Mr Driver kept his house pretty clean and tidy but spent most of his time in his garden and shed. He had a son who lived in Brisbane and didn’t get home much. He cooked for himself. His specialties, as he called them, were tuna and sweet corn mornay, baked-bean toasties, eggs with soldiers, and self-saucing chocolate pudding he made from a packet. I was a great fan of his pudding and had asked if he would make it for my birthday this year, and he’d said he would. Sometimes if he had some of his bowling friends in for tea, he made three times the usual packet size in a big tray, and everyone clapped and told him it was the best ever. I whipped the cream for him to serve with it, which he said was a very big help. I tested it because you have to check how much sugar it needs. He never complained about my testing, and didn’t point out you probably didn’t need to try it out by the dessertspoonful.

Dad said we shouldn’t bother Mr Driver too much because he had been in the war and became tired easily, but we could usually tell how tired he was by his limp. He had a wooden leg, which was just about the best thing you could have if you were going to get hurt in a war without dying, and some days he would roll up his trousers and take it off and show us the stump. Mum said not to ask him to do it, but sometimes Caleb couldn’t stop himself. Mr Driver didn’t seem to mind. He was quite good at saying, ‘Not today,’ if it really didn’t suit him, so Caleb would regularly try his luck.

We found Mr Driver in his shed, which is where he was most of the time. He lifted Caleb up to sit on the bench he was working on, and Ruthy and I perched on old oil drums that had nothing in them, but which Mr Driver said he liked to have around. He didn’t ever ask us not to touch anything, or to watch what we were doing, or not to get dirty, or to stop asking questions, and these were, of course, some of the reasons we loved him rather a lot.

‘We have to study for the Sunday school exams today, worst luck,’ said Caleb. ‘Did you have to study for Sunday school when you were little and still had two legs?’

Mr Driver stopped planing the wood he was working on for a moment. ‘No, I didn’t have to do exams for church,’ he said. ‘Never met another family that did, come to that,’ he added, muttering.

‘No, we are the only ones in our school,’ said Ruthy. ‘But our Sunday school friends all have to, even though some of them get teased.’

‘What kind of teasing do they get?’ asked Mr Driver.

‘They get called Mormons, heathens, sect members and Ku Klux Klan. We don’t know what that means, but luckily we don’t get that at Rostrevor Primary School,’ said Ruthy.