Kate failed her eleven-plus. At the time, nobody was surprised. It had been considered rather a marvel that Peter had passed, and he was, as Kate knew, having a tough time at the Grammar—he was finding it hard to keep up, was sweating away unprofitably at his homework, hated games, had found a new tormentor in the shape of a sadistic vicar who taught mathematics. So Kate wasn’t even disappointed to fail. She was, and is to this day, almost totally innumerate—the spectacle of her trying to work out eight per cent of £200 for a VAT invoice is a lamentable one. She reckons she scored something like zero on the maths papers. In those days she took this weakness for granted, but now she is both self-conscious and curious about it—was it a result of sexist conditioning, or is it true that men are better at maths than women, you know the kind of argument. How she managed to do so badly on the rest of the paper is more mystifying—it was, she says, a hot day, she felt sick, it was a strange building, the questions were too silly for words, like which has higher rank, a colonel or a private, and I didn’t know what any one of those three words meant—“rank,” “colonel,” “private,” I mean—or was there snow at Christmas in Australia, I mean how the hell was I expected to know? And the truth is, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to go to the Grammar. It sounded horrid, at Grammar School.

So off she went to the Girls’ Secondary Modern at Romley Fourways, so named because this rather bleak Late Victorian brick edifice stood at a large road junction on the Old Romley Road, where Roding High Street intersects it. It was in those days a derelict district, for a large area to the south had been devastated by bombs, and not yet rebuilt. The school had been miraculously (or, as some of the staff argued, disastrously) untouched, and it rose from the surrounding sea of rubble and willow herb like a great dark ship.

It was at Romley Fourways that Kate discovered her true talents in life. Or the talents that have got her to this point, anyway, though whether or not they will carry her beyond it is, I imagine, precisely what keeps her awake at nights.

At Romley Fourways, Kate found a whole new set of people, most of whom knew nothing about herself and Peter, about her large mother and her small father, who had never heard the nasty little ditties that had echoed over the peeling front steps of Arblay Street.

Pete, Pete,

What does he eat?

A nice thick sandwich

Buttered with shit