My husband, Arthur Pritchard, was a carpenter.

He lived in the village of Little Hadleigh, in Surrey, his whole life. We married at St Michael's when I was twenty-two. He made the oak bench we sat on at our wedding breakfast. He made our kitchen table, our beds, our garden gate.

He made the big double oak doors of the church hall too, in 1979. Carved with leaves and acorns. It took him a whole winter.

Arthur was a quiet man. He didn't like fuss. But he had a clever brain for how things worked.

In 1983, he invented a new hinge for folding ladders. A small, simple thing that stopped them from snapping shut on people's fingers. A big hardware company bought the right to use it.

Every year since then, a little money came in from every ladder they sold. Then a little more. Then a lot more, as they sold millions of ladders around the world.

We never touched it. Not really. We lived on Arthur's wages, in our little cottage on Mill Lane, the way we always had. Arthur said money was like wood glue. A little bit is useful. Too much makes a mess.

Arthur passed away peacefully in his sleep two years ago, at seventy-six.

He left me the cottage, his tools, and two million, four hundred thousand pounds.

Nobody in Little Hadleigh knew. Except our solicitor in Guildford.

And me.