'Does he bring the flame on the end of the stick?' asked Sylvia.

'You know very well he doesn't,' said Harry.

'There's a hook on the end of the pole,' I said. 'He uses it to push a switch. That sets the gas flowing. Then he pulls a little chain with the hook, and that ignites the gas.'

'Let's watch,' said Sylvia, as though what I'd just said wasn't really true, and needed to be proved.

We watched, and when he'd done, Shannon circled on his bike in the pool of white light that he'd made, and set off back for Thorpe and, if I knew him, the Fortune of War public house.

'I love Mr Shannon,' said Sylvia as he wobbled off between the wide, darkening fields.

'He's quite useful about the village,' I said.

'That's exactly what I mean,' said Sylvia.

'He hasn't changed the water in the horse trough for a while,' said Harry. 'It's all green.'

'How does he take the old water out?' asked Sylvia.

'Harry?' I said, turning to the boy. 'How does he do it?'

Harry watched the gas lamp for a while, keeping silence.

'Not sure,' he said, after a while.

'Perhaps he drinks it,' said Sylvia, and she gave a quick little smile.

'That might not be far off the mark,' I said, thinking of Shannon sinking his nightly five pints of Smith's.

We turned and walked back to the house, across our land, which we called 'the meadow'. It smelt of cut grass just then because I'd gone at some of the taller stuff with a scythe in my work suit only an hour before. The house was a long cottage, half tumbled-down, but it was big, getting on for three times the size of our old place on the main street of Thorpe. You could look at it as a terrace of three with a barn or, with a bit of knocking-through, it would be one good-sized cottage with built-on barn.

We lived in four rooms at one end of it, but the whole thing was ours, and on the day we'd moved in the wife had turned to me in our new parlour and said, 'Well, Jim, we've got on!