After six years of working flat out to keep their tiny house, she’d also managed to put away a couple of hundred pounds every year, and when she’d told Becky they were going away, her eyes had lit up with so much excitement, Kate had felt bad she’d never been able to do it before. But then the excitement had become infectious and the two of them were now looking forward to it with such intensity, there was a lot of pressure on the holiday to deliver. She’d booked a mobile home by the beach in Devon and hired a car and now she was attempting to get to the former without dissolving into a sweaty nervous puddle and without Becky being sick all over the seats.

‘Are you OK?’ she called out, risking a glance in the rear-view mirror at her daughter’s grey-green pallor.

‘No,’ came back the pathetic reply. ‘It still smells.’

‘I know, Becky. It’s because the car is new,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll open the window again.’ She wiped her hand on her jeans, then quickly touched the window button. ‘Fresh’ air and traffic-roar entered the car.

‘Are we nearly there?’ asked Becky, hopefully.

‘Yes,’ replied Kate, thinking it would help neither of them if she told the truth. ‘Try and get some sleep, eh?’

Becky picked her blue toy puppy up off her lap and held it close and, mercifully, in another few minutes, was asleep.

The mobile home was a little tired, but it had bright-yellow curtains and, from one window, you could glimpse the sea. Becky delightedly bounded around, opening each door, discovering ‘the toilet!’ and ‘the cupboard!’ as if she’d never seen one before.

The weather was glorious and so they quickly got changed into their swimming costumes and shorts. Taking Becky’s hand, Kate followed the signs down the gravelly paths to the site’s swimming pool. It was every bit as good as the picture in the brochure, with a pirate-ship slide and a large fixed plastic dolphin that shot water out of its mouth, and after dumping their bag and towels on a couple of miraculously still-empty sun loungers, they got straight into the water, laughing and splashing.

By two o’clock, they were starving, so Kate wrapped Becky in a towel, and pulled on her shorts and T-shirt, then they hurried over to the cafe at the side of the pool. They ordered their lunch and two milkshakes at the counter, then took the drinks to a table.

‘I saw you in the pool,’ said a lady sitting at the table next to them. She smiled at Becky. ‘You were having such a good time.’

She looked to be in her fifties and was large and bosomy, with a towelling strapless sundress covering her swimming costume. The sundress was light blue and two large dark-blue breast-shaped patches had formed where her wet costume had seeped through.

‘I’m Audrey,’ she said, ‘and this is my husband, Phil.’

Phil was also large, a hillock of a belly stretching through his T-shirt, and the only thing that adorned his bald head was a pair of sunglasses, the string attached to the arms making two black lines down behind his ears. Both he and Audrey were tucking into a burger on a flaccid bun with a mountain of chips, washed down by cans of beer. He raised a hand in greeting.