Dear children, I am having a wonderful adventure and hope you are too. I love you very much and will see you soon. Grandma and all your Scottish relatives send their love.

As Ruthy said, would it have hurt to have at least put our own names on the cards? What I hadn’t said to Ruthy is that the writing didn’t exactly look like Mum’s writing, and I wondered if she’d even written them.

Dad said Mum didn’t call us because Grandma couldn’t afford Mum to make four different calls every week, and that he would tell us every Sunday how she was going. The trouble was I didn’t believe the reports he gave us. He claimed she rang him on Saturday nights, and he said things like ‘she’s finding the weather very cold’, or ‘she’s enjoying spending time with all her cousins and sisters’, or ‘Grandma is so glad to see her’, but I could have just as easily made up those sentences. He also didn’t sound convincing when he told us. There was no bounce in his voice, he didn’t look us in the eye, and he wouldn’t elaborate. I worried and worried and worried about what it all meant, but when I tried to talk to Dad about it, he just said everything was fine and we should be happy Mum was having a great time with her family. He wouldn’t be drawn into conversation about when she might return either. ‘After Christmas’ seemed like an eternity to all of us.

Sitting next to him on Sunday mornings, I felt him grow sadder and sadder. He didn’t sing with the same energy. Usually he would lift up his face as though he was singing to the top of the enormous pipe organ in our main hall, and really belt out the hymns in his lovely tenor voice. When he sang the harmony, it was as though he was racing around us, weaving in and out of our song, sometimes making us go all quiet and thoughtful, and sometimes raising us up to feel the joy he felt when he offered God a hymn. He really did sound as though he was praising God when he sang, and although I wasn’t sure how I felt about this God fellow sometimes, Dad’s certainty made me feel comforted and hopeful, peaceful and confident. Every Sunday I would feel I could be a better child, a better friend, a better daughter, and for at least an hour or two, I was able to be the perfect child I so badly wanted to be despite the devil in me.

But now he kept his face on the page as though he had never seen the words before, as though they were a surprise and he had to follow them one by one. These days he sang the main tune quietly along with everyone else, and never offered the harmony, even though I knew he knew the funny notes by heart, the ones that sounded so discordant if sung alone. Now I couldn’t always even pick out his voice. Since Mum left, it sounded as though he’d lost his puff, his ability to take others with him to a holy place, and it felt as though perhaps he didn’t believe any more. Hymns sounded sad rather than reverential and joyful to me now.