We played ladies with a girl called Rhoda. There were six little girls, three in Rhoda’s family and three in ours. So we could have a father, a mother, two children (a good one and a bad one) and a visitor or a servant. But the only one of us who could act a first-rate mock swoon was Rhoda. She had a colourless pale face and was lean, with a faraway, languishing look in her eyes. Standing, sitting or lying, Rhoda could fold herself with elegant swaying motion and sink prone.

The difficulty was to think up tragic situations worthy of swoons. Sometimes we played ladies in Rhoda’s back field, sometimes on the rocky ridge behind our cow pasture. In both places we had delicious make-believe houses: no walls, no boundaries. Perhaps that is what the many heavenly mansions will be like. Our houses always had to have a drawing room and a kitchen and a front door bell. Those were the rooms in which our play activities took place.

The visiting ladies were always very elegant and the cook gruff. The kitchen was the loveliest room of all, a big separate rock covered with deep green moss. A little gully divided it from the drawing room. Cook had to either jump the gully or shout, “Dinner do be hot on the plates, mum!” Rhoda was always a grand lady. She chose the name of Mrs. Cholmondy. To be sure, when cook rushed in, shouting, “Excuse me Mrs. Cholmondy, your child has pot drowned he in the kitchen sink!”

Rhoda looked round to be sure the spot where she was going to stretch her lank length had no sticks nor stones to scratch her as she sprawled at rigid length and moaned, while we chafed her hands. Two fanned and cook rushed off to an imaginary tap in the spirea bush with a rusty can to fetch water. When somebody held the rusty can to Rhoda’s lips she usually revived enough to sit up and take notice before the water splashed. Everyone said, “Oh Rhoda, that swoon was a beauty.” Though the rest of us practiced we could only flop and get bruised. Had anyone succeeded like Rhoda, we would have felt they had infringed on her patent.