Her eyes were wide, and she kept staring at us, one then the other, then the other. Her mouth opening and closing like she was looking for a word to say but couldn’t get a holt of it. The Mummies clucking and soothing her.

After a while, she found her words. Says she, What is this? What’s going on here?

Not a one of us had the heart to tell her.

Time’s an awful funny thing. The way it stretches and shrinks, gets bigger and smaller, thinner and fatter. How some things seem like the size of the whole wide world when you’re in the middle of them, and all these years later, they feel like nothing at all. And the wee things stay with you and they’re all you really remember.

I mind Daddy Ivan brought down two big bowls of food. One was full of beef and spuds and the other had sweet things I’d never seen nor tasted before. Mummy Noreen telt me they were apple crumble and custard. I’d never had the like of it in my mouth before. I would’ve ate the whole bowl myself if they’d let me.

The three of us took into thon food while that poor girl lay on the bed and cried her heart out. I suppose we should’ve felt bad about that, eating like pigs with the spoons Daddy Ivan gave us, with her only just knowing what was happening to her. That’s what I really mind about that night. Not her cowping down the stairs, not her tears, but thon food.

After it was gone, we all sat quiet for a long time. The only sound was her crying. We found out her name was Esther, and she was from Belfast, but I don’t mind if she said it then or later. She was different from Mummy Joy and Mummy Noreen. She was softer in the way of her, and how she spake. Mummy Joy thought maybe she was a posh girl, from a rich house, not like either of them.

I don’t think she understood where she was for a day or two. That she was there to stay, that there was no going home. I don’t think she knew the men upstairs wanted more from her than cooking and cleaning. Daddy Tam especially. She belonged to him now, whether she wanted to be his or she didn’t. I didn’t know myself what they really wanted with us, not then. The Mummies never telt me. I suppose they wanted to spare me from it for as long as they could.