achieve nothing better than the consistency of suet. Slices cut from them left a disappointing film of moisture on the knife. In Parton Magna, Lilian’s bread had been crusty and ample and irresistible to Roderick Blackstone, who had adored the way it scratched the roof of his mouth, and had devoured great quantities of it, spread with beef dripping, on the morning that he died.
    â€˜In this godforsaken place,’ said Lilian, ‘everything is worse.’
    Harriet hurried away. She hurried to the back of the Cob House, where her garden waited. There was nothing there yet, only a rectangle of tilled earth, where birds she didn’t recognise parleyed in the early mornings when the sun rose over the valley and the beech leaves glinted like oil. Slowly, she was picking the stones from the soil, dividing the ground into squares with planks of totara pine, fencing it with tin. ‘A stone wall round a plot of these dimensions’, Joseph had told her, ‘is pure make-believe. Have you any idea how long it took three men to build a stone chimney?’
    Harriet had imagined the stone wall, but it could wait. She painted the tin white, nailed it to sapling stems. There was no gate. The tin enclosed the garden all the way round. Whenever Joseph and Lilian came out to see it, they stood watching Harriet from the other side of the wall, as though she were a prisoner they were not allowed to visit. They saw her working with her hair tied up in a kerchief, stooping over her planting, her apron bunched full of her seed potatoes, her boots clotted with mud.
    â€˜Is she happy doing that?’ asked Lilian.
    â€˜Yes,’ replied Joseph. ‘She is.’
    Lilian sniffed. ‘It looks like convict work to me,’ she announced.
    The creek came snaking down behind Harriet’s garden, noisy after a fresh, rattling the stones, carrying with it stems of red matipo and black beech from the high bush. Harriet had never touched nor tasted water of such icy sweetness. When the afternoon dusk fell and she saw the first glimmer of Lilian’s lamps at the Cob House windows, Harriet stood at the creek’s edge, listening to her new world. If the wind had died a little, she might hear an owl far away in the trees, or the mournful kooo-li kooo-li of the weka, which Joseph had taught her to recognise. Sometimes, she would spread out her muddy apron and kneel on this, rinsing her hands, then scooping water into her mouth. Often, she stayed here, with her face close to the water, for so long that when she stood up she discovered that an absolute darkness had come on.
    II
    In her first letter to her father, Henry Salt, Harriet wrote:
    We eat mutton and more mutton: legs of mutton,