There’s a good history of the school on the web too. New kids got new clothes for the farm – old clothes, for running around in – and they got new ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’, who were basically people who lived on the farm and took care of them. Agnes got Aunty Mitty. ‘And she was apparently the aunty that everyone wanted,’ Ruby said. ‘She chain-smoked morning till night, even when stirring the big pots of porridge, and she had all the children roll her cigarettes for her. She was big and fat and always up for a cuddle.’

I know from my own reading that life at the Fairbridge Farm School in the 1950s was pretty basic: kids lit a copper to boil water; they collected eggs and milked cows. They had the river pool; they had movie night in the old hall, with wooden seats, and girls on one side of the room and boys on the other, and that was about it.

‘But as far as Mum was concerned it was paradise,’ Ruby told me. ‘The only thing that bothered her, really, was the haircuts – they had to sit on milk crates and let Aunty Mitty go at them with shears. And the flies. She says you wouldn’t believe the number of flies.

‘But for the most part, Mum can’t say enough about Fairbridge. She loved it. Of course I’ve heard all the stories . . . I’ve seen that documentary, Oranges and Sunshine, and I know that some of the orphans that came here from Britain had a terrible time of it. But all I can say is, as far as Mum was concerned, Fairbridge was wonderful, it was a big adventure. She even told Rocco it was like . . . what is the daughter of Steve Irwin called?’

‘Bindi Irwin?’

Ruby said, ‘Bindi Irwin! Yes, that’s what she told Rocco, that it was like being Bindi Irwin, climbing trees all day. And the only thing that troubled her – the only thing that really played on her mind – was the confusion she felt, having been told in the orphanage that she wasn’t an orphan, and then being told, just out of the blue, that actually she was. So you can imagine her shock, finding out late in life that she’d been right all along, and that she wasn’t an orphan, and then getting a phone call from a lawyer in Australia saying that her parents had also moved to Australia and that they’d had a little girl here, a girl they called Snow . . .’

Chapter Three

Dear Jack,

I haven’t heard back from you since I wrote my last letter, so I suppose you’re waiting for me to come up with a list of all the mistakes you made so you can correct them. You’ll have to excuse my French but it’s not exactly easy to pick out a few mistakes when the whole story you wrote was rubbish, starting with how you said my dad’s name was Jim Olarenshaw and that he was from London.