Not literally — the equipment was recent enough, the swings and the climbing frame and the roundabout with the chipped paint — but the spirit of it was older. It sat in a clearing where the trees fell back and the sky opened up and the ground was just grass, thick and rough, the kind of grass that council mowers attacked periodically but that grew back with the defiance of vegetation that has been growing in Welsh soil for longer than councils have existed. Below, the valley dropped away into the haze of distance. Above, the sky did what the Welsh sky does in August — it couldn't decide, offering sun and cloud in alternating measures, the atmospheric equivalent of a person who keeps changing their mind but whose indecision is, in itself, a kind of beauty.

Eira and Tima claimed the swings with the territorial efficiency of small children who have spotted playground equipment from fifty metres and who have been running — or in Tima's case, walking very fast — since the moment of sighting.

"Push me, Peter! PUSH ME."

"Push me too, Tad!"

Peter and Papa took up their stations behind the swings, and the pushing began, and the rhythm of it — the swing forward, the pause, the fall back, the push, the squeal, the swing forward again — was the oldest rhythm in the world, the rhythm that playgrounds make of children and gravity and the immovable fact that going up feels like freedom and coming down feels like trust.

"Higher!" Eira demanded.

"I'm not launching you into orbit, cariad."

"HIGHER."

Peter pushed higher. He pushed the way he did everything — with commitment, with the body behind it, the push of a man who had built walls and carried stone and whose strength had found, in his fifties, its gentlest application in the act of sending a small girl toward the sky and catching her at the bottom of the arc.

Tima's swing was lower. Papa pushed softer. Not because she couldn't handle height — she could, she was fearless in the way that children with conditions are often fearless, the condition teaching them early that the body is a thing to be negotiated rather than taken for granted, and the negotiation producing a relationship with risk that was not reckless but considered — but because the rhythm between them was different, slower, the rhythm of a man and a girl who had been synchronised since birth.

"Like flying," Tima said, her eyes wide, the wind in her hair.

"Like flying."