‘Well,’ Irene hesitated. ‘Grandpa wasn’t really there when …’ She saw the tearful gleam in Clem’s bloodshot eyes and changed her mind. ‘Grandpa too. We decided to try and save the baby bird. It was a blackbird – you know, the ones with bright yellow beaks and a beautiful song. We’ve got a blackbird that sings in our garden, hour after hour. I’ll show you tomorrow morning when you wake up. Anyway, we very carefully picked up the bird – it was so terrified that its heart was thundering in its tiny body and I remember I was scared it would just break apart – and put it in a shoebox, with cotton wool in it. And somehow Granny got hold of this teat pipette …’

‘Whassat?’ muttered Aggie, half asleep, thumb back in her mouth.

‘It’s a little pipe you can squeeze liquid from. Like in Clem’s bottle of ointment, remember, when we had to squeeze drops into her eyes for conjunctivitis? So every day, I fed it warm milk, and then bread mushed up in milk – and then, as it got bigger, we dug worms up from the garden and fed him that. Someone lent us a bird cage and he lived in that.’

‘What was he called?’ asked Sasha.

‘Reepicheep. After the mouse in Narnia – I’ll read you the stories soon, Clem. He needed to be fed every hour or so, and my teacher said I could bring him to school with me. He became like a class pet. He’d even sit sometimes on your finger, like a budgerigar. He got bigger and stronger and soon he was flapping his wings. He was almost ready to let go.’

‘Why couldn’t you keep him?’

‘Because he was a wild bird; it wouldn’t have been fair. So one day we took him into the garden, and I stood on the step ladder with Reepicheep in my hand, and I threw him up in the air. And he flew away. Free.’

‘Did he stay in your garden though, and sing?’

‘Yes,’ said Irene firmly.

It was a lie, of course. What had happened was that one night the bird had suddenly died, there in the cage, and by the time Irene had found him the next morning there were maggots on his feathery body. But you can change your stories, she decided. They don’t have rules; you can let them pull you in whatever direction they suddenly decide to take, out of the shadows and into the sun.

‘He sang from the tree, day after day,’ she said, smiling at the three faces. ‘And I sat and listened to him. I thought he was singing to me.’