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No!' she shrieked, rushing forward as if I'd suggested he jump off the Matterhorn. 'You mustn't! It's dangerous!'
    Â Â When I pointed out that with two of us pulling on a thirty-foot rope, both feet on the ground and standing way beyond the range of the length of the branch, it was perfectly safe, but that I couldn't pull it on my own and if I cut right through the branch instead and just let it drop it would land on the shed, she capitulated. Hands clasped in prayer, she stood by as we pulled the branch sideways and Mr Myburn held it there while I shinned up the ladder and severed it completely. 'Oh, Leslie, you are brave,' she cooed while I climbed down and prepared to move the ladder.
    Â Â We got all four trees down like that – first the branches, then the trunks – until a large pile of timber lay on the ground in the Myburns' field and their shed was out of danger. I hadn't the strength to cut the wood into logs for them, and I wasn't lending Mr Myburn my saw. One thing you have to do with an electric saw – which he didn't know, never having used one – is to press the oil button at very frequent intervals, otherwise the chain will dry out and the motor overheat. He'd questioned my pumping it as often as I did – they didn't do that with petrol ones, he said, his tone conveying that, as a woman, I didn't understand these things. Maybe not, but engine-powered saws work on a different oiling system, and I had no intention of having my electric one ruined. It was essential for the cottage wood supply for the winter. So I made the excuse that I had work to do with it later, trailed back down to the cottage with the equipment, took the notice off the cat-run door, telling them 'I'm back, chaps. We're all right for a while yet – I did it', and tottered indoors to have some bread and cheese before collapsing into an armchair. All afternoon I could hear Mr Myburn up at the top of the hill, industriously cutting logs with a saw borrowed elsewhere. Every now and then it stopped and, from the stuttering noises, proved difficult to start again. I hoped he understood the mechanism of that one.
    Â Â One thing it did bring home to me was that as a widow I was indeed a social outcast as far as some people were concerned. Immediately after Charles's death many people had called offering sympathy, going out of their way to be friendly. 'It doesn't last,' I was told by other women who'd gone through the experience before me. 'People don't really want you when you're on your own. They soon start to drop you.'
    Â Â How true that had turned out to be. In the old days, if Charles and I had been taking down those trees together, we'd have been asked in for coffee before we started. It would have been a friendly get-together. Now I was fended off as if I had the plague, or might expect further help with something.
    Â Â The Myburns weren't the only ones, either. One couple, Rhona and Paul, with whom Charles and I had been very friendly – we played cards together regularly – actually told me, when we met by accident some weeks after his death, that they'd seen me one day in the supermarket in Cheddar but had kept out of my way. 'We thought you wouldn't want to talk to anybody,' they said.
    Â Â What they meant was that they hadn't wanted to talk to me , and were only telling me now in case I'd happened to see them. The only time we met again after that was when Rhona's mother, herself a widow, came to stay with them. I was invited over to tea, and to go and see a place they were thinking of buying. It seemed they had the idea of starting up a boarding cattery and kennels and had found an old house with large grounds and an attached barn that could, they said, be turned into a granny flat. Several granny flats from the size of it. If they could get planning permission Rhona's mother, parked docilely side by side in the back of their car with me as if we were already in our wheelchairs, was