The events I’m relating really started the year I was nine, but I’d already kept bees for a couple of years then. There’d only ever been Gran and and then later me too on the farm and back when I was seven we’d been struggling for money a bit. Gran was only fifty-five then, but had been bad with rheumatism for a few years and was finding it harder and harder with time to keep going. She said even bedding wasn’t the pleasure it had been because her hips ached. I was only small, it was years before I grew any, so I couldn’t do any heavy work.

A neighbour said he’d do Gran a trade, a box of bees for a night in her bed. Bee keeping is relatively light work, so I could do it without help. Gran had always used her bed to help out with the work on the farm, and the day Henry brought the swarm round in a cardboard box he shewed me what I needed to do to make a hive and frames and stopped the night. After breakfast he made sure I knew what I was doing and Gran knew how to make me a veil from cheese cloth and an old hat before leaving.

I used an old potato bushel box for a hive and some bits off the broken vegetable boxes that I got free in town for kindling for a set of frames. The swarm had already started building comb in the cardboard box so I cut the cardboard both sides of the three combs and tied the whole lot to the top bars, cardboard and all. Within a week the bees built the combs solid into the frames. I had four colonies by the time they went into the winter and I’d managed a gallon of honey for Gran and I. I made some proper hives over that winter, all out of free materials. The bees never looked back. I doubt it was because of my bee keeping. I suspect the valley is a good place for them.

Gran bought a couple of beef stores every year which we fattened on grass and hay over three years to sell. Some folk fed them with bought feed and they finished in two years, but that was a much bigger loss if one died on you, and we had the grass and made our own hay. There were three pairs on the farm of three different ages. We managed a sounder of open range pigs in the oak and beech woodlands. They foraged on acorns, beech mast, grubs, roots and shoots and there must have been enough food for them because they stayed there and grew from piglets to killing size in a year and a half.

I shot a few sows regularly and dragged them out of the wood to the waggon with one of the horses. If I couldn’t lift them onto the waggon I dropped a plank over the tailgate, tied a rope to the pig, fed the rope through the pulley at the headboard and used the horse to pull the carcass up the plank. We sold most of the meat at the mart after Gran and I had scraped the hair off the carcasses with a dull knife and hot water and removed the offal and heads to make various products that sold quickly too. Wild pig that found its own feed was reckoned to taste better than pig fed on corn and slops. Mostly we sold whatever portion of pig some one wanted to buy till it was all gone which never took long, even the the trotters sold. Sometimes someone would order a particular cut for next time, or even a head to process themselves. Every couple of months Johnson the butcher would order a dozen whole boar carcasses in advance. Boar meat had a tang to it that some didn’t like, but Johnson made a spiced cured meat with it that was popular as hams, bacon and sausages.

Pork kept well in our cold store, and we’d eat pork for a while, but Gran salted most of ours for bacon and ham. She only made bacon and ham to sell to order because most folks made their own, or bought it as they needed it off Johnson. Shooting the sows kept their numbers down, so they didn’t get to be too many and run out of wild food, cos we didn’t feed them, and they sold better than boars. Too many boars didn’t mean they bred any faster, and I thinned them out when Johnson wanted them. Johnson paid by weight and was an easy man to deal with, so if a few were on the small side I’d kill a few more to throw in the waggon. I was a fair shot, and the odd deer was a bonus when out after pig.

Gran kept sheep, hens, ducks and geese and raised a couple of dozen turkeys poults she traded a neighbour for. James was single, so she’d spend the night over at his place which saved the cost of the whisky and two breakfasts. She sold the turkeys live at the December mart for Christmas. We had a nanny goat for milk and took her to a neighbour’s billy for service whenever she needed it. Greg would pass by to service Gran for payment within a few days. Gran saved her own seed, and with the vegetables we grew, we got by.

I’d been found abandoned in the town as a baby. There had been a travelling shew round, and it was assumed I was from there. No one would take me in except Gran. She’s clever is Gran. She told the neighbours she fed me milk from Nanny. But she told me the truth, she took some herbs and nursed me herself, the herbs brought her milk in. She’d never been pregnant, nor nursed a baby before, and said she’d been surprised her baby feeders got to be the size of Nanny’s in less than ten days, and to start with she’d had to milk herself till I could take what she was producing.

Gran knows herbs, some in the town say she’s a witch. But that’s nonsense, she’s just a clever old woman who, in spite of having no formal education, uses all her senses and misses nothing. The town’s women don’t approve of her, they say she’s a whore, but Gran says she’s got an asset that doesn't wear out with use and she going to get as much use out of as she can, cos if it’s a choice between bedding, which she enjoys, or starving, which she doesn’t, and she’d know because she’s had some, it’s no choice. She also said that a woman who had a certificate of marriage from Preacher Barker was just a whore with a license, cos all women used their parts for trading. It was just some were more honest about it than others. Like I said she’s clever Gran is.

Some of the neighbours complain that their cheese doesn’t always come out right. Gran’s is always perfect, but she won’t tell them how she does it because that would push the price of hers down. She doesn’t use acid juices like fruit juice or vinegar followed by something from a calf’s stomach. She uses the residues from her last batch of cheese to allow it to acidify itself and the juice from a certain kind of thistle to clabber it, and she lets both processes take as long as they need. She says you can’t rush a female in the straw and you can’t hurry a cheese in the making, and to do well both need to be at a comfortable temperature.

When I’d asked Gran how she’d learnt all that she had she laught and said that most folk wanted to brag and it took little effort to have them tell you everything they knew, which in most cases wasn’t much. If you did it to enough folk you would learn a lot. Too she said most folk take little heed of children and say things in front of them they’d never say in front of adults. As a girl she’d been clever, had a real good memory and could put things together that she’d been told by a few folk. The women of the town didn’t have a problem with her then and had taught her to cook, bake and sew and every other thing a woman needed to keep a house and a man happy except for about bedding, which any girl could teach herself by just satisfying her own parts.

Gran said if you looked real careful when you were butchering you learnt a lot of stuff that was helpful for fixing sick or hurt animals. Moses the vet was going to put a cow down a few years ago that got tore up on a wire fence, but it would have been a big loss to Martin Jeffers, and he sent for her asking if she could do anything to save the beast. She told him to knock it out with a steel bar and stitched the muscles back. The cow walked with a limp after that but lived to calve several more. Martin gave her eight days work in return and both were happy with the trade, though Moses was angry about it for years. Gran said occasionally that sort of thing helped doctoring folks too. She learnt a lot from the old women of the travellers too. One of them had taught her about cheese making. She said you could learn something from just about anyone, and she was still learning.

We live fifteen miles from the nearest folks, near to seventeen from the town, in a sheltered valley about five hundred feet above sea level. The farm house is on the southern slope, and we need hardly any more fuel in winter than in summer. The house is bigger than most and made of logs double walled a yard apart stuffed with dried bog moss, sphaggers they call it in these parts. There’re not many folks in these parts, and we farm the entire valley, maybe six hundred acres. It’s all registered in Gran’s name. We don’t get much rain, so six hundred acres isn’t as much as it seems, cos it can only be grazed every three or four years.

The vegetables we grow are irrigated by the wind pump from the bore hole. But we gather a lot of wild vegetables that most folks call weeds and fungi that folk call toadstools to eat, but Gran says a weed is just a plant growing where you don’t want it and there’re no such things as toadstools. She says what folk call mushrooms aren’t special or even all the same. They’re actually a few different kinds of fungi that happen to look and taste similar without killing you. Gran’s teaching me about fungi, and says quite a few unlikely looking ones are tasty, most fungi aren’t anything one way or the other or they’re too tough to eat, there’re are a few that will make you ill, but only a very few will actually kill you, but it’s not a good way to die. One of my favourite meals is the shaggy ink caps that grow in the meadow fried up with a bit of butter and a pinch of salt, on a piece of toast.

There’s one type of fungus she collects for women who want to lose a pregnancy, though she uses a few other things for that too, including wild rye grass seeds from a patch infected with ergot that grows half way from here to town which she only uses when there’s nothing else available and never brings home. Gran says ergot is a tiny fungus and the spores get everywhere. She doesn’t want it round here because if it got into our cereals we might miss it, cos it doesn’t always smell bad, and it can do real bad things to you and even kill you if you bake bread with flour that’s infected with too much of it. She knows fungi too does Gran.

There are two midwives in the town, but if a woman was worried, or one in the straw was doing badly they sent for Gran to handle the delivery. Funny thing, some of the women who paid Gran to lose a pregnancy were the ones who were nastiest about her. Gran’s a pragmatist she gets her own back by charging them more, in advance. Gran’s a hard woman with anyone who’s given her a hard time in the past. One woman came to see her who asked to pay later. Gran told her she should have brought the money with her. The woman told Gran she could be trusted to pay. Gran told her, “In God we trust. Everybody else pays cash on the barrel head, in advance.” The woman went back to town and was back later in the early evening with the money.

Gran’s not big on religion though she made Preacher Barker laugh when she misquoted Psalm 23 to him as, “Yea, even though I do dwell in the valley of the shadow of drought, I shall fear no evil for thy rod and thy sac they comfort me.” Preacher’s not a bad sort, he’s a kindly man who helps where he can and believes if you can’t find anything good say of someone then it’s best to say nothing, and he surely does understand human weakness.

I asked Gran why the woman was so desperate to get rid of the pregnancy. Gran chuckled and told me that many a woman who got caught out with a lover’s baby had passed it off her husband’s, but that can be difficult when the woman is black and her lover is white and impossible when the woman is white and her lover is black. Seems the woman I asked about had been bedding Billy the blacksmith. Billy’s a nice man, and I could see why she’d been bedding him, his rod was almost the size of Preacher Barker’s, but her man, who’d the reputation of having the rod of a young child, would have cast her off if she’d had a mixed baby. Talk was none of her six children were fathered by her man, but bedding Billy was a nothing short of foolhardiness. Seemingly she learnt her lesson from the scare, for next we heard she was bedding Jacob the ironmonger.

Over the years Gran had told me her story. Her mother had died when she was a toddler, and her dad was a drunk who died when she was fourteen. She was pretty and clever, and the women of the town didn’t like the way their men would look at her. Not long after her dad died, she was driven out of the town by the women. That was about forty years ago, and she came here for peace. Nobody had ever bothered with the land, so she registered a claim to it, and it was granted. Men from the town built the house for her the way she wanted it over a couple of years while she lived in a tent, and she collected and dried the sphaggers to insulate between the walls.

The men hadn’t liked what the women had done to Gran, but wouldn’t stand against them, because if they had they’d have been given cold meals and a colder reception in bed. Gran was always truthful, and when I was little she told me most men will do almost anything for a hot meal and a good deal more for a hot woman. The men were still coming by for a hot meal and a hot woman, which Gran said was because their wives weren’t using their gifts right and made no effort to understand men who were different from women. She said men were like a piece of string, you could get them to trail behind you real easy, but pushing them was impossible.

She said bedding was easy enjoyable work, all she had to do was enjoy herself. She’d never wanted to take another woman’s man because she reckoned that was the quick way to get used for firewood in someone’s bonfire. After a while she’d reckoned she was better off with no permanent man, and didn’t want one. She still had visitors who serviced her and were entertained by her for a few nights, and she always took payment in work, in advance.

That was how she paid for fencing the paddocks and getting the winter’s firewood cut and split and everything else that needed a man’s strength. She told me she’d bedded the pair of men from the city who’d put the borehole in for a couple of weeks and was sorry when the job was over. The wind pump had cost her a week and another two days for Billy the blacksmith for making the missing part and installing it.

The men from the town were still a bit in fear of the Dry Valley Witch as some called her, and not a one ever thought about cheating her, but they couldn’t stay away because their wives rationed them in bed, and Gran gave them what they wanted, as much guilt free enjoyment as a man could manage doing what he wanted to do with a hot meal and a few glasses of her home stilled whisky to follow. But I could see she was right when she said that once a man started even thinking about the smell of a woman’s parts he did his thinking with his stones, and there wasn’t a pair of stones in existence that had any brains. She told me to think about the sheep. Wethers could be smart and difficult to deal with, but rams would follow a rag that had been rubbed on a ewes parts like a pet lamb after a bottle. I knew that was true because it was what we did to catch them for shearing.

The year when I was nine was when I noticed some of the worker bees out of one hive were much bigger than the rest and they were highly defensive too. That is they were till I got stung by one through my jacket, after that they were even more gentle than ever, but they behaved like Africanised bees when any other creature came near their hive. Gran got stung, but only the once, after that the bees never bothered her again, but her rheumatism disappeared, and it took fifteen years off her. I presumed the animals got stung the once too. I never actually saw it happen, but the bees ignored them after a while.

I found the queen in the hive with the big workers. She was huge, the size of my thumb, not that I’ve got big thumbs. It only took a few weeks before gradually all the bees in that hive had become big. Obviously as the older bees, who were the previous queen’s progeny, died off, they only live maybe six weeks in the summer, they were replaced by the progeny of the new queen. I’d thought the queen was big, but the drones she produced were enormous.

Over the summer either the newly mated queens from the first hive took the other hives over, or as the smaller virgins queens rose to mate the smaller drones were outflown by the giants who did all the mating. I doubted the latter, but I didn’t know then. I did know the bees in every hive gradually became replaced by larger type. Midway through the following season all the bees in my apiary of forty hives were of the large type.

My apiary is isolated, so for the time being there is no out breeding with any one else’s bees, which may or may not be possible, and fortunately no one has any reason to go anywhere near my bees.

I’d never seen another boy naked, so I’d nothing to compare myself with. I’d seen some of the men Gran had dealings with naked, but a boy of that age doesn’t compare himself to a man grown. Many a time I’d seen Gran washing at the pump, and she’d shewn me and explained what all the parts on a woman were. She told me the townsfolk would like as not hurt us if they knew she’d done that, so it would be as well if I held my peace. I’d asked her why she shewed herself to me if I had to keep quiet about it, and she said in her book there was only one sin, and that was wilful ignorance, and she felt obliged to educate me in every way she could which wasn’t much by most folk’s reckoning, but when she’d done I at least would know everything she did.

That was the year I became convinced, instead of growing, my rod and sac were getting smaller. At that time my stones still hadn’t descended, and in fact they never did. I shewed Gran, and she said it was hard to tell, but not to worry. After a few months I was getting smaller for sure, but Gran had no idea why. Six months went by, and my rod had gone leaving the head shrunk to a woman’s nub with my pee coming from below it and my sac was starting to develop into a cleft around it and look like Gran’s lips. I’d made a mess of myself trying to pee standing up months ago and I’d had to sit down to it ever since. Gran said it was a disappointment because she’d been looking forward to having a young vigorous man in her bed every night when I was big enough and interested. She said she could take me to the city if I wanted to see a fancy doctor, but she warned me like as not they would keep me and I’d never see her or the farm again. There was no decision to make, no doctor.

When my bips started to grow, Gran suggested it would make life easier for me if I got used to dressing like a girl as soon as possible. I objected, but she asked me if I were objecting because I really felt that way, or because it was what I thought would be expected of me. I had to agree it was because it was what I felt would be expected of me, which was silly because no one would even think about it if we told them what Gran had suggested.

I didn’t feel like a girl or have any yearning to be a girl, but I didn’t feel like a boy either and I certainly didn’t have any problems with leaving boyhood behind me. I just felt like me and I was ok with just feeling like me. The first time I wore girls underwear it felt right, nothing else, just right. I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like, and that didn’t bother me either. It made no sense to have the parts of a girl and wear boys’ clothes. One hot, sultry morning Gran gave me a frock to wear that she’d made. It would be cooler she said. I must have been wearing it for a couple of hours before I even thought about it, but it was cooler than jeans.

Well within the year my parts had changed in every detail to those of a girl. My nub had it’s cloak which blended into an inner pair of lips and all was hidden within the outer ones. I had some hair about my lips and lower belly, and I looked just like an immature version of Gran, though she said she didn’t have much hair compared with most women. My bips had become so sensitive that Gran gave me some cream for them that she made from goose grease pounded with a numbing herb and a softer lamb’s wool vest to wear. They were the size of my finger tips and were standing a good inch proud of the swollen rosy circles on my chest which were a couple of inches in diameter.

At twelve rising thirteen my quarters were spreading by the week, and I was getting baby feeders behind my bips. At thirteen and a half my quarters were a woman’s quarters and my baby feeders were getting to be substantial enough to need support. No doubt about it I was girl becoming a woman. Gran said a goodly sized pair of baby feeders was a good thing for a woman to have because men liked playing with them and with a pair of baby feeders in his hands a man was as soft as risen dough in a woman’s hands and just as easy to knock back down. I saw myself reflected in the duckpond one calm day and I couldn’t believe how much my hips moved from side to side as I walked.

Seeing as there was no way I could pass as a boy any more, next time we went to market Gran put it about that I always had been a girl, but she’d thought it wiser, seeing as I went to town on my own sometimes, that I was believed to be a boy for as long as possible. Gran told a couple of men who dropped by the farm from time to time that she hadn’t been bothered by local men who she knew would have treated me properly knowing about me, but folk capable of abandoning a baby like the travelling shewfolk who passed through several times a year had done, she considered to be capable of doing anything to a young girl. They agreed with her and the tale soon went round. Nobody could remember the baby I’d been, and all those who’d seen me naked as a baby were according to Gran all dead now, so it was accepted and she was thought to have done the right thing by me.

I now went by the name Jenny, not Jerry, and Gran said seeing as I was a woman I needed to learn how to entertain and handle men, so she had me watching her through a hidden gap in the wall. Later I watched from right up close next to the bed, which she said made the men’s rods much harder for longer and drove them to perform much more vigorously. She told me, it was more enjoyable for her and required no extra effort on her part and the men were far more satisfied, which meant they were willing to give us more of their time in exchange.

Eventually my first time of the month arrived and I was moody and difficult. Gran shewed me how to relieve my tensions, and gave me a smooth sanded wooden rod to help, but said I really needed a man to settle me down properly. She said there were substances in a man’s essence that a woman needed for her peace of mind. She said I was behaving the same as Nanny did when she needed a billy. Next time a man came round I helped, Gran was on her hands and knees on the bed, and as he spread and mounted her I handled his sac and gripped his rod. I only did it the once because he released his essence almost immediately. He was disappointed Gran wouldn’t let him service me, but she told him maybe next time when I was protected from getting with child.

Gran had some condoms, but they were years out of date because she hadn’t needed them since her change, so she made me a tea to take every day from herbs that acted as a contraceptive, but to play safe the next time we were in town she got me put on the pill. There could have been a problem about my age, but Doc Phelan was young, and his wife was a shrew which was why he was a regular at the farm. Gran told him that if he kept me from getting with child till I was ready between the two of us we’d handle his needs. It was Alan Phelan that eventually made a woman of me. There was a bit of pain, but Gran was right, it was what I needed.

Gran was a good teacher, she said we had unusual trade requirements, so we negotiated unusually. She told me to state what it was I wanted doing, to ask him how much of it he had time to do and to tell him what I was prepared to do in return and for how long. She told me to get a days work done first in return for a night in my bed, but to be a little trusting, because their wives would drive them back. In general the deal was we paid for the materials, posts and wire or what ever, and a day’s work received a night’s pleasure as payment. Though often we traded for the materials wire too. After a while we stopped working on our own because men were willing to do more than twice as much when we worked together.

The first man I did the negotiating with was Preacher Barker. He was a fine figure of a man, nigh to seven feet tall and built like a truck with a tremendous rod, a full foot long and as thick as my wrist, and a huge low slung sac with stones as heavy as a bull’s. He was as hairy as a bear with a black beard and hair that reached half way to his waist. It surely was entertaining watching him split cord wood buck naked with his rod straining for the horizon and his sac swinging in the breeze. Granny said it would be best if she took the edge off his vigour before he serviced me till I was more used to it.

With the two of us in business, we got more work done on the farm than ever before, and Gran said maybe it had worked out for the best that I’d never got a pair of stones, cos neither of us were being shorted for men, and the farm was doing better than it had for years. I suppose we were getting four or five night’s service each twice a month which was pleasant and gave us enough time to do all the things we had to do.

Sewing and knitting with Gran in the evenings was enjoyable, and she said if I was old enough to be a woman I was old enough to be a woman. Which made no sense till when she got the whisky out she poured me a glass too. We only ever had the one, but it was a good measure and even our evenings without a man were pleasant. Sewing, gossip and whisky with a well stoked fire is a good way for a pair of women to spend an evening during the cold, and sewing, gossip and whisky with a rocking chair on the porch watching the sun go down is a good way for a pair of women to spend an evening when the weather is fine.

It was Gran who noticed one of the beef stores was a heifer. “You know I never bought me no heifer, Jenny. I’ve never raised a heifer. A young store costs a bit more, but is as easy to raise, and makes more meat and sells for more money than a heifer. I’ve always paid a bit more out to bring a lot more in three years later.”

Finally we figured it all out, it was the bees. Their sting changed you so you ‘smelt right’, and then they left you alone, because you belonged. They didn’t seem to bother with poultry just mammals. The sex change only affected young prepubescent males, older males and females weren’t affected. The stores despite having been gelded were prepubescent males so were affected. It wasn’t long before all six stores were heifers. Gran and I decided to buy a couple of older heifers, so we could slip the ex-stores into the mart without comment. After that we only bought heifers because there was no point in buying stores to sell them as heifers, and we kept the sheep well away from the bees. Any billy kids off Nanny we’d usually eaten since they were worth next to nothing, but nannies were worth money, and we never had billy kid stew again.

I sent a few of the bees off to an entomological lab. I said I’d found them on the wind shield of a truck, so they could have come from anywhere. They were disappointed that I couldn’t pin it down as to where they’d come from. I was told they were variants of Apis cerana the eastern honey bee not our native Apis mellifera the western honey bee, and they were big because they were a tetraploid mutation that had four not two complete sets of chromosomes like a normal diploid bee.

I know all inheritance, even sex inheritance, in bees is complicated because I always read the bee keeping publications in the library when I go to town, but because my queens were laying both workers and drones, and since some of the queens must have been laid, hatched and mated from my hives, the virgin queens and the drones had to be genetically compatible. Drones are hatched from unfertilised eggs, so don’t have a father, so it made sense to think the drones from a tetraploid queen would be diploid with two sets since normal drones from a diploid queen are haploid with one set of chromosomes.

The lab said the bees must been from a swarm that had settled on a ship in the tropics and been transported over the sea to within flying distance of our coast. Once on land, they would have to have been blown inland by the recent warm weather storm system to reach anywhere near where I found them. I was told they wouldn’t be able to withstand our climate and the first frost would kill any remaining bees off.

The bees are thriving and Gran and I have moved them to the most inaccessible part of the farm that no one can approach. We’ve laid sixty acres down to a combination of bee plants that flower over the entire season, so they have something to work whenever the weather is warm enough for them to work at all. We’ve also planted a hundred yard deep shelter belt of trees with willow for early season pollen nearest to the hives. The trees are already tall enough to contain them to the bee plants. We intend to widen that with time. It’s future timber for the sawmill and firewood whenever anyone asks. The bees produce prodigious amounts of honey which is paying for our spending. The bees are easy to obtain venom from and injecting it into prepubescent male mammals does change their sex, and it does it every time.

Given what happened to me, we are working on ways to assist the transition of trans girls without exposing ourselves. We’re having some cabins built as holiday camping cabins and have advertised them in the trans press as being on an isolated farm with no modern ‘attractions’ just the wide open outdoors with lakes, mountains, peace, good food and two trans friendly lady farmers. We already have a couple of bookings for next year. The plan is we’ll make some money helping those who could use it.

I’m a big girl now, I probably should refer to myself as a young woman really, with quarters like a plough horse, and as I said I started my times of the month ages ago. I finally started to grow last year, which may be the bees or maybe not, but I’m five ten, and pretty with large baby feeders and I’d like a family. At first I thought of finding a nice boy from an orphanage who was prepared to live here, so we could rear him to our way of life. Trouble is if he’s young how do I make sure he stays a boy if I bring him here and, making babies requires a man.

Easing your tensions is different, when none of the townsmen have stopped by for a while, Gran and I help each other out that way from time to time, and even though neither of us are interested in women as a way of life as a short term measure it’s fine, but it won’t get me pregnant. Then on the other hand, I don’t particularly want a husband in my life. Gran’s never had one, and she’s done ok. But I do want children eventually, and Gran says she would like them around too, which if I’m going to bear them myself, which I want to do, needs a man for at least one night. Of course no matter what I give birth to they’ll have to be reared as girls because long before they realise there’s a difference I’ll introduce them to the bees. It’ll be better done deliberately and early when no explanations are required rather than later by accident which could be traumatic.

I’ve got my choice of sixty or so men to get me pregnant, and no matter whom I use at stud I have no intention of telling him he’s the father. Preacher Barker is the best I know of at bedding. He’s a regular because his wife is a real misery, and he only gets any bedding at home when he manages to get her drunk, but she doesn’t approve of whisky either so that’s not often. How she got in child eight times I’ve no idea. I don’t want him to father my kids because he’s not overly intelligent and despite his calling he’s as ugly as sin. His wife is pretty enough, but all his kids are ugly too which they must get from him, which is a pity really. I thought about Billy, but though I like him, mixed folk are not well thought of round here, stupid really, and I don’t want to visit that on my own kids. Life’s difficult enough.

Alan Phelan is clever and handsome, he’ll make good babies with me, and I know from experience he’ll give me an enjoyable night when he does. When I told Gran that I’d decided I didn’t want a husband, intended to use Alan at stud and not tell him of the outcome, she agreed and said she was glad I’d come to that conclusion because any man, even if we’d brought him here as a boy, would eventually start trying to impose his will on us simply because he was a man. Her view was we only needed men for bedding and babies, and as long as men had stones there’d never be a shortage of them for that.