Hollins Farm had been a small working dairy farm of a hundred and twenty acres, diligently tended by Florrie and her husband, Red"s great uncle Hubert, who was called Hubs by everyone, pronounced "Oobs" in the local dialect. After Hubs"s death Florrie had sold the herd and rented out the fields to an organic-farming neighbour; it was the only way, she said, to care for the land. The outbuildings the new tenant didn"t use had begun to fall into disrepair, inhabited now by a noisy g**g of feral chickens, who roosted wherever they chose, and a trio of cantankerous nanny goats who bickered in the old dairy like straight-laced maiden aunts.
A spirit of harmonious decay seemed to have crept over the place, as if the farm was merging into an earlier world, where wild nature had not been replaced
