[The listening experience occurs in a section of the memoir devoted to character sketches of Susan Silvester’s relatives and other villagers. Silvester briefly worked in service for Mrs Pratt at the age of twelve]

[…] Pem was a member of a settled and respected family in the village but she herself was a wanderer. Se went from farm to farm doing just enough to keep herself going, and she slept under haystacks, in barns, and sometimes, when she had taken too much, under the hedge. She always wore a long white apron which covered the whole front of her body and the extraordinary thing was that it was always spotlessly clean. She wore a feathery or flowery hat and nearly always carried a bunch of wildflowers. She was absolutely contented, always singing gently to herself as she wandered along, and always looking blissfully happy. 

A glimpse of three village characters all together takes us into the 1920s. Mrs. Pratt, my first employer, was still living, an old lady but not yet infirm; a devout churchwoman and always dressed in long black clothes and widow’s weeds. My daughter-in-law tells me how late one night she looked out from her bedroom window and saw in the bright moonlight the rector, Mrs. Pratt and Old Pem walking along the middle of the road all singing gently together.