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IT WAS THE LOFT OF a fisherman’s cottage and he’d used it to store sails in, sails and rope and all sorts of gear, nets and lanterns and lobster pots, canvas bundles of Lord knew what. The loft ran all across the top of the cottage, so it was a biggish room, long and narrow, the length of two rooms and a passage and the width of one. The trap-door was right in the centre of it, and, at the moment, shut.
At each end of the loft was a very small window, a fixed pane of glass in a heavy frame which wasn’t made to open. These windows admitted very little light, partly because they were so small and also because the other cottages had their end walls close up to them, a few feet away; on the ground there was only a narrow path dividing each cottage from the other. And the panes were dirty,
