As soon as the news circulated about the train being late, people started to gather in small groups, talking and laughing as they waited. Someone produced a harmonica and began to play vigorously and before long a man with a fiddle had joined in, and people were starting to clap and sing. Kate couldn’t resist going over there, and soon her feet were tapping, her eyes sparkling.

‘You look as if you’d like to dance.’ The man to whom she’d spoken earlier was there, standing in front of Kate with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Has your mother gone shopping?’

Kate laughed at him. ‘Oh that’s not my mother. She’s my big sister – Ethie.’

‘Bit of a dragon, is she?’

‘No,’ said Kate mischievously. ‘I’m the family dragon.’ She laughed again and caught the eye of another girl who was standing there twirling her skirt in time to the music. ‘Come on, let’s dance!’

The next minute, she and the other girl were dancing wildly in the street, kicking their legs and clapping, their hair whirling around and both of them giggling. The men stood around whooping and whistling. Kate was enjoying herself. She loved to dance, it felt good and right on such a beautiful May morning when the bank opposite the station was covered in wild flowers, moon daisies, corncockle, buttercups and cowslips, with butterflies dancing and fluttering all over them. The whole world seemed full of music and exuberance.

Freddie got out of the lorry and stretched. A board was propped outside the entrance to the station announcing that the train was late. He was glad. He’d been hard at work since 5 a.m., first in the bakery, then out in his lorry delivering timber to the wheelwrights. He’d come to the station to collect some bales of fabric for the tailor’s shop and six brand new wheelbarrows for the builder’s merchant.

Glad of the break, he took off his jacket and strode across to his favourite place on the sunny bank facing the station. Bleached by the sun, the hot grass was spangled with flowers, and the glistening wings of honey-bees. Butterflies danced through the shimmering sunlight, and Freddie studied them with pleasure. One pitched on his finger, spread its wings and settled there. It was a peacock. The breeze ruffled the gingery down on its body, and rich patterns of blue and red glowed on its wings. The antenna had tiny grey and white stripes, its slender legs were hunched as it clung to his finger, looking at him with wise black eyes. The contact with its fragile beauty touched some forgotten place in Freddie’s soul. Working long hard hours through the golden summer days gave him fewer and fewer spaces to dream. Engines chugged in his mind; his clothes smelled of oil; his shoulders carried heavy sacks; his drawing book lay untouched in his bedroom.

Three years had passed since he’d bought the Scammell lorry. His bank account was growing, and so was his confidence. At first he’d practised driving, especially the reversing, until he could manoeuvre the lorry in and out of the tightest spaces, necessary as some of the villages had streets so narrow that the lorry almost touched the walls of cottages as he drove through. He knew the engine like an old friend, listening to it and interpreting its every need and mood. The strength of it was exhilarating to Freddie, and sometimes when it roared up a steep hill with a load of stone he would lean forward, hold his breath, and then laugh out loud when he made it to the top.

Freddie had never had friends like those he had made now, other men he could talk to, tell yarns and share laughter together. For the first time in his life, he felt respected and welcome. His best friend was Herbie, the stonemason. Herbie often invited Freddie to go to the pub with him, but Freddie always refused. He hated the smell of beer and the clink of glass, and the women with red lipstick who ‘made eyes’ at him.

The only shadow in Freddie’s life was his mother’s increasing unhappiness, her anxieties and needs which piled into his mind as soon as he got home. Juggling the bakery and the haulage business wasn’t going to work forever, he knew, but he carried on helping with the bread to placate Annie.

He looked at the butterfly still resting on his hand. His skin was cracked and sore, his knuckles red from constant scrubbing, for each night he had to remove every trace of the ingrained engine oil so that he could make bread. He had a rash on the backs of his hands and wrists, and he often hid them away in his pockets when he was talking to people. Yet this butterfly didn’t care how rough his skin was, it had chosen to pitch there and stay with him. And as he gazed at it, he heard singing, a clear, pure, happy voice that was somehow familiar.

‘I’m forever blowing bubbles,

Pretty bubbles in the air,

They fly so high, nearly touch the sky . . .’

Freddie turned his head very slowly, so as not to alarm the butterfly, and scanned the busy station yard, peering past the parked motor vehicles to where the horses were tied up along the railings. He saw the girl who was singing. She sat on the back of an open pony cart, in a red dress, swinging her legs.

The butterfly flitted away, and Freddie stood up as if in a dream. He brushed the grass from his clothes and walked over there in long deliberate strides, his jacket slung over one shoulder. The blood in his veins ran hot and fast, like mulled wine, and a haze of sweat glistened on his brow. He didn’t know what he was going to say, only that he had to go to her. The walk felt strange as if a golden string was pulling him towards her, winding a loop of gold around the two of them.

As soon as he recognised Polly, and saw the flaked old lettering on the cart, he knew his dream was coming true. She was watching him walking towards her, and as he came into her presence, Freddie couldn’t help staring. The little girl whose face he had carried in his mind for years had blossomed into a vibrant young woman with plump, firm breasts, a curvy waist and shapely legs swinging in a carefree way. Her beautiful face with its shell-like nostrils and rose-petal skin was the one he had memorised, but when he saw the life that flashed from her eyes he almost gasped. Tight-lipped, he stood in front of her, and he couldn’t think of anything acceptable to say.

But Kate made it easy for him.

‘Hello,’ she said warmly, and beamed as if she’d been waiting for him. ‘Have you come to help me? How kind of you.’

Freddie looked deep into her eyes and saw that they were not dark as he’d thought but a warm bright amber. There was no fear, no suspicion and no anger in there, only a breath-taking sense of purity and love, and it filled him with the sudden glory of new life, open and trusting like the butterfly.

‘So – what do you need help with?’ he asked awkwardly.

Kate jumped down from the cart with a flounce of red skirts and lace. She was shorter than him, about up to his shoulder, and now she smiled at his concerned face. ‘I need to unload this truckle of cheese,’ she said, ‘and take it onto the platform with the rest of the stuff.’

‘I can lift that,’ said Freddie.

‘Oh, can you? That’s marvellous,’ she cried. ‘It’s terribly heavy.’

Freddie leaned into the cart and slid the truckle of cheese towards him. He couldn’t help noticing the label.

‘That’s a long journey for a piece of cheese,’ he remarked.

Kate laughed. ‘Oh, it’s going to my uncle’s farm in Gloucestershire,’ she said. ‘He’s got a thousand-acre farm on the banks of the Severn Estuary. It’s lovely. I’ve been there for a holiday, and you have to go in a BOAT.’ She announced the word boat in a dramatic whisper, her eyes widening as if a boat was the most exciting thing on earth.

‘A boat?’

‘Yes, a ferry boat. It goes from Aust Ferry, over the wide brown river. People take motorbikes on it. They wheel them on over a big ramp and then they pull the ramp up and the boat goes chugging out into the swirling river. Oh, it’s so exciting. And the wind blows up the river and gives you roses in your cheeks, and you can smell the SEA. Ooh, I love the salty sea, don’t you?’