She was quite a nice girl, but rather too godly for me. She never seemed to do anything wrong and was always polite and kind, and read her Bible every day and crocheted rugs for poor people in Africa. I asked her once why poor people in Africa would need those rugs, given it was very hot, but she said the Christadelphian missionaries asked for them and they would know best.

Maudie was okay. I neither liked nor disliked her because she was a sort of blancmange. She was pale and thin with mousey brown curly hair that seemed to be falling out, a bit like a man going bald. You could see her bright pink scalp between the curls. She wore clothes that were far too big for her; usually long box-pleated skirts that were higher up at the back than the front, and little jumpers with things like cats and fairies stitched on to them. The best word for her was beige, I thought. She was an all-round beige person.

I sensed all the girls in the Royston family saw me as a bit ungodly, and somehow dangerous. I stayed on the top bunk in the two-bunk room Maudie and Helen shared. There was only room for a tiny desk under the window between the bunk beds, and the girls had a roster to share it to do homework and Bible study. They offered to change the roster to give me a space, but I wasn’t one for homework and decided if I couldn’t go to my own school, I wouldn’t bother too much anyway.

By far the nicest person in the family was Uncle Paul. He was a tiny, very thin man who walked with a crooked back, bent over quite a long way. Brian Dirk and Bruce Munsford at the meeting were often rude about him. They did Quasimodo impersonations behind his back and walked around saying they couldn’t remember his name, but his face rang a bell.

I’m pretty sure Uncle Paul knew about this but he never complained or punished them. I would have stuck a knife in their bike tyres at least. He was very clever, and although he worked as a clerk somewhere and didn’t make much money, everyone at church said he was a genius and if he had been a worldly person, which he wasn’t, he would have been a great professor or scientist or something equally important.

But the story was he devoted his brain to the study of Revelations and had written two books about it that were printed by the church and even sold in the big book cupboard in the entrance hall of our meeting. I thought he would only read Bible things, but he read all kinds of interesting books. He told me he was very fond of insects and showed me a collection of books on his shelves about them. Many had fascinating drawings or photos blown up so you could see all their bits and pieces, and he told me stories about them I could have listened to for the longest time. I told him one day I wished he had been one of my teachers at school because he made everything sound so interesting. He kindly said he wished he had been one of my teachers, because he would have been lucky to have an excellent learner in his class. No one had ever called me that before, so I was pretty chuffed and rolled those words around and around in my head for a long time later, particularly when things were a bit dark.