Sprawling on the grassy bank, Willis’s workforce drinks its Batey’s ginger beer, then presses the cool earthenware to their burning cheeks. No matter what their egalitarian guv’nor said, it is difficult for them to escape the conclusion that this is serfdom — albeit of an unusual stamp. Willis was a nob of sorts, although a second son — and there was his manorial property at the top of the rise — of modest proportions, true, but a pretty enough flat-fronted little house in old honeycomb-coloured brick, with newer chimneypots
just so, and a shining colophon of a knocker just so. The garden fell away so steeply to the High Street that the canes implanted to train runner beans, tomatoes and peas made a stockade lashed together with edible rope. Willis was a vegetarian: I graze my own garden, he said the day he took Stanley with him to the garden party at Norr — the day Stanley met Adeline and it all began under her husband’s complaisant wolf-yellow eyes.