My neighbour stripped every apple from my late husband’s trees the day we buried him. By morning I’d laid something across her front lawn — and she screamed so loudly the whole street came out.

I read that shed door by the light of my phone, standing in my dressing gown on wet grass, and I knew exactly what it meant.

And I want to put down precisely what I did next, because the version that went round the street is much kinder to me than the truth.

I did not go next door.

I went back inside and I made a cup of tea.

And then I sat at the kitchen table and I found out where the fruit had gone.

It took about two hours. Glenys is not careful. She had posted on the neighbourhood page at eleven the night before — fresh apples and pears, garden grown, £1 a bag, on your doorstep by 7 — and about fifteen people had replied.

The corner shop had taken two crates first thing, for their front display.

And she had booked a pitch at the Sunday market on the green, from ten.

So I had names. I had a list.

And instead of taking that list next door and knocking, I went into the garage.

I found the empty spray container in the recycling, where Hamish had rinsed it and put it.

I printed the label. I took a photograph of the shed door, and printed that too, big, on the printer in the spare room, four sheets taped together.

I wrote everything on a sheet of stiff card from Rory’s art box, in black marker, in capitals. The spray date. The waiting time. The words from the label about not eating the fruit. And the list: the corner shop, the market, and the house numbers of every single person on our street who had replied to that post.

And then, at about half past eight, I carried all of it next door and laid it out, in a neat row, across the middle of Glenys’s front lawn.

I folded the two empty garden-centre bags and put them at the end.

And I went back and stood on the pavement and waited for her door to open.

When she came out at about nine and saw it, she screamed.

It was not a word. It was a noise, and it went right down the street, and doors started opening.

About twenty people were out on their steps and their paths inside two minutes. Some of them in dressing gowns. Two of them holding bags of apples.

Glenys came across that wet grass in her slippers and got hold of my wrist and said it loud enough for every single one of them: