‘You’re a girl,’ he said to her, frantic with this new information which didn’t seem to mean anything new to her at all.

What took David only a few hours to learn didn’t change her view of herself until months later, and then only imperfectly. Some of her confusion might have come from David’s own inconsistent behaviour, for, when they were at home alone together, they often played as contentedly as they had before, though now only with David’s toys, and he tried to make her feel it was a privilege.

‘Girls don’t usually play with soldiers,’ he said.

But he flatly refused to be bathed with her.

‘Girls are dirty.’

His mother gave in to him. He had only to say, ‘Boys don’t do that.’ Except for such obviously masculine chores as emptying the garbage, he got away with it.

Diana was never as easily impressed as her mother, but she saw David daily in his less certain command among his peers whose recklessness and cruelty often terrified him. There were boys who withdrew, but they had to suffer such taunts and bullying from the others that they were made to feel even beneath the girls, a humiliation David couldn’t have endured, for he would have to suffer it with Diana looking on. She was there, always there, watching.

‘See Dick run. …’

Little girls are not impressed with little boys. Only other little boys are. For them David tore his clothes and broke his bones. For them he caught the cat to be hanged from the school flag pole and stole light bulbs to be smashed in people’s driveways. Their approval could not change his sister’s growing disgust or their mother’s dismay. They couldn’t understand what David didn’t either.

‘I have to,’ David said.

Diana had no such compulsions.

‘Why don’t you have some of your own little friends over?’ their mother asked Diana when David excluded her from the pitched battles that now went on in their once basically scenic back garden.

‘They’re silly,’ she said, a judgment she wouldn’t apply to herself.

When David occasionally condescended to play on a boring Sunday afternoon, Diana more often than not wouldn’t on the excuse that she didn’t like the game or wanted to listen to some stupid radio programme.

‘You play with me if I say so,’ David demanded.

But he could never get her to do anything he wanted her to, but cry.

Nobody could, not their mother, not the teachers. How docilely David accepted the teacher’s judgement that being left-handed was babyish! No such shaming touched Diana. If she couldn’t use her left hand, she wouldn’t draw or write.

‘Baby D won’t,’ David crowed to their mother.

‘Why not?’ their mother asked.

‘This is my own hand,’ Diana answered, offering it.