Apart from rattling lorries carrying animals to market – I see the legs of cattle pressed against the slats of the trucks and sheep’s noses sniffing the wind – the only sounds to disturb Hoolet’s tranquility are the squeals and shouts of children.

A couple of boys who live on the green are bicyclists, but by the time we hear their voices they are already far off, like jumbo jets whose roar follows seconds after they have flown by.

Hoolet’s children have never been more conspicuous than in the recent weeks, when their parents take them for their daily pram walk or stroll, or they play in their gardens, making piratical cries. At the bleak end of March, one little girl collected sticks on the green and made a wigwam. This was added to some days later by another family’s three-year-old, who claimed joint ownership. This boy has his own toy strimmer and ear muffs – he has already been identified as our future resident handyman.

One family, who arrived in the village with a toddler shortly after us, had a baby at the turn of the year. Probably the youngest member of the village, although by a narrow margin, he is slowly getting familiar with it, by pram and papoose. Meanwhile, his sister visits her favourite haunts, or hangs over the garden gate bidding hello to those of us she recognises. She can’t know how much that does for our spirits, but she, and others of her age, are making Hoolet their own. It’s immensely cheering.

When they are older, they’ll join the other children ferried to nearby schools. Before lockdown, the school bus would pass our kitchen window on its circuitous journey to the secondary school some miles away. Its passengers seemed to sit as far from each other as possible, absorbed on their phones. If they ever looked our way, would they feel envious of those pouring a second mug of tea, and enjoying a leisurely start to the day rather than facing a double dose of chemistry?

Not long after we arrived here, I was shown a photo of the village from around 1910. In front of our cottage, in the wide, dusty road, were a handful of schoolgirls. In their crisp white pinafores and straw hats, they looked like illustrations from Little Women. Just up the street is the old schoolhouse, whose plaque tells passers-by it was built in 1831.

An earlier school had 70 fee-paying students and records show that in 1834, Hoolet boasted that by the age of six, everyone could read and write. Older pupils were also taught French, Greek, geography and Latin, although they might have been too cold to concentrate. Apparently in winter the schoolroom temperature plummeted so low that ink in the ink wells would freeze. That aspect of Hoolet is still recognisable. When nearby towns have sleet and rain, we get snow and ice.

Photographs from the early 1900s show dozens of neatly dressed pupils by the school, girls dancing hand in hand in a ring, boys running here and there, doubtless kicking a ball or stone. The school closed for good during the Second World War, and has since been a post office, library and shop. It’s the typically chequered career of a building at the heart of many small communities and, equally typically, is now just a desirable property.

That glimpse of pinafored schoolgirls by our cottage has stayed with me. In many old snaps the village children are either posed in their classroom outfits, or caught accidentally in passing. In one, from 1916, a fishmonger, smartly dressed in hat and long jacket, has drawn up his horse and trap a few doors from our house. He is handing a parcel to a woman gracefully dressed in a long skirt and blouse.

Coming up the road behind is a young lad, barefoot, his trousers short as a sailor’s. Did he, or one of the schoolgirls with ribbons in their hair, live in our house? Did they survive the war or the Spanish Flu?

There are several photos of our cottage from those times which I find unexpectedly eery. You realise how short your occupancy is, and how a house has a life much longer and far-reaching than yours. In these pictures, cows are often grazing on the green, and chickens roam freely. There was a lamppost right outside our gate, almost identical to the one in Narnia. It had a white picket fence in those days, and a steep thatched roof whose grass sprouts on the ridgepole like a horse’s mane.

Roses clamber up the front, but it’s pretty scruffy, the walls in need of patching up. Back then, country cottages were neither desirable nor chi-chi. Those with money lived in the mill-owners’ villas, on the south side of Hoolet, mansions maintained by an army of servants.

At the back of our cottage was an old cart-house and the corner of the front wall is cut away to allow wagons and traps to scrape past. After this it became a cobbler’s. Now it contains my husband’s books, some on floor-to-ceiling bookcases, others simply on the floor, and almost as many stacked in the loft overhead, begging to be shelved.

If any villagers from the eve of the First World War returned to Hoolet, they’d recognise it at once. Although there are modern houses, the same old properties line the green and the main street. Unlike in their day, however, it would be hard to survive here without a car or electric bike. Despite the resurgence of local and online deliveries, the village is no longer self-sufficient. It is not a community as its former inhabitants would have understood it.

The tide is turning, though, as people appreciate the benefits of country living. Perhaps in our post-pandemic world places likes Hoolet will continue to become more self-reliant and inventively independent. Even so, the chances are that children raised here will leave at some point. They will either remember their leafy, roaming childhood with affection and longing, or make a beeline for the city, never to look back.

Until, perhaps, they tire of concrete and cars, or start a family, and suddenly realise they must return.