Especially when the train keeps stopping unexpectedly. What now? Maybe the West Riding Otter is on the line. The tannoy is crackling but I can only hear heavy breathing and snuffling. Lawks a mercy, the wild otter has hijacked the train!

I don’t care about the otter driver! Live and let live, I say.

Uh-oh, the tannoy is crackling again.

“Sorry about that, ladies and gentlemen, I momentarily lost hold of my pie. Next stop Skipley.”

We’re just passing Grimbottom Peak. Brr. It looks so dark and forbidding up there on the crags. I’m surprised it’s not pouring down with rain and … It is pouring down with rain.

Crumbs, it’s like the lights have been turned off. You can hardly see Grimbottom. The locals say that when day-trippers are up there the fog can come down in minutes. Mr. Bottomly at the post office once told me and Flossie:

“One minute t’day-trippers are up there on’t top, playing piggy in’t middle like barm pots. The next it’s so dark they can’t even see t’ball. And it’s in their hand. Hours later the grown-ups stumble home but the little’uns are nivver seen no more.

“Sometimes late at night tha can hear ’em up there wailing, ‘Mummeee … Dadeeeee …’ All them lost bairns, speaking from beyond the grave.”

Flossie had said to Mr. Bottomly, “That’s rubbish. I think there’s a massive wild dog up there called Fang. Half dog, half donkey, and it comes out in the fog and takes the children and raises them as its puppies.”

In my opinion, even though I haven’t known her for long, my new friend Flossie is what is commonly known as “mad.”

But mad or not, I am really, really excited about seeing her and my new mates again. Vaisey and Flossie and little Jo and Honey, who can’t say her “r”s but knows everything about boys. She says she always has “two or thwee on the go.”

We can go into the woods near Dother Hall again, to our special place! And gather round our special tree. Our special tree where we met the boys from Woolfe Academy when they surprised us doing our special dance that Honey taught us. She said we had to be proud of all of ourselves, even the bits we didn’t like. It was a “showing our inner glory” dance. Or “inner glowee” as Honey called it. Which in my case was hurling my legs around shouting, “I love my knees, I love them!”

Not quite as embarrassing as Vaisey waggling her bottom at the tree, but close.

The Woolfe Academy boys, well, Charlie and Phil, call us the “Tree Sisters.”

Charlie said to me …

Well, I won’t think about Charlie. Not after what happened after he kissed me.

Where was I in my performing life? Oh yes, last summer when I got to Dother Hall I couldn’t do anything. The others could sing and dance and act, but all I could do was be tall and do a bit of Irish dancing.