‘I kept the grown-ups away while Henry picked Andy up – he was stronger than he looked – and we ran back to the house. Where else was there to go? I saw that most of the grown-ups from the shed had come out of the front door and were wandering down the driveway and we got past them and back inside. There were two still there, though, slower ones, both mothers, I think. I went crazy, chopping and hacking and whacking with the spade until they were both down, and I shoved their bodies out. We barricaded the front door and the back door and took Andy to the sofa where five minutes earlier Henry had been sitting so calmly. He was bleeding. He’d badly cut his side on the rusted metal of the car. I tried to clean the wound and gave him a pillow to press against it.

‘I looked out of the front window. The grown-ups were milling about in the street. Some tried to get into the house, but couldn’t work out how. I felt like a fool. We shouldn’t have run. I should have just slammed the back door on the ones in the garden. I’ve learnt a lot since then. Wouldn’t make a mistake like that again. As I was looking out, one of the gangs of kids we’d seen earlier arrived; maybe they’d been following the car or something. Or maybe following all the grown-ups who were out there. I don’t know, but they chased them away from our house and forced them down the street, and in a while it was quiet.

‘So I went into the back garden and hoiked the dead father over the fence into next door’s garden. I didn’t stop. I used the spade to dig a grave in a flower bed and put the girls in there. Said a prayer for them as best I could.

‘When I went back in, Andy was in a bad way, crying and shouting and bleeding all over the sofa. Henry was just sitting there in an armchair, ignoring him. Hands in his lap. Like he was waiting. I looked at him and he asked where Mary was and right then I wanted to hit him with the spade, though I guess he couldn’t help how he was. I found another sheet upstairs and tore off some strips to make a bandage for Andy. Gave him some painkillers I’d kept from the doctor’s. The wound was deep, right in below his ribs. It looked really bad.