Chapter 33
33
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER
‘Does anyone know the phrase “rule of thumb”?’ I ask, looking out at the sea of eager young faces in front of me. I get a few blank looks, but most of them nod.
‘Does anyone know where it comes from?’
Nobody raises their hand. I wasn’t expecting them to, but one thing I’ve learned since starting this is always to be prepared for anything when you’re working with children.
‘It’s actually a milling term,’ I tell them, moving over to the chute the ground flour is gently sliding down before falling into the sack below. ‘The only way a miller could tell if he or she was milling the flour correctly was to take some and rub it between their thumb and forefinger, like this. That’s the rule of thumb. Who wants to try?’
Several hands shoot up, and I give them each a little bit of flour to rub. It always makes a mess, but what’s the fun in visiting a mill if you don’t end up covered in flour?
‘So, before we finish, has anyone got any questions? No? OK, I’ve got one to ask you then. Who can remember the names of the three main controls in a mill, and what they do?’
A little girl at the front sticks her hand up so hard I’m concerned she’s going to do herself a mischief. ‘Yes?’ I ask her.
‘The slooz gate,’ she says.
‘That’s right. The sluice gate is one of the controls. What does it do?’
‘It makes the wheel go faster and slower.’
‘Exactly. It controls the speed of the mill. Who would like to tell me another one?’
The little girl’s hand shoots up again, but I pick a boy near the back this time.
‘Go on,’ I encourage him.
‘The tent screw.’
‘Tentering screw, close. What does it do?’
‘Controls the stones.’
‘That’s right. It controls the distance between the stones, so we can adjust how finely they mill the grains. Can anyone remember the last one?’
No hands go up, not even the little girl.
‘The crook string,’ I remind them. ‘Anyone remember what it does?’
‘Controls the flow of wheat?’ a boy in the middle of the group offers.
‘Well done,’ I tell him warmly.
‘What an interesting visit, don’t you agree, children?’ the teacher says brightly. ‘Shall we give a round of applause to say thank you to Thea for showing us around her mill?’
I smile as the children clap. ‘Thank you,’ I tell them, ‘for being such good listeners and asking so many interesting questions. If you see my colleague Rebecca in the gift shop on your way out, she has a little bag of flour for each of you to take away to remember your day here.’
They’re my last class of the day so, once they’ve trooped out with their teachers, I begin the process of shutting down the mill. Primary school children are always a joy to have in here, because the concept of something that isn’t computerised or powered by electricity is so totally alien to them that they usually find it fascinating. By secondary school, the magic tends to have worn off, and I’ve learned to tailor my presentation accordingly. Once the mill has stopped and I’ve tidied everything up, I load the bags of flour I’ve milled today onto the trolley to drag them over to our weighing and packing area. Although we run it primarily as a tourist attraction, we do end up milling a lot of flour here. We sell some of it in our gift shop in olde worlde brown paper bags for suitably stratospheric prices, but the majority of it goes to the trade, including our café partners.
It was Alasdair’s idea to get an external company to run the café as a separate business and, after a few false starts with companies who expressed an interest only to let us down in one way or another, we came across one called The Mad Hatter. I say we came across them, but we were actually handed them on a plate by one of our other customers, the bakery down the road in Appledore, who already had a relationship with them. It’s a nice setup, actually. They use our flour in their pastry products, so visitors can see the flour being made and then taste the finished products in the café. The wheat is organic and I buy it from a local farm, so it ticks all the sustainability boxes.
It’s a beautiful summer’s day, and I glance across at the pond as I drag the trolley behind me. We’ve had a bumper set of ducklings this year, and it makes me smile to see them bobbing along behind their mothers in the water. Further away, I can see a family making a complete hash of rowing one of the hire boats. There are two children holding one oar each and an exasperated-looking father evidently trying to direct them, while their mother sits in the front of the boat staring serenely at the view. It’s at moments like this that I pinch myself, unable to believe that this is my life now.
Once I’ve weighed the flour out into the right quantities for tomorrow’s deliveries, I head back to the cottage, where I’m surprised to find Alasdair sitting at the table with his laptop open in front of him.
‘I thought you were in London today?’ I say as I bend down to kiss him. He’s wearing the sandalwood aftershave that I like, and I breathe it in deeply.
‘I was, but the meeting finished early. Besides, I couldn’t miss the test run.’
‘Oh, yes. What time is it?’
‘Six o’clock.’
‘I’ve got time for a shower then. How did the meeting go?’
‘Well. They signed.’
‘Of course they did. Finest legal mind in the south of England, they’d be mad not to hire you.’
‘Second finest. I hear there’s this peculiar hermit woman who lives in the middle of nowhere in Kent. Legend has it she was the youngest female partner at one of the most prestigious law firms in the land, before she chucked it all in to fiddle with her flour mill.’
‘Alasdair?’
‘Yes?’
‘Piss off.’
He laughs good-naturedly. This is a well-worn exchange. Ever since he started his own legal consultancy after leaving Morton Lansdowne, he’s been begging me to come on board, but I just don’t have any enthusiasm for that stuff any more, as I’ve told him every time we’ve had this conversation.
‘So, how was your day?’ he asks as I put the kettle on. ‘Mill anything interesting?’
‘Yeah, actually. This smart-arsed lawyer turned up, trying to drag me back into legal practice.’
‘No!’ Alasdair feigns shock.
‘Don’t worry. He won’t be bothering anyone else. I fed his flesh to the pigs and ground his bones to a powder. It’s like I’ve always said. Today’s smart arse is tomorrow’s scones.’
‘Sounds like a particularly unpleasant folk tale,’ he says with a theatrical shudder. ‘Remind me never to cross you. Thinking of which, I had another run-in with psycho Colin this afternoon. What is his problem with me?’
‘He doesn’t like smart-arsed lawyers either,’ I say with a grin. ‘He’s a bird of exquisite taste.’
‘He’s going to taste bloody exquisite as a Sunday roast if he doesn’t knock it off.’
‘You just need to stand up to him, show him you’re the bigger man,’ I soothe. ‘He probably sees you as a threat. Good-looking guy like you is bound to turn the heads of all his chicks. Thinking of which, we had a complaint about him today.’
‘Really? Who did he attack?’
‘Nobody. There was a group from Rollo and Louis’s school first thing and the head teacher, Mrs Steadman, came with them.’
‘Is she the one that thought you and Rebecca were a couple?’
‘That’s her. Anyway, Colin was having one of his frisky mornings, and she complained that it wasn’t suitable for young children to see that sort of thing.’
He laughs. ‘What did you tell her?’
‘I explained, very patiently I thought, that Colin doesn’t have the same sensitivities as us when it comes to love and sex, and he wasn’t trying to offend her or the children. Ultimately, this is a farm and farm animals are going to do farm animal things. That is, after all, the point of seeing them.’
‘Did she get it?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m not going to lose sleep over it. Rebecca can deal with her.’
Although most of the animals on the farm are a great success, we do have a couple of slightly problematic ones, and Colin the Cockerel is definitely one. Ben was adamant that, although our chickens are all Rhode Island Reds, which are generally good natured and prolific egg layers (another thing we sell in the shop, along with the honey from our bees), we needed a Welsummer cockerel, because they’re the proper storybook ones. I don’t know whether it’s his breed, his sex, or whether it’s just him, but Colin is aggressive to the point that we’ve had to put up signs warning people not to approach him. For the most part, this works fine, but he does seem to have a particular grudge against Alasdair, and against the farm dog, Lola.
Lola is our other oddity. She’s a Border collie we acquired from a sheep farmer, again recommended by the bakery in Appledore. She was the runt of her litter, so they were selling her off at a reduced price and Alasdair fell immediately in love with her. She is the sweetest thing, and even now she’s lying on her mat gazing at him adoringly, but she’s completely terrified of livestock in general, and Colin in particular – a fact he exploits ruthlessly.
‘Right, enough,’ Alasdair states firmly, shutting his laptop as I hand him a steaming mug of tea. ‘Are you showering then?’
‘Yes. You know what it’s like. I think I have flour in places where flour has no business being.’
‘Hm.’
‘What?’
‘Tricky stuff to get off, flour. You might need help.’
I laugh. ‘Might I? Are you offering, then?’
‘This is a job for a professional,’ he says, rising from the table and loosening his tie. ‘I’m going to have to go over every nook and cranny in forensic detail. It’s hard work, but someone’s got to do it.’
‘You poor thing,’ I say, laughing as he wraps his arms around me from behind and starts kissing my neck.
‘It’s just one of the many sacrifices I have to make for the woman of my dreams,’ he murmurs as his kisses caress my shoulder. His hands snake under my top, and neither of us says anything for a while after that.
‘You’re just in time,’ Rebecca tells me as we join the small group waiting outside the barn at the top of the farm. Rollo and Ben are here, of course, as well as Saffy, Tim, Louis, Mum and Phil, Dave, Brooke, Ernest and a few others that I don’t know but assume must be friends and family of the traction engine crew, as we’ve named them. Typically, the restoration has taken much longer than any of them anticipated, and Trevor has told me gratefully on more than one occasion that they probably would have had to have abandoned it if they were still paying the exorbitant rent on the unit in Tenterden.
‘I think it’s nearly there,’ Rollo says excitedly, bobbing up and down on his heels.
The door is wide open, and I can see George, Trevor and the other two bustling round the traction engine, checking things and calling out to each other. It’s producing an impressive amount of steam and, after a few more checks, Trevor climbs up onto the platform at the back, moves a lever and the flywheel slowly starts to turn. We applaud wildly as it edges out of the barn into the evening air, under its own power for the first time. The sunlight glints off its pristine burgundy paintwork, and we all jump as the whistle sounds. It’s loud enough to be heard in Ashford, I reckon, and I can hear braying and bleating from down the hill as some of the animals voice their displeasure. Above it all rises the shriek of Colin crowing. I suspect the traction engine has just made it onto his sworn enemies list.
‘Good luck with that one, buddy,’ I murmur as I lean back against Alasdair’s solid frame and survey the view from up here. His arms are wrapped around me securely as I cast my eyes over the farm, with our cottage and the mill right at the centre of it. A thought comes to me and I start to laugh gently.
‘What?’ Alasdair asks.
‘I’ve just realised something. Since I made the decision to leave Morton Lansdowne, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, has turned out the way I planned.’
‘Is that a problem?’
I turn round in his arms and lean up to kiss him.
‘Not at all,’ I tell him. ‘In fact, it’s all turned out much better than I could ever have hoped.’