‘Dorcas gets called Sausage Head a lot, but that’s because of her scabs and sausage curl rags, not because of Sunday school exams,’ Caleb helpfully added.

Mr Driver turned to look at me. ‘They tease you, Dorcas?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. But it’s okay. It’s mainly Maynard’s older brother Rufus and I kick him a fair bit if it gets out of hand.’ I showed him how I kick. Mr Driver nodded in a fairly impressed way. ‘Or I tell the girls in his class that he wets his bed, and that gets him really riled. I’ve got strategies,’ I offered confidently.

‘I bet you have. I bet you have,’ said Mr Driver, and smiled and tapped my head, but gently because he knew about my scabs. Usually when old people did that I hated it and twisted away from them, but when Mr Driver did it, it felt friendly and I didn’t mind.

A visit to Mr Driver always helped set Saturdays up to be the best day of the week, and after we’d chattered away with him for a while, asked for and been refused a look at his stump, and each had a Scotch Finger biscuit from his kitchen canister, we headed off to play with our friends before the dreaded study time at two o’clock.

I’d thought it was just an ordinary day up until then. I thought things would just keep rolling on until I was big enough to get a job and a house and a dog. I never guessed what was going to happen: grown-ups shouting in our street, boxes full of bad news, people I loved going all over the place. And the most terrible, terrible loss of all, which I can’t think of without the pain still making it hard to breathe.

CHAPTER 2

After our visit to Mr Driver, we walked together to Mrs Abrahams’s shop for our lollies, and then we took our sweets and sandwiches into the vacant block across the road from our house. It was full of ancient olive trees. Dad said it had been part of a large commercial grove before we moved to Rostrevor. The big grey trees weren’t looked after by anyone anymore, so there were branches at different heights, which made them great for climbing. There were ten kids there when we arrived, and for a while we all stayed together playing. Caleb, Ruthy and I climbed our favourite tree as high as we could to eat our lunch. My jam sandwiches fell out of the paper onto the ground, but I climbed down to fetch them, dusted them off, picked out a few twigs and a bug of some kind that had been trapped by the separated jammy bread, and ate them anyway. The two Phillips boys yelled out, ‘Gross!’ but I didn’t care.