Peter didn’t pay a lot of attention to me but we had to eat dinner together every night, so I got to see him then. I combed my hair before I went to the table, which I didn’t do at home, but when Helen asked me what I was doing I said my mum always required us to straighten our clothes and comb our hair before ‘being summoned to dine’. This wasn’t true. I was usually screamed at to get to the table, threatened if I didn’t hurry up, criticised for looking like a rag and bone man’s assistant and smacked for being so grubby. But Mum would have liked us to smarten up for tea, so it was sort of right, and Helen and Maudie were very impressed.

I found myself telling stories over dinner about all sorts of amazing things, but Peter kept snorting and saying, ‘That’s just not true. You are a little liar.’ Uncle Paul would just make pushing down motions with his hand and say, ‘Bring it down, Peter, bring it down.’ Aunty Jean cuffed him on the head and said not to be rude to guests, but then said, ‘Dorcas, you shouldn’t tell fibs.’ The problem was when I was telling the story I believed it was true.

For example, I was absolutely positive that not long before my visit a whole family was found living in the belly of a whale. When the whale swallowed pirate ships and such like, all the bits floated in and the family was a bit like a clan from the book about the Borrowers by Miss Mary Norton. The Borrowers were tiny people who turned everyday things into useful objects, and they would have turned all the flotsam and jetsam into household items to make their stay in the whale cosier. Peter said that was an out-and-out lie, and I insisted he was wrong and it was in a newspaper, or else how would I know the term flotsam and jetsam, but he said Ruthy would have taught me those words because everyone knew she was the brains in our family. If he kept this up, I thought, he was going to have a hard time of it when he proposed to me.

Mum always said Helen turned dowdy at eight. I sort of knew what she meant. She was as skinny as Aunty Jean was round, and short like Uncle Paul. She wore knitted grey tights all year round that were baggy around her ankles. Her grey glasses had thick, coke-bottle bottoms in them, which gave her a slightly scary owl quality when she looked at you, because they made her eyes too big for her face. Her sturdy black shoes had a strap across them and she wore very bulky jumpers in winter and large crocheted tops she made for herself in summer. Mum used to say that Helen must have hunted through the rubbish tips to find the wool she used to make her tops, because it was always of the ugliest possible shade and other people must have thrown it out. She didn’t seem to be comfortable with herself and was always hitching her tops down as though to cover bits she wasn’t that keen on.