That Christmas Eve night, I had fallen asleep to the sound of the great bells in the church tower down the street pealing for midnight mass but the ringing that woke me just a few hours later was a sharper, shriller sound.
Last night, before going to bed and just as the church bells began, I had closed the door of Skeldale House behind me and walked into the market place.
Nothing stirred in the white square stretching smooth and cold and empty under the moon, and there was a Dickens look about the ring of houses and shops put together long before anybody thought of town planning; tall and short, fat and thin, squashed in crazily around the cobbles, their snow-burdened roofs jagged and uneven against the frosty sky.