When they got outside, their wet hair slicked back over their heads, as often as not Patrick would say, ‘Let’s just go in next door for a few minutes, shall we?’

It was he who had introduced her to the library, and the hushed, brown atmosphere of the books lining shelves and the newspapers, heads bowed over desks.

‘Here now – why don’t you give this one a try?’ he’d say, on every visit, pulling out old cloth-bound copies of David Copperfield or Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson. ‘These are some grand books.’ Katie read some of them, and for herself picked girls’ school stories: Queen of the Dormitory and The School by the Sea by Angela Brazil, What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge and Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott.

She discovered other worlds, and how she could travel off into a book, into a place so different from these streets, which were the only scenes she had known; places where she didn’t have to tiptoe around Mother, and where the sudden stark silence of the house when Uncle Patrick crashed into his black, slow times were lost to her. She was far away in America with the sisters Meg, Beth and Amy, and best of all Jo, who wanted to be a writer. Or she was gasping with horror as Katy fell off her swing and was confined to bed for months and months. Or laughing at the pranks of Angela Brazil’s schoolgirls.

‘You’ve always got your nose in a book,’ Vera would say, half grateful at getting some peace and half resentful that Katie’s attention was diverted away. ‘You could be helping me, not just sitting about. When do I ever have a chance to read?’

The truth was that Vera was not a reader at all. She thought reading was all right for men, but that Katie ought to be perfecting her sewing.

‘It’ll stand you in good stead for life. Look at me – I was in desperate straits when your father died. If I hadn’t been able to sew, where would we have been?’

Reluctantly Katie learned hand stitching, cross-stitch and blanket stitch, running stitch and back stitch, open seams and French seams, pin tucks and collars, buttonholes and zips. In fact her fingers were nimble and, like most things, she took to it quite easily. But she was always more than happy the moment she could escape from sewing and bury herself in a book again.

She knew, when she stopped to think about it, that most of the things she liked best she had been taught by her uncle.

Six

‘One more week,’ Amy said, through a liquorice lace she was chewing, ‘and we’re free forever! Here, d’you want some?’ She dug down and brought out a coil of liquorice, dusted with bits from her pocket, but Katie wasn’t fussy. After all, sweets were sweets.

‘Oh, yeah – ta.’ Soon she was chewing away too. Amy had sweets far more often than Katie, because of her mom working at Woolies. Because of her sticking-out teeth, she always looked rabbitty when she was eating.