“All the more reason to go,” his wife replied. “Jim and Ethel would normally feed Smokey but they’re much too frail to be going out in this so he’ll go hungry – on Christmas Day! How would you like it if you had no dinner, today of all days?” Sue knew she was fighting a losing battle, but she had to try.

It felt good to get out of that stuffy house. She couldn’t blame George for wanting to stay home, really. He’d worked double shifts all week to be sure he could be home with her at Christmas and he needed the rest. But the snowflakes on her cheeks and eyelashes and the chill air in her lungs made her feel awake and alive. She strode out, enjoying the crunch and slip of the ice beneath her boots and – whoops – skidded on a treacherous slick beneath the snow. Slowing down, she looked carefully where she put her feet and was doubly careful crossing the main road.

‘Smokey is most definitely going to need feeding,’ she thought determinedly, and leaned forward, pressing herself, it seemed, against the solid, blinding white wall of the afternoon.

Once she had crested the ridge and descended into the lee of the ancient beech hanger which separated the allotments from the common, the wall of wind fragmented, although it still kept her company, mumbling and chattering in the high branches.

She was glad when she arrived at the allotment gates and more grateful than she thought she ought to be when the padlock opened at first try to her trembling fingers – but the allotment fairies always made it easier to open the gate when getting there was difficult, or so she and George had decided after one amiable stroll up here in the summer sunshine when the padlock stubbornly refused to open for what seemed like hours.

Inside, with the gate locked firmly behind her, she felt more secure, but the wind continued to clash and chatter in the trees as she hurried up another slope towards the allotment.

“Smokey!” she called, and made the tut-tutting noise her husband always said cats recognised as a food call, “Smo-o-o-okey”. And paused. Was that people talking? No, surely it was just more of the voices of the wind in the trees and the shushing sussuration of the fat white snowflakes falling around her.

She thought she caught a flicker of grey, a silent miaow, from the corner of her eye and turned to call again.

“Smo-o – Oh!” A tree root, exposed by earlier heavy rain but now hidden beneath the snow, snagged the toe of one boot while the other slid away on the treacherous ice and she measured her length on the ground.

‘I must have banged my head on something’, she thought, ‘but I can’t have been unconscious long, or the blood would be dry.’

She sat up and the cat ran off, towards her allotment. At least the snow had stopped and, in fact, wasn’t that a stray sunbeam? She heard voices again but this time, she suddenly realised, it couldn’t be the wind because the wind had dropped.

The cat trotted back towards her, stopped, turned expectantly and, pausing to look back at her several times, walked deliberately away towards her allotment and – where had the snow gone? she wondered – towards the voices.

The grass was slippery underfoot but the heat of the sun was quickly drying it out. She clambered to her feet and followed.

Allotments are usually thought of as being parcels of land laid out on flat areas but these occupied either side of a valley bottom. George and Sue had recently taken advantage of this to install a bench next to their shed, halfway up the slope, which, while sheltered by the shed and an overhanging hawthorn, commanded a delightful view down the valley to the sea.

On this bench sat two elderly men in fustian coats, pipes in mouth, deep in a vociferous discussion of allotment matters.

“…and Mr Middleton was saying only the other day it was our duty to use National Growmore to increase our crop yield or the country would starve,” one said.

While she was rather taken aback by their colonization of her bench, Smokey had run up to them and now sat at their feet, purring. And they appeared to be discussing the clamps she had hastily improvised that autumn when she had had such a bumper crop she hadn’t had room at home to store all the potatoes and carrots she had grown.

They both looked disconcerted at her appearance but retreated into a once-common male disdain for women’s gardening.

“I was rather pleased with them,” she replied. “I got the idea from an old copy of Gardeners’ Enquire Within.”

“Ye’ve not enough crop to bother with ’un,” the other said. “Tis not tall enough and the wet won’t run off proper. And that fancy bubbly paper you’ve used to line it” – in the lack of any ready source of straw, Sue had abandoned authenticity and used bubblewrap for the insulation layer – “is stoppin’ the clamp breathing properly. Yer spuds nor carrots’ll never survive winter.”

Sue was upset by this and turned to the business of feeding the cat to conceal the flush mounting to her face. Behind her, the old man took his pipe out of his mouth and muttered to his companion, “young flibbertigibbet’s got no shame, comin’ here alone like this.”

She sat on the grassy bank, taking comfort in absently stroking the cat while it ate and felt an unusual warm glow in her upper arms and chest, as if a single sunbeam had found her and was sharing its warmth with her alone.

Smokey had finished eating but instead of his usual trick of climbing onto her lap to curl up for a cuddle, he stood up tall in her lap, butting his nose into her face, and uttered his loudest and most plaintive miaow…

“…and when we arrived at the allotment, there was no sign of Sue and it was dark and I was worried sick but Smokey must have heard us talking because suddenly I heard him miaowing  and, there he was, bursting out of a snowdrift and there she was inside it, where he’d been keeping her warm…”

Snuggled in an armchair by the fire, wrapped in a blanket, with a hot cup of brandy-laced cocoa in her hands and Smokey curled luxuriously on her lap, Sue drifted in and out of the conversations.

“…couldn’t leave the little hero up there to fend for himself in that awful weather so we brought him back…”

“…woke up and found she wasn’t home yet and it had got dark, of course I was worried and called…”

“…and carrots are best left undug till they’re needed…”

“…got to protect your food sources or you’m goin’ ter starve…

“…prrrrrrr…”