As for the foreman – actually a forewoman– she had a face like a twisted lemon. She had decided, I’m absolutely sure of this, that I was guilty before she’d finished taking the oath. She was scowling at me.

I probably don’t need to go through all the ins and outs of the trial. You were there. You saw it. That stupid police officer who kept going on about finding a ‘hidden room’, like you can hide a room with nineteen kids in it. It wasn’t hidden, it was behind a door that Mark made, to keep the noise down. Then the Lenore Wallace woman, who had dropped that Polly off with us, appeared on the stand. I must admit, I couldn’t even remember who she was when she first stepped up, but then when she spoke, I thought, ‘Oh yes, I remembered that child. Polly. She was an absolute pest of a kid.’

This lady, I remembered, had come to us with a whole list of instructions of how I was supposed to look after her. How she had asthma; she had a congenital heart defect; she had seizures; she had problems with her weight, and needed to be on a special diet; she had hearing aides in each ear; she could be stubborn and uncooperative; she needed to be reminded to brush her teeth; we had to be patient when she had something to say because she would stammer and stutter and pause between words; she found it difficult to get up from a sitting position; she couldn’t see without her glasses; she had patches of eczema; she needed to have her comfort toys, although we had a quite clear rule – no comfort toys because they’d get lost and the parents would have to go hunting around, trying to find them.

She was going on about how she ‘inspected Delaney House’, which was a lie, and saw three children on the bed ‘like seals, not making a sound’. I felt like yelling out, ‘Because they couldn’t talk!’

Then that ear, nose and throat specialist all the journos loved so much got up and talked about how she’d examined our kids, and all had short tongues so they couldn’t make a lot of noise and wouldn’t have been able to eat properly. Again I felt like yelling out, ‘They didn’t eat! They had stomach tubes.’ She went on for quite a while, saying that all the tongues were cut in the same way, with the fishing line, so that the front section of the tongue – the bit in front of the webbing – was gone, and that would have made speech difficult. I was thinking, ‘Like they talked before?’

They dragged up the mothers of some of the children we’d taken in, including some drug addict junkie deadbeat single mother who had abandoned her disabled child to Delaney House. She actually stood there in the court room giving evidence against me.

I thought, ‘The cheek! The hide!’