He had just sipped his coffee when he heard the first fire engine go by; a few seconds later another followed in its wake. More traffic, a police car.

John Price opened the door and that was when he smelled the smoke, life-stifling fumes, choking, burning vegetation. The sky was aglow, a deep smoky red, activity everywhere. His eyes smarted; it was surely a heath or woodland fire and this was the last thing they needed in Stainforth with killer snakes on the loose. So much for tomorrow's carefully laid plans; anything could happen now.

He closed the door, went outside. Wherever the fire was the smoke could well drive the reptiles out from their hiding places, disperse them in all directions.

And infuriate them.

Being a single parent in a village like Stainforth was both a source of embarrassment and bitterness as Barbara Brown knew only too well. Tall and lanky, she was 'not bad-looking' as most of the youths in Stainforth agreed, but she wasn't the sort of girl you could get worked up over. Some boasted of having 'had her' after youth club, others kept quiet about it. 'Respectable' parents worried about their sons associating with her, to some she was just a joke, 'the village boot' as they referred to her.

But in reality Barbara was no local whore, merely an unfortunate and misunderstood girl who craved affection and could not find it. She had been desperate for a steady boyfriend from the time she reached fifteen and she had grossly misunderstood the attentions of the teenage boys at youth club; she genuinely thought that when one of them slipped his arm through hers and led her up behind the ramshackle Nissen hut that had served as a youth club since the war ended, it was because he felt for her, loved her. It took her a long time to cotton on to the fact that all the rough element of the local male population were interested in was their own pleasure. And that was how it was for three years, hopes built and dashed, and no chance of a permanent relationship.

Barbara's father had walked out on her mother when Barbara was eleven; he had an affair with a woman in the next town, and he left home to go and five with her. Betty Brown did not seem to care as long as she had enough money to buy forty fags a day; every evening she went down to the pub and usually got-air the free booze she wanted there. Barbara remembered the time her mother brought a boyfriend home. Bill was several years older than her and unemployed, and he used to stop overnight on occasions, sharing Betty's bed. Eventually he moved in permanently.

The young girl felt that she was in the way, the hints that a lot of girls leave home and set up in a flat on their own hurt her. She would have left if she had had the opportunity, but with no money and no job the idea was little more than a pipe dream. She was jealous of her mother, too. How was it that a woman of forty-five got a steady boyfriend whilst she, at seventeen, was still searching for a relationship?

It was on the cards that Barbara would get herself pregnant eventually. Some of Stainforth's youths had standing bets on it; a quid she's got one in the oven before she's eighteen, 50p it's a boy. And a fiver says it's Ted Growson's. But nobody would ever conclusively prove that it was Ted's because there were three or four of the younger men who would be reluctant to help with an inquiry concerning the fathering of the Brown baby, and even if they were willing it was very doubtful if anything could be proved conclusively.

Barbara had her baby three months after her seventeenth birthday and it cost George Rowley a quid. Tom Sproson forked out 50p because it was a boy but that fiver was still unclaimed and Ted Growson's girlfriend had blacked his eye but that did not prove anything.

Life underwent a drastic change for Barbara Brown after she returned to Stainforth from the maternity hospital. Her own mother didn't want to know the baby. 'If you get doin' them kinda things, Babs, then you gotta take the consequences for it,' Betty mumbled from behind her cigarette. 'You can stop 'ere but don't let that baby get makin' a row in the night, 'cause me and Bill needs our sleep.'

Somehow Barbara muddled through, relied on inborn maternal instincts to help her. In her own way she was happy, she had somebody who loved her even if baby Michael taxed her patience to its limits. Often in the night she nursed him to stop him from crying, sat up in bed with eyes heavy from lack of sleep, because if Michael had a screaming fit Bill would bang on the flimsy adjoining bedroom wall, yelling, 'shuddup'. But usually on fine days she could catch up on her sleep whilst her son slept in his second-hand pram in the garden. Overall, everything worked out, more or less.

Yesterday she had kept him indoors because of the snakes warning. They had kept doors and windows closed in accordance with the policeman's instructions and Michael had been restless, crying for long periods, and Betty had lost her temper. 'Don't know what the bloody place is comin' to,' she had screeched. 'You can't go out 'cause they reckon there's snakes on the loose but I never seen none. So we all stops inside and that flamin' babby 'owls his bleedin' 'ead off. Well, we ain't standin' for this day after day. It makes Bill proper niggly and then 'e gets on at me. You take it from me, Babs, there ain't no snakes in the village, if there are any they're up on the moors. You put the babby out tomorrow, 'e won't come to no 'arm.'

There had been a big fire in the night, Roberta's barley field ablaze, the smoke pall hanging over the village so that the inhabitants of Stainforth had to keep their windows shut anyway. The smoky night air was filled with the demonic howling of fire engine and police sirens, everywhere eerily aglow with an orange hue, vehicles coming and going all night long.

By dawn the fire was out but the stench of burning lingered, would hang around for days, flaked ashes floating in the slight breeze like a black summer snowstorm.

'It won't do Michael no good out there,' Barbara had said as she helped herself to the sawdust-like remains of a packet of cornflakes, her baby held to her bosom with her free arm, seemingly unable to make up his mind which breast he wanted to feed off first. Bill was still upstairs in bed; he rarely put in an appearance before midday.

'It wunna 'urt 'im,' Betty Brown screwed up her face into her usual expression of perpetual discontentment. 'Trouble with babbies today is they're pampered. If 'e lived in the town then he'd have to put up with petrol fumes and the like and learn to like 'em. A bit o' smoke never 'urt nobody. Bill'll go mad if 'e 'as to put up with 'im indoors all day again today.'

So, with some misgivings, Barbara wheeled the pram out on to the square of grass at the rear of the council house, found Michael a patch of shade beside the single struggling lilac bush and secured the pram's rickety brake.

'You go to sleep, darlin', like a good little boy.' She fixed the hood, pulled the stick of beads across for him to play with if he had the inclination, and placed his rattle on the coverlet. He looked like he might just go to sleep. 'You have a nice sleepy-byes, my love, and in a bit mummy will come out and move your pram so that the sun doesn't shine in it. See you in a bit, lovey.'

Michael gurgled, but he did not start to shriek when she tip-toed away. Thank God, for that. After all that commotion last night she needed to sleep for an hour or two.

She turned back at the doorway for one last look. Silence from the pram, maybe he was asleep already. She coughed; this smoky air wouldn't do anybody any good, worse than smoking fags all day long like her mother did. No good for the lungs.

There was a lot of activity in the surrounding area again today. Two helicopters flying back and forth on the hillside below the moors, a steady drone that could be either soothing or get on your nerves, depending on what sort of mood you were in. Cars up and down all the time. She shrugged her shoulders, went inside and upstairs. There was no sign of her mother, perhaps Betty Brown had decided to go back to bed and keep Bill company. The pair of them must get bored, she decided, with nothing to do all day except moan at somebody whose life was taken up looking after a baby.