I pleaded and promised and prayed and protested but nothing made any difference. Mum was firm. No dog. If I couldn’t have a dog, my next greatest wish was for a guinea pig, but Mum said they were really just rats with long hair and cowlicks, and there was no way she was having a rat in her home. I tried to explain I was pretty sure I would be a vet when I grew up, and I needed animals to practise caring for, but Mum said there was no way I’d get to vet school with my school marks, and I was more likely to be a mum than a vet, if anyone would have me, which she said she doubted if I kept scratching the sores on my head.

Mrs Johnson lived across the road from us and four houses down. I liked her for lots of reasons, but the main one related to the animals she kept in her backyard, and in particular a guinea pig called Sixpence.

Mum didn’t like Mrs Johnson or her family. We lived in a street where all the houses had been built at the same time by the government and all looked like each other. People changed the colour of the paintwork or the cement steps leading up to the front door, or the plants they put in the garden beds, but that’s about all. Our mum was very houseproud and had a reputation for being a bit of a style queen around the neighbourhood. She always looked tiptop herself before she left the house, although we saw the other side of her of course.

She didn’t much care what happened in our backyard – she said backyards were for men and front yards were for women – so she threw her heart and soul into making sure we had what she called ‘street appeal’. She repainted the cement steps dark grey each spring, once the worst of winter was over, and swept them clean every day. She said she held no truck with people who let the paint on their steps blister and flake. Caleb asked Ruthy what a truck had to do with the steps, but even Ruthy just shrugged.

Most of our neighbours had low front fences made of crisscrossed wire. Some people grew ivy over the fence, although if you didn’t keep it clipped it grew too heavy and often made the fence line dip towards the pavement. Others left it wiry and you could see the plants they put in their garden beds. Mum grew roses along our wire fence line. She loved her roses and clipped them and sprayed them and picked bugs off them so she could have flowers to put in a vase come the summer. She grew seasonal flowers beneath them, only in white to show off the colour of the roses. She mowed the little square of grass between the wire fence and the front of the house with an old push mower because Dad wasn’t home enough to do it for her. She had a large terracotta pot on the doorstep that she kept filled with whatever was flowering at the time. She refused to have stone gnomes or fairies or plastic anythings because she said they were common. And she hated, hated, hated Mrs Johnson’s front garden.