My grandmother kept her orchard the way other women kept a grievance: quietly, thoroughly, and long past the point where anybody else could see the sense in it.

The trees had been planted for a wedding in 1911 and had been dying ever since, which she took as a personal instruction rather than a fact. Every March she went out with a bucket of lime and a short knife and did what she called the necessary. By the time I was old enough to follow her down the rows there were eleven of the original forty still making fruit, and the fruit was small, and the salt had got into the ground on the seaward side, and none of this had been said aloud in the house for thirty years.

She worked from the landward end because that was where the living trees were, and she worked slowly, and she did not explain. If I asked why a branch came off she would say, because it was finished. If I asked why the one beside it stayed she would say, because it isn't. It took me until I was twenty-two to understand that this was not evasion. It was the whole of her method, stated as plainly as it could be stated, and I simply did not yet know enough to hear it as an answer.

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The sea took the bottom four acres in the winter of 1978, in one night, without any of the noise that people expect from such things. My mother, who was nineteen and had been in the town at a dance, came back at two in the morning to find the field gone and her mother standing at the new edge in a coat over a nightdress, looking at it.

She said afterwards that she had expected weeping, and had prepared herself for it on the road, and that what she found instead frightened her far more: an old woman entirely calm, working out where the next line would have to be.

In the morning my grandmother walked the remaining rows and marked eleven trees with lime. Then she went in, made tea, and asked my mother whether she had enjoyed the dance.