South Berwick is the top of Perham’s Maine range, straight up Route 236 from Kittery. It is a village town: Main Street and Portland Street around the centre, the Berwick Academy campus on the hill, the Hamilton House and Vaughan Woods along the Salmon Falls River, and neighbourhoods of older New England homes fanning out from there. The houses tend to be older and larger, with wood floors, plaster walls and plenty of windows, which is where the room-by-room checklist earns its keep: cabinet doors hand washed, bathroom floors washed by hand rather than mopped, beds stripped and remade. The published price by the bedroom applies here the same as in Kittery, and the crew books South Berwick in three-hour windows and texts on the way, so a job ten miles from base runs as predictably as one around the corner.
