My parents told me to empty my farmhouse for their forty anniversary guests. I said my daughter was eleven days out of a bone-marrow transplant. Mum said: “Lock her upstairs.” I agreed — and on Saturday the sheriff was waiting at my gate.

project. Not the old place.

Mine.

I bought it seven years ago from my grandmother at its appraised value, with a mortgage, a solicitor, a survey and a stamp on a document at the county office.

My parents had been offered it first. They turned it down, because the plumbing was ancient and the twenty acres around it were, in my mother’s exact words at the time, worth nothing to anybody.

I spent four years and very nearly everything I had on it. I did a lot of it myself, badly at first and then less badly.

And then, somewhere around the time the kitchen was finished, they started calling it our farmhouse.
PART 2

At nine o’clock on the Saturday morning, I heard tyres on the gravel.

My parents’ silver Cadillac first. Then, behind it, three chartered coaches, nose to tail on a single-track road.

And behind those, a