And the days slipped slowly by. And the seasons and the classrooms and the teachers changed.

Miss White was the Grade Three teacher and I was her pet. She was gentle, with a soft cheek that smelt of powder. She had dimples, and wore dresses with buttons from neck to hem. She made me a flower monitor, and I collected the flowers the girls brought on Mondays and arranged them with one of the Twinnies in the pickle-jar vases. They were dead on Fridays — we threw them out.

When I left Grade Three I cried. I took some of my mother’s drawing paper and wrote a letter to Miss White. My letter was written with a Black Magic pencil on handmade water-colour paper. It told Miss White how much I loved her.

There were no pets in Grade Four. The teacher was called Stewpot. She wore severe suits and a helmet of steely hair set in strict grey waves. She was cold, with thin lips and little eyes. She smacked our hands with a ruler and it hurt. She said we were big girls now; that we must learn. All the girls who made the error in dictation had to come forward and be slapped. It hurt. We folded our arms and sat silent when she was out of the room — Patty Briggs reported us if we talked, and there were more slaps that stung with the ruler. I was smacked when I bent my finger double to hold the pen — I could not help it, that was how it went. Because I had to hold my finger high, like an umbrella, my writing was always bad. When I had chicken-pox I stayed away from school; when I was almost better, Nan took me to a matinée at the pictures; Lorna Jones told the teacher she had seen me, and when I came back to school Stewpot said if I was well enough to go to the pictures, I was well enough to come to school. Nan was cross.

At lunch-time when the bell rang, I ran across the playground with Catherine Oates and Janice Budden, the Twinnies and Joan Stott. We saved each other seats on the benches that made a square round each of the trees: the two pepper-trees with their herring-bone leaves and berries, the one in the middle whose white flowers looked scalloped from flannel. We sat on the benches and saved places and ate our lunches. We watched the Opportunity Class children, who looked like Reece. When we had finished eating, we drank at the taps, then played hidey and chasey and skippy; waved to the boys far away behind the furnace and the lavatories.

The playgrounds were swept by strange crazes.

Suddenly everyone was bent over a bobbing yo-yo at the end of slender string. Then there were squares of plastic filled with smaller squares and all the letters of the alphabet and one space — we moved the space about with clicks to make words. There were epidemics of skipping-ropes and rounders and rubber balls. We collected autographs and film star pictures and cards from the cereal packets. I had marbles in a draw-string bag, plastic knuckle-bones, beach bats, silkworms in a box.