During the lockdown months it had become a habit. I’d leave the house alone and walk the short mile, past the exposed white vertebrae of the dinosaur playpark, to the knee-high grass beyond the Walton Road, where insects chirped their love songs into the still evening air.

Caldecotte, or Cold Cottage, had likely been a rest-stop for travellers. As I walked the shallow grooves that once marked the divisions between peasant dwellings, I wondered: if those travellers walked as ghosts in our world, did I walk as ghost in theirs?

*

Tonight, crowds throng the muddy path. Faces glow by amber torchlight, their heads crowned with summer flowers. Embers dance the air like fireflies. Someone mutters behind me:

‘The woe of this midsummer revelry be the day doth never find its end.’

Hawkers bellow from market stalls: ‘Hither, and gaze upon these holiest relics! Fingers of blessed saints, ten for but a shilling. Amass the whole collection.’

A man stumbles from a doorway, flagon in hand, his cheeks rosy and his breath as rich as a cowshed. He grips my shoulder.

‘Hark, young sir, and lend thine ear to a tale.’

No one has touched me in months. It seems impolite not to hear him.

The man taps his nose.

‘I went to old Jones to borrow his ass. He sayeth, nay, for I have lent it to Smith. I say I understand well, but then I hear the ass bray from the paddock behind Jones’ house, and I tell him as such. I can hear it, I say. Know ye what he says?’

I confess I did not.

The man fixes me with a heavy stare. ‘He doth say, “Good sir, wouldst thou take the word of an ass afore mine own?”’

The man stumbles away, laughter in his belly.

In the half-light, some great skeletal structure emerges. The air rings with hammers against wood and nail. A voice cries out against growing darkness: ‘Thou witless knave, those nails facing thee be meant for yon far side.’

I feel a great sense of movement, and I remember that wherever there are people, there is laughter, there is buying and there is selling, there is pain and celebration, and there is civilisation, springing forth from the ground as dreams are made real.

*

Beyond the village, I melted back into the smooth curves of redbrick houses, each one a shelter for the hopes and pain and laughter of tomorrow’s dreams, as the great city continued to expand. I traced the curve of Monellan Crescent and Felsted, and peeked between the terraces to the dark lake, and the plump ducks with their heads folded beneath their wings.