¹Every Saturday morning, whatever the weather, Grandad walked to the allotment with a flask of tea and a battered wooden box of seeds. Priya usually went with him. She liked the smell of the place: wet soil, mint and the sharp green scent of tomato leaves.

²This Saturday was different. Grandad had hurt his back lifting a sack of compost, so he sat on an upturned bucket by the shed and gave instructions. Priya did the work.

³“Beans first,” he said. “They need the canes before they get any taller.” Priya pushed eight tall canes into the earth and tied them at the top with string, so that they leaned together like the poles of a tent.

⁴The bean plants were only a hand high, but already their stems had begun to twist, searching for something to climb. Priya guided each one gently to a cane. “They always wind the same way,” Grandad told her. “Anti-clockwise. You can’t make them go the other way, however hard you try.”

⁵By eleven o’clock the sun was warm and Priya’s knees were brown with mud. She had planted two rows of lettuce, pulled up a bucket of weeds and found three snails, which she carried to the hedge at the far end. Grandad said snails had to live somewhere, just not among his lettuces.

⁶The best job was last. In the corner of the plot stood a water butt, green with age, and Priya filled the heavy can from it and watered every row. Dark patches spread across the dry soil and the smell rose up, rich and cool.

⁷“You’ve earned a biscuit,” said Grandad, opening the tin. They sat together on the bench, and the only sounds were a blackbird and the slow drip of the tap.