While Carson napped – if he did – I cleaned up, tidied, washed dishes, made beds. A maid, Marietta, came in three times a week, but the house got so dirty in between. Abby never seemed to wash a dish. I’d tried to speak to Marietta, but she raced around with her mop and cloths, always wanting to clean exactly where I was standing, so I learned to stay out of her way. Otherwise, I rarely had a minute to sit down and I often forgot to eat lunch until gone three, shaking with hunger pangs, tears close to the surface. I cried a lot in LA, while driving, which didn’t help, or while mopping the floor, wiping the tears away with the back of my hand. All those unpaid skivvies in children’s books – Cinderella, the Little Princess – I identified with them. I was paid a few hundred dollars a month, but had nothing to spend it on – I had yet to go anywhere except the grocery store and school, or once when I took Carson to the doctor’s. The doctor had been a suave man in his thirties and I’d fantasised about him for days after.

José the gardener was there some days, but although I smiled and waved and opened the patio doors to chat to him, he never spoke much, answering me in monosyllables. I felt he resented me for some reason. Maybe because I had a room in the house and he had to drive out there all the way from where he lived, through the LA traffic. The rest of the time the house was as cool and silent as the surface of the moon.

What shook me most about LA was how far apart you felt from people. Sometimes I might hear the neighbours in their garden or in the pool, but their voices were muffled by the thick trees growing in between the houses, and I had yet to see what they looked like. Even walking up and down the street I never saw anyone. People here simply didn’t stroll, even when it wasn’t too hot for it. They swept past you in cars, giving you strange looks.

On my first day off I climbed right up to the Wisdom Tree, looking out over Warner Brothers and Universal, the green mountains, the dusty city. On my way down I stumbled on the steep sandy path and fell twice, finding myself almost in tears. When I finally got back to the house, my knee bleeding a little, Abby just looked at me and told me to clean myself up.