Mum was yelling at me, and calling Dad on the phone saying, ‘Do something, do something!’ And I could just picture what Dad was saying on the other end of the line: ‘What exactly would you like me to do, Ros?’

Mum said, ‘She’s underage!’ And Dad must have said, ‘So call the police,’ because Mum, who was one of those British people who can’t stop thinking about what the neighbours might think, was saying, ‘I can’t do that, then the whole neighbourhood will know!’

Mr Cooper was weighing in, saying rude things like, ‘Why does your greasy friend want a girlfriend who’s still in school, anyway?’ And, ‘Can’t you see he’s using you?’ which, when I think of it now, wasn’t such a dumb thing to say, but I wasn’t listening, at least not until what was bound to happen happened. I got pregnant.

Obviously my mother went off the planet about it, going on about ‘The money we’ve spent on that school . . . the opportunities you’ve been given . . . have you any idea how hard it’s been for me?’ And then, ‘What do you think you’re going to do now, Snow? You can’t have that baby. You’re only fourteen years old – they won’t even give you a single mother’s pension.’

I was so full of myself, I said, ‘I don’t have to worry about that because Vincent’s going to marry me.’ And I actually believed it, Jack. I really did! But word for word what he actually said when I phoned him was, ‘How do I even know it’s mine? You could be having sex with anyone.’

At first I thought I must have heard wrong, or maybe his mum was listening and so he was saying what she wanted to hear, because he also kept saying, ‘You have to have an abortion,’ and, ‘You’re giving me stress and I have an ulcer. If it bleeds, I’ll die.’ And, ‘My mother will have a stroke. She’s not well. You can’t do this to her.’

I said, ‘I don’t want to have an abortion!’

Vincent said, ‘My father’s an old man and this’ll kill him.’

The next time I called him, he wouldn’t come to the telephone. But you know who did, don’t you? His mother did and she spat venom at me. ‘Putana, putana, skippy, skippy, leave my boy alone!’ Like I’d tried to trap him or it was all my fault and it doesn’t take two to tango.

So then I had to tell my mother I’d have the abortion, and if you think she said, ‘Oh, Snow, don’t worry I’ll look after you. Come on, have a little cry,’ then you’re wrong because she didn’t. What she did was make that ‘I told you so’ face and then said, ‘There’s only one place that deals with girls like you.’ She meant Bertrand Wainer’s clinic on Wellington Street in Richmond, which probably isn’t there any more but is where all the girls from the Catholic College had to go, and all I can say is at least she drove me there, and at least she kind of helped me get through the people with their ugly posters of dead babies, and at least she waited for me to come out, and drove me home and put me to bed. But if you think she was any nicer than that, you’d be wrong.