Although school was going well and I’d made several friends in my class, we all lived too far from each other to meet up at weekends and during holidays. I’d seen no sign of Kit or Robert since Christmas. Most of the children who lived in the village itself were pre-school or junior-school age, so the Timpson twins – Jane and Juliet – were my only friends in Wormley, and when my fifteenth birthday came around Mrs D suggested I invite them to the vicarage for tea. She made delicious fish-paste sandwiches and a carrot cake with real sugar frosting, and Pa joined us too. They gave me a book about butterflies so it was not a bad birthday, after all.

I met the twins each day on the school bus and we sang together in the church choir on Sundays, with a rehearsal every Thursday evening. But they were such a self-contained unit; they didn’t need anyone else. Watching the way they understood each other without speaking and finished each other’s sentences, the way they sometimes held hands walking down the lane, I found myself aching with envy.

Filled with adolescent turmoil, thinking of myself as nearly adult, but actually feeling as lost and confused as a child, I devoured the paperback romances from cover to cover. Although we’d only met once, briefly, Kit always appeared as the hero and I as the love-struck heroine who ‘softly rested her cheek against his shoulder, breathing in the scent of his warm skin’.

Lately, in an attempt to cheer myself up, I’d been listing the good things about living in the countryside. At the moment the good list wasn’t winning:

What I struggled with most was the way people in the village looked at my brother: as if he was some kind of non-person – like a creature in a zoo. When we went to the little shop and post office I would encourage Jimmy to do the asking, and the paying. It was part of educating him towards independence, which was what Ma had always been keen to promote. But the lady in the shop never answered him, and always looked at me instead, so that he got sidelined and ignored, which I know he found frustrating, although Jimmy would never have been able to express it like that.