There must have been a few hundred kids here, but so far Ed hadn’t had any luck finding anything out about Maeve, Robbie, Monkey-Boy and Ella. Everyone had been busy sorting out their teams, setting up their camps, getting settled in. He’d had a short chat with one of the guys in charge at Maidenhead who said he hadn’t heard anything, and he’d spent a wild but similarly blank night with the Sandhurst kids, whose leader was a friendly psycho called Dara.

Despite their looks, the Sandhurst kids seemed to be the most welcoming. While other groups kept to themselves and even posted guards to keep outsiders away, the Sandhurst kids were here to party and didn’t much mind who joined them. They’d got hold of several cases of beer and a whole load of cigarettes and vodka. They never appeared to eat anything and instead had all got stuck into drinking, wrestling, kick-boxing and general free-for-all fighting. Kyle had joined in and held his own pretty well.

So that left Bracknell and Windsor. There was no way Ed was going to get anywhere near anyone in the Windsor camp. There was so much security there it might as well have been Guantanamo Bay.

Ebenezer had found out that most of the kids from Maidenhead were practising Christians. Sandhurst had become Hell’s Angels, Slough were a bunch of obnoxious yobs who spat at the world, the Ascot kids were misfits, Windsor were trying to act like royalty, and it seemed that the Maidenhead kids had got religion. They reminded Ed of Mad Matt and his acolytes at St Paul’s.

Everyone had found their own way of coping with this new world; they were free to create their own identities. The kids around here were only doing what teenagers had always done – trying to find out who they were and how they fitted in.

Whatever helped you make it through the night.

And here they all were, sitting in different sections of the grandstand. Six blocks of colour. Red, white, green, black, blue and gold. The Ascot kids were sitting right in the centre. To their right were Maidenhead, past them Bracknell and then Slough. To their left were Sandhurst and then Windsor. Ed was glad that he was a good distance from Josa’s mob. He didn’t want the complication of having to deal with them right now.