The builders started in August.

The old hall came down carefully. The oak doors were taken off their hinges and wrapped in blankets.

The man the architect found to restore them was Stan Ellery. He was sixty-eight, from the next village. He'd been Arthur's apprentice in 1979. He'd helped him hang those very doors when he was a lad of twenty.

Stan came to find me at the cottage.

“Mrs P,” he said, holding his cap. “They've asked me to do Arthur's doors. I wanted to ask if you'd mind.”

“Mind? Stan, I can't think of anybody better.”

He worked on them for three months, in his workshop. Every acorn. Every leaf. He sanded off forty years of varnish and found Arthur's pencil marks underneath, where he'd measured the panels.

“He signed them,” Stan told me one day. “Right at the bottom of the left-hand door. Underneath the paint. I never knew.”

He showed me. Tiny letters, carved into the oak with the tip of a chisel.

A.P. 1979. For everyone.

I had to sit down in Stan's workshop for a while after that.