Once I found a little fieldmouse in our room and made it a nest in my upside-down summer straw hat. It did lots of little mousey poos and wees in it and the hat smelled quite bad after a while, but Mum just smacked my legs and hung it on the Hills Hoist with a peg to air it. She said I would just have to smell like a rodent and no one would want to sit next to me. I didn’t care too much, and after a while it only smelled bad if you put it up to your nose and took in a deep breath.

Aunty Maisie cornered Mum in the ladies’ toilets after the Memorial Meeting on the Sunday morning after the Caleb-football-jumper fiasco, as Ruthy called it. I was in a cubicle. Mum had just asked me to hurry up because she was insisting I sit next to her for the community lunch in the rear hall as a punishment, partly for making Caleb laugh in the meeting, and partly because of the Gary Johns incident. The Memorial Meeting was the most serious of all the church activities because it was where the grown-ups who had been baptised took the wine and the bread to symbolise the death of Jesus. Ruthy had the right word for it – solemn.

We had to sit in rows in very uncomfortable brown wooden chairs with no arms and no padding. When it was time for the bread and wine, the front row of men in dark suits all stood up at the same time, walked solemnly down the aisles to the back of the room, and then walked to the end of each row in turn to pass along the little dish of bread or the little glasses of wine. I had pinched a bit of bread when I passed it along to Mum, and then rolled it between my fingers and stuck it up my nose. This made Caleb giggle quite loudly, and Mum pinched me so hard I knew I’d have another bruise on my leg.

It wasn’t fair because I wasn’t the only one behaving out of line. When we all stood to sing a hymn, Gary Johns, a thirteen-year-old boy with a reputation for being a bit of a black sheep, had passed me a note saying the Serving Brethren in their dark suits and white shirts and plain ties were really mafia men sent to infiltrate the church and steal the collection money for their Sicilian masters. I didn’t laugh but I made a snorting noise and then pretended I was coughing when Mum’s head snapped to the right to check on me. She wasn’t fooled. I was sentenced to lunch beside her with just a look.

Aunty Maisie was my dad’s sister-in-law. She was really old. Dad had been born twenty years after the brother before him. My grandma, who I didn’t really remember, had some kind of mental breakdown and the doctor suggested to Grandpa that another baby might help. Grandma was very old by the time she had Dad, and I didn’t like to ask if it cured her of being mad, but I hoped it did, because now that I know how you actually have babies, it’s not something you’d do for the fun of it. My source for this knowledge was Venita, who had described both conception and childbirth in such graphic detail, I was a bit surprised there wasn’t a law against both, or at least books in the torture section of every library to warn you to stay away.