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One hoof, I knew from my lectures, usually means that a leg is folded back inside. Knowing that and doing something about it in a cold shed at four in the morning turned out to be very different matters. I rang the farmhouse. Eluned arrived in a dressing gown and wellingtons, rolled up her sleeve, and then talked me through the whole thing without once touching the ewe herself.

Eluned, it turned out, had little patience with nervous students. She knelt in the straw beside me and had the lamb out within a couple of minutes, barely speaking as she worked. When I asked her to explain what she had done, she shrugged and said there was no time for lessons at four in the morning, and that I would pick it up by watching.

It was a large single lamb, stuck at the shoulders, and by the time I found the ewe it had been dead for some time. I got it out and saved the mother, which was what mattered most, but afterwards I sat in the straw feeling as if I had failed an exam nobody had told me I was taking. When Gethin came in at six, he looked at the lamb, then at me, and put the kettle on.

Gethin drove me to the station the next morning, past fields now full of lambs chasing one another along the walls. He asked whether I would come back next year. I said I hoped so, though I suspected I would be working in a small-animal practice by then, vaccinating cats. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least the cats won’t keep you up at night.’

I assumed he was joking. He wasn’t. During lambing, he explained as we drove up the valley, someone checks the shed every hour of the night for ewes in difficulty, and for the next three weeks the shift between midnight and six would be mine. His mother, Eluned, would be in the farmhouse, on call in case anything went badly wrong.

That week also taught me the strangest trick a shepherd knows. A ewe whose lamb has died will usually reject an orphan, because she recognises her own by smell. So Eluned showed me how to remove the skin from the dead lamb and tie it, like a small woolly coat, over an orphan’s back. The ewe sniffed it doubtfully for a minute or two, then let it feed.

Twins are common in hill flocks, and the second lamb arrived quickly and easily, as second lambs often do. By the time I had dried them both and made sure they were feeding, the sky above the ridge had turned grey and I was trembling slightly, though not from the cold. Eluned patted my arm, told me I would do, and went back to bed.