She accelerated away really violently before I had time to sit down and I ended up sitting on the lap of a bloke with a guide dog.

I said, “I’m really sorry but the bus . . .”

He said, “Is it full then, the bus? Is there nowhere else to sit? You’re a bloody big lad. My legs’ll be numb by the time we get to Heckmondwhite.”

At a red traffic light I staggered to a spare seat.

Everyone on the bus was looking at me and grumbling. I could hear things like, “from that bloody Dither Hall,” “simpleton, I think,” and “They’re allus . . . messing about in beards and tights. Sitting on blind people’s knees . . . bloody daft.”

It was raining so hard you could barely see the road ahead. It didn’t make Mrs. Bottomly slow down, though. There was a bump at one stage and I thought I saw a sheep fly past the window, but I can’t be sure. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped raining and a watery sun came out and a little rainbow appeared over the top of Grimbottom Peak.

Ooooooh, maybe the rainbow was a sign.

A sign that everything was going to be all right. All of my hopes and dreams would come true. I was going to become a star but, more importantly, have a proper boyfriend. Oh, and also I might have a corker mini-growth spurt. Not just one of them. Both, I mean.

When we stopped at my bus stop, Mrs. Bottomly was cleaning her nails with a penknife as I passed her. She didn’t look up but she said, “Our Beverley dun’t like thee, so that meks me not like thee. Watch your sen, lady. Walls have ears and radishes repeat.”

I got my case down from the bus and there before me was Heckmondwhite in all its glory! The autumnal light shining on the bus stop! The village green! The shop! The church! And the pub—The Blind Pig.

My substitute parents, the Dobbinses, who I lodge with in term time, are away on a Young Christians’ Foraging weekend in Blubberhouses.

Harold and Dibdobs and the lunatic twins are nice but possibly the maddest people I have ever met. They are away till tomorrow so I’m staying the night with my little mate Ruby at The Blind Pig. I’m really looking forward to seeing my fun-sized pal and her bulldog, Matilda. Ruby told me that out of eighty breeds given an intelligence test, bulldogs come seventy-eighth. But that’s the intelligence-o-meter test not the love-o-meter test, which Matilda would definitely win paws down.

What I am not looking forward to is seeing Mr. Barraclough, Ruby’s dad. The landlord of the pub and chief tormentor of me and my legs—which, I must admit, sometimes have a life of their own. When I am nervous or excited they, my legs, well, they initiate Irish dancing. All by themselves. My brain has nothing to do with it. Also, because of my skinniness, Mr. Barraclough keeps pretending I am a long lanky lad. In a dress.