I thought the grave was lovely. Mr Driver put a little chair next to the bit of garden where we planted her, and every day I would sit for a while and tell her what had happened. Sometimes I saw him looking at me out of his kitchen window, and he would wave, but he didn’t ever interrupt me or ask me to go home, and I felt calmer there than anywhere else.

Although no one would ever replace her, I admitted to myself I would love to have another pet because Sixpence couldn’t talk back to me or snuggle into my jumper anymore. I missed visiting the animals at the Johnsons, but even I didn’t have to be told to stay away from them again. I started to think in my head that if I tried very hard to be good until Christmas, and did better in my union exam than the year before, I might be able to talk to Dad about another guinea pig.

Mum and I seemed to have reached an uneasy truce. She didn’t get as cross with me, but she didn’t talk to me much either. I must have been scratching my head in the night more than usual because my head was often sore in the morning, but she just took the pillowcases off the bed and put them in the laundry without nagging me or making me wrap my hair in ringlet rags at night.

Ruthy’s hair was golden white and curly, but mine was a dark brown colour and dead straight to halfway down my back if left alone. The problem with it being shiny was that the big pieces of sores from my scabs would get stuck in my hair and you could see them sitting on the surface sometimes. Rufus’s nasty friend Robert Bridge started to call me Leprosy, and Rufus called me Scabhead. Maynard kindly looked over my hair in the lunch hours and pointed out bits he could see so we could try to pick them out. He wasn’t at all fussed about this. He wanted to be a doctor and said this was nothing compared to the blood and guts he would have to get used to. In fact he seemed quite fascinated by it all and even wrapped some of the bigger bits of scabs in his hanky to look at under his microscope at home.

Mum must have been right though about me being a terrible child, because sometimes even though I knew I shouldn’t do things I just came right out and did them anyway. The morning of the exam Mum and Dad sat around the kitchen table helping us with our revision questions. Mum made pancakes for breakfast and, even though it was all about getting ready for the exams, it felt like a family holiday thing that we were all working on together. Mum helped Caleb and Ruthy, and Dad helped me. He asked me lots of questions about the Daniel in the Bible in particular. Dad was a bit of a Daniel fan, as far as I could tell, and he was really enjoying himself. He knew a lot of things about him that weren’t in my Sunday school notes, and he made him sound a lot more interesting than Sister Joyce, my teacher, ever did. I told him he should be a Sunday school teacher, and he said he was when he was younger, which was fascinating because I didn’t know that about him. I told him I’d like to be a Sunday school teacher too and he said that was a fine ambition, but I’d better learn the stories if I wanted to do that, and I thought this was good advice and made a lot of sense.