I had a lot of mixed feelings going on all day. Part of me was very happy about Sixpence coming home, but the other part of me was worried that Caleb’s revelation might somehow wreck it all. I couldn’t quite see how. Once Sixpence was home it should be okay. Mum might be cross for many days in a row, but we had managed that in the past, and at least I could stay in the garden with Sixpence now, even if it was hard in the house.

At the break I filled Maynard in on everything that had happened. He said it was sensible that I had told Mr Driver what had happened, and it would all work out for the best now, he was sure. In the lunch break he brought out paper and pencils and we did some designs for Sixpence’s hutch to help Dad work out what might be the best home for her. I was starting to feel quite excited and wondered what time Sixpence would be dropped over from the Johnsons. I was hoping it was straight after Mr Johnson got home from work, which would be while it was still light and I could play with her for quite a while before teatime.

But at the end of the lunch period one of the prefects came to fetch me from our seat under the gum tree. She took me to the office of the headmistress, Miss Lillicrap, and I waited outside wondering what I’d done this time. I went through a list in my head. It could have been that I didn’t finish my maths homework. It might have been that I had been asked to revise my latest English essay and had just added three words to it – ‘very’, ‘enormously’ and ‘hugely’. It could have been that I was told off for talking several times that morning, because I had been desperate to tell Venita about Sixpence. I thought the best guess was about rewriting words to Gilbert and Sullivan.

Every morning we had to take out our Gilbert and Sullivan songbook and follow along while the headmistress piped in ten minutes or so of one of the operas. She was the head of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and thought it was an important part of our education to learn the classics. Maynard said there was nothing classic about Gilbert and Sullivan, and that his mother said the headmistress had a voice like a strangled monkey.

At the moment we were doing HMS Pinafore. I made up a play where we sang: ‘She always swears a big, big B. So give three cheers and one cheer more for the strangled monkey on the Pinafore.’ My class teacher, Miss Thompson, had heard it and asked what it referred to and I said, ‘Nothing,’ but I worried she might have guessed. The next day she caught us singing my version of the words to ‘Little Buttercup’:

‘I smell like my name – that’s crap –