We sat on the grass beneath the trees that lined Rotten Row and waited, and within minutes we saw our first real-life horses! A pair of black-and-white cobs with fluffy feathered legs, Roman noses and broad backsides. I did a sketch of them as best I could as they went past, and then at home that night I painted over my original drawing to get the light and the colours right.

“Do you really think I’m a podgy?” I asked Dad. He was confused. Then he got what I meant.

“Not a podgy,” he said. “Prodigy. It means you are a young genius. You have a gift.”

So … yeah, I’m a prodigy. Or at least I was. If you look it up in wikipedia a prodigy has to be under ten! And I’m twelve now, almost thirteen, so I’m way over the hill – that is modern life for you. Anyway the prodigy thing is not all it’s cracked up to be. You’d think that being an art genius would be a good thing. I mean, I’m pretty sure everyone loved Mozart when he was a kid. But it’s totally not working out like that for me. For a start, Mrs Mason, my teacher at Brixton Heights Academy, is a total cow and thinks drawing in class is, like, a crime or something. As far as she is concerned, it would be better to be Adolf Hitler than to draw horses. At least that was the impression she gave at the parent-teacher conferences.

“She’s wasting everyone’s time and disrupting my class,” Mrs Mason said.

“Because drawing horses isn’t part of your art curriculum?” my dad asked.

“Mr Thompson,” Mrs Mason said icily. “Maisie doesn’t restrict her drawing to during art class. She is drawing horses all – the – time.”

Mrs Mason reached below her desk.

“Maisie’s maths book,” she said as she held it up and flicked through the pages. There were no sums, no formulas on the cross-hatched pages. Just horses. Lots and lots of horses.

“I could show you her English book, which is exactly the same.” Mrs Mason continued her character assassination. “She draws in science; even during religious studies! She is the most impossible, unteachable child I have ever encountered in all my years as an educator …”