We agreed that Dad wasn’t around enough to talk to about it, and that I wouldn’t get a chance to tell him by myself anyway. And in any case he would probably feel he had to tell Mum about it, which would just lead back to the problem of being banned. We considered telling my teacher, but Maynard cautioned against this. He had heard of children who made complaints about things to do with nudey or rudey things who had been taken away from home by a social worker, so that pretty well axed that idea. I didn’t really know what a social worker did, but I gathered they just drove around listening to children’s stories and taking them away in a van if they didn’t like what they heard. My guess was that they were all women, because they seemed a bit like witches from what I could tell, and therefore were probably a bit warty with pointy chins and missing teeth.

Mr Driver was a possibility for advice. He had been to the war, so he was probably used to terrible things and big problems. Also, he listened and didn’t say too much, so he wouldn’t go off like a cracker and I didn’t think he’d do anything about it without telling me. We weren’t sure though, so we decided to keep thinking about it at lunchtimes until we had a solution.

That night Dad wasn’t home. He was in Mount Gambier for work again. Mum was very upset, claiming that his boss, Mr Henry Bednarski, took advantage of Dad and that Dad wouldn’t stand up for himself. When he was away, she had a lot of cross days, and would often stay in bed with ‘one of her heads’. When this happened, she would stay in her room with the curtains tightly closed, and we would all have to tiptoe and talk in whispers so as not to upset her. We would get ourselves ready for school, and I would make everyone eat cornflakes before we left. Mum made the sandwiches for school on Sunday nights, so we just took our share from the fridge and let ourselves out. On many of these days if she wasn’t up to get tea by six, she would call out to me to bring her purse and then give me money to take the three of us to the main road to buy our dinner.

Although we did not enjoy her head days, we did love buying our own tea, because we could choose whatever we wanted, and would just tell Mum we had sandwiches and fruit when we got home, even if we had bought cakes and lollies and ice-creams. Before we set out, we would meet in the tree house and divide out the money. I used to try to keep a few cents extra for myself, but Ruthy was too good a counter and I couldn’t get away with it. We usually had a council of war before we left so we could plan where to go. Most times we agreed to buying a medium serve of chips from Mr Conjunctivitis, which we would share. We didn’t know the fish shop owner’s real name, but Mum called him that one day when his eyes had been red and oozy for weeks and weeks, and it had sort of stuck. Ruthy and Caleb added a potato cake each to the order, and I chose dim sims, not really because I loved them, but because I wasn’t allowed to have them if Dad was buying fish and chips for a Saturday night treat. I usually made the other two buy at least one piece of fruit each, because I liked to be somewhat responsible, and because then I could honestly describe the fruit to Mum if she asked. What was left was free choice. It was usually enough for one cake or ice-cream or a White Knight or a large bag of mixed lollies. I tended to buy a White Knight because it had the word knight in it, although I did really like peppermint anyway.