I discovered something curious too: the sweeps turn backwards (anticlockwise). This took me by surprise. And as I watched, it seemed to me as if each reverse pass was taking the windmill back through its memories, swooping through past moments which caused it to sigh and weep and laugh and cry out with pain, or regret, or joy, or delight – or

When Nina came in, if she didn’t close the door fast enough, a tornado would swirl in with her, flapping the curtains, blowing papers into the air, knocking over picture frames. Joe accepted this with equanimity. ‘It’s the windmill’s job to withstand gales. It calls the wind up here, and sometimes it’s too much, and it gets battered and torn up,

The mourning was, in fact, trickier than it sounded. It wasn’t just a question of stagey weeping at the back of a church. The acting required significant research, sometimes several phone calls with the client for background information, and then a dramatic performance sustained over many hours. Astrid had never thought before how funerals are

Afterwards, she thought her life was over, but it really wasn’t; it had just been halted for a bit, then had changed tack. She’d been stripped of one identity but eventually she had adapted to being someone different. She didn’t mind that sometimes she was unhappy, it was silly to believe that one could be happy all the time. When circumstances

‘You’re on another planet!’ Mrs Baker would cry as she turned off the gas or saved the bath from overflowing. ‘God only knows what you did before I came.’ ‘Well,’ Astrid would say, ‘I had Charlie, and before Charlie I lived in squalor.’

She shrugged. Astrid saw then that she’d been badly hurt, badly treated and had, like a winter shrew, responded with shrinkage. Somehow, she’d let herself get so small that she’d ended up in an isolated gatehouse on the edge of a Scottish estate, writing an old man’s life.

the wind had picked up, coming in off the sea, rushing over the ridge of the Downs, clear and hard, carrying salt and complicated scents of wildflowers with seagulls cresting in, and over, clouds travelling fast, faster, onwards, past; and the power builds and hums, the muscles strain for release and at last familiar feet run up inside, and there

22nd June 1921 Dear Lady Battiscombe, I write in the strongest possible terms having received complaints from several Claycombe residents about depraved and ungodly goings-on at your windmill on the evening of 21st June. Two of your guests, dressed in pagan robes and trailing foliage, accompanied by an inebriated young lady wearing a swan costume,

‘So what?’ She cut him off. She was not going to allow him to undermine everything. ‘I’ve had a wonderful life, thank you. I have a very dear friend who looks after me. I have my beloved dogs. And I have a windmill! I wake up on the South Downs every morning. You might think that’s a small life, compared to yours, but I don’t think it is – I’ve