The churchyard felt like the right place to start. It's where the village keeps its memory in stone — some of the same names I've been finding in the archive boxes at The Grange. But it turned out the churchyard had something to teach me too.

It was hot in there too, but the history was palpable the moment you walked in — pews lined up in rows, and along the back wall, old sepia portraits of men in uniform: former pupils who, I was told, once sat in these very pews as schoolboys, including Rudyard Kipling's son among the decorated officers gazing down from the wall.

Seeing those children stare out of the black-and-white plates, knowing most of them are long gone, is a powerful thing. If anything it sharpened the urgency I already feel to record the people who are still here, while they still are.

It was immediately clear that Mike knew everyone. We sat at a small café in the village centre, and before the coffee had arrived I'd heard all about the server's failure to quit smoking, how the postman who'd just walked by had once sat for a famous artist, and how the beautiful old tree above us used to be the centrepiece of the playground of the local primary school, now long gone.