Ruthy presented her research to my little brother. She had worked on it all week, asking the school librarian, Mrs Sandicock, to help her find books and references, and then sat at the little table in our room after tea to work on her report. She got up just as the light was creeping in under the little torn corner of the blind in our room on Saturday morning to copy out her notes on to her favourite lined pad that she used for homework. We took it into Caleb’s bedroom together and shook him awake. Ruthy handed it over. He was very excited in a nervous kind of way and sat straight up in bed to read it. Ruthy got in with him so she could see her writing and help him with any words that were hard for him. In the end, he handed it back and just asked her to read it out loud. I crawled in next to them and put my arms around Caleb so we could listen together, as though it was a story time with Mum or Dad, even though Ruthy and I hadn’t had one of those for quite a long time. Ruthy read her report in her best ABC newsreader voice.

‘Joan of Arc was a French girl who was born in 1412. She was called the Maid of Orleans. You don’t say Orleans the way we would say it, because it has a little dooverlacky over the letter ‘e’ and the French people know to make that sound a bit different, but it doesn’t matter really. And Maid of Orleans didn’t mean she did people’s cleaning but I am not sure why she was called that.

‘Her dad’s name was Jacques d’Arc, which Mrs Sandicock says you would say like “Jark da ark”, which sounds quite funny, but they probably didn’t think so. When she was only one year older than Daniel is now, that is eighteen years old, she led the French army into a battle that they won. There had been a prophecy that a girl like her would lead an army. I searched Dad’s Bible concordance and she is not mentioned so this was a made-up prophesy and not a proper one from God.

‘She claimed that when she was thirteen, she started to hear voices in the garden that told her what to do. She believed they were from God, but as we know, Maynard’s grandpa hears voices all the time and they are definitely in his head and not from God, who would not bother to ask the nurses to remove the frogs from his jelly. The voices said the English were bad people and she had to save France from them. This seems strange to us because Grandpa Wilson is from England and he is not a bad person, but this happened a long time ago so perhaps they were then. Her voices told her she would be struck in the chest by an arrow. That’s exactly what happened, so people believed her voices in the garden were from God. The French king was very happy with her and made up a coat of arms for her that he drew himself. It had a sword holding a crown with a picture of a flower on each side.