Mum said, ‘Oh, good morning, Snow,’ and when I kind of mumbled she said, ‘Don’t be cross, everything’s going to be okay. It’s just going to be a bit different.’ She said, ‘Let me make it up to you. Tell me what you’d like in your lunchbox and I’ll make it for you. What would you really like?’ And when I said I didn’t want anything she said, ‘Well, let me give you some money for the canteen,’ making it two days in a row that I was suddenly allowed to go to the canteen.

She said, ‘I think I’ll drive you again today, Snow. You’d like to be driven to school again, wouldn’t you?’ And I was starting to think that the whole divorce thing wasn’t that bad, since I was getting special treatment, nice treatment, for a change. But then, while she was driving, Mum made a point of making eye contact with me in the rear-vision mirror, and she said, ‘You know, there’s no reason to tell anyone every little detail of our personal lives, don’t you, Snow? People love to gossip, but remember what I told you, it’s not good manners.’

I could see what she was getting at, which was that I wasn’t supposed to run into school and immediately tell everyone our private business, that Mum and Dad were getting a divorce. But I was only about ten when all this was going on, so how was I supposed to keep it to myself? I couldn’t wait to get to school and blurt it out to everyone, but then the first girl I told – ‘My parents are getting separated’ – wasn’t exactly shocked, she just shrugged and said, ‘You know it means you won’t see your dad again?’ Which was something that shocked me maybe as much as what Mum had told me about wanting to have two houses.

I said, ‘Of course I will.’

She said, ‘Okay, then where is he now?’ And that’s when I realised that I didn’t know where Dad had gone when he left the house what felt like ages ago.

The first thing I did when I got home was say to Mum, ‘The kids at school said I won’t see Dad again.’ To begin with she was furious that I told people, but then she said, ‘It’s rubbish, he’s coming next week,’ and I suppose it was about a week later that Dad called to say he’d come and pick me up for a visit ‘so you can see where I live’.

I can’t tell you how weird it was to answer the phone and have Dad on the other end, mainly because I don’t think I had ever spoken to Dad on the phone before. He never went anywhere, so why would I talk to him on the phone? He was always at home and now he was calling to speak to me because he didn’t live there any more. But anyway, the day came for him to pick me up and I noticed he didn’t pull into the driveway like every other day. He stayed out on the road and honked the horn and I had to run down the driveway to see him.