‘I tell you, it’s true. I went out in the woods one night with the boy from the farm. We were looking for badgers. We borrowed the big kerosene lantern from the milking shed.’
He felt the excitement of it all over again. ‘We never did see any badgers, though we found the sett all right. We ended up going for the rabbits: it’s no end of fun to watch. Their eyes fix and they can’t move, once you trap them with the light.’
Nicholson was smiling but he didn’t seem very sure. He tried a sideways punt and the pebble shot away into the new growth of stinging nettles lining the track. After poking around after it with a stick, he gave up and returned.
‘Do your people live on a farm? I thought that they were out in India,’ he asked.
‘Oh, the farm was just somewhere we were putting up last summe
