‘Oh Mummy – he’s mizzerable! Quick – run after him!’ implored the tender Harry, and Mrs Garden, after hastily tucking them up and kissing them, went anxiously down to soothe, if she could, her monster.

‘Daddy always spoils things,’ whispered Francis to Harry, just before they fell asleep.

‘Poor Daddy. He’s mizzerable,’ said Harry. ‘Never mind, I love him.’

Sophia and her brothers did not make many friends at school because they were afraid to ask people home to tea lest there should be a row, or Dr Garden should come in drunk. Sophia suffered the most from this situation, because people liked her in spite of her severe appearance and self-opinionated manner, and she was often asked to tea by other girls, and had to refuse because she knew that she could not return the hospitality she received. She could not help making one or two friends, but she did not ask them home to tea.

‘My people are unhappily married,’ she would say sternly, staring straight ahead of her straight nose, and the friend, much embarrassed, would mutter ‘Rotten luck,’ and be devoured by speculation.

Francis suffered in the same way; but Harry accepted invitations as his royal right, and never bothered about asking people to tea in his turn.

‘Chaps hate going out to tea, anyway,’ he would say mildly, looking at the shocked Sophia and Francis with beautiful eyes of clear blue-green. He was very popular at Northgate, the big school to which he and Francis went after they left their preparatory school, because he was good at games, modest, and gifted with natural charm and a delightful sense of humour. He had a talent for writing light verse of the kind which schoolboys like best, and his physical beauty charmed the eyes as much as his good nature and nice manners pleased the social sense.

Sophia and Francis were proud of him, but in a troubled fashion. Francis used to say, ‘The old chap hasn’t got a very strong character, you know,’ and Sophia would reply firmly, ‘Yes; we’ve got to look after him,’ and so they did.

The years at school seemed endless yet they also seemed to fly. Matters at home grew very much worse. Dr Garden was hardly ever sober; and their mother was often ill with terrible headaches and attacks of vomiting. Sophia could hardly bear to think when she was older about her mother’s last years; the memory was too painful.

Life was divided sharply into the white of the pleasant time which she idled away at school (for she was extremely lazy, and not clever) and the black of the awful time spent at home, comforting her mother, standing up to her father in one of his rages with her knees trembling under her, and the infuriating tears of anger coming too soon to her eyes and reducing her to speechlessness.

When she was eighteen she left school.

She had no talents except one for writing, and by this she proposed to earn her living. She had no dreams of going off into an attic to write novels. She wanted to be a journalist, and earn enough money to take her mother away from her father, and get her brothers started in decent jobs.