‘You’re going to go just the way of your brother, aren’t you? You’re all the same in your family. Too sure of yourselves by half. So sure everyone will adore you. Think you are all so good-looking and clever. Well, Daniel-boy wasn’t so clever when they found him with Esther Dangerfield with their pants down behind the kitchens at the interstate youth camp, was he?’ he sneered.

This was news to me. I felt the shock that came with instinctively knowing I had been told a truth. I knew Daniel had done something he shouldn’t have, and although we kids had tried to guess what it was, we didn’t really know. We had made lists to try to work it out, and these had included the following possible reasons: he stole money from the collection plates when he helped Dad tally the takings on Sunday morning; he kept saying he was going to be a lawyer, even though Christadelphians said you shouldn’t be because you might help a judge make a decision that was against God’s will; and he’d refused to go to Aunty Maisie’s for Christmas lunch because she made us eat her manky prawn cocktail.

We had agreed that we just couldn’t see Daniel stealing, and that the other two items didn’t seem bad enough to cause Mum and Dad to send him away. As Ruthy said, it was an enigma, which apparently is a thing wrapped in a thing that’s a mystery, or some such.

‘Well, at least Esther Dangerfield was the prettiest girl at the camp, and she liked my brother the best and I bet she didn’t like you,’ I said, not guessing until much later that this was an arrow straight to his heart.

‘Yeah. Well look where that got him,’ shouted Peter, who pushed me into the corridor and slammed the door. He barely spoke to me for the rest of my stay, and could hardly bear to look at me ever again.

The fourth very bad thing was the caravan. Every day the teacher made a long list of revision homework we should do for the exams. Although my school had told Dad the curriculum would be largely the same, I didn’t recognise much of the work we were revising in the classroom, and the homework may have been written in Zulu for all I could understand it. And I just couldn’t find the energy to do schoolwork when I got home. I would take my library books and sit on the top bunk and look through them until teatime, but homework just seemed a waste of time when I was so far behind.

Unfortunately, while my new temporary teacher barely had the energy to lift her head from the desk, she found the get up and go to write a note to Aunty Jean, again delivered through Maudie, to complain that I had not done a skerrick of homework since arriving at the school. Maudie had tried to be loyal and warned me she’d been given the letter, but I felt angry that I was even at her stupid school and just shrugged away the chance to fix the problem.