She welcomed her visitor warmly and proceeded to give Netta the full tour of the Home. She was a brisk, buxom ex-Army nursing sister who ran Oldroyds like a main line train station, keeping to a strict timetable of activities. Netta was immediately reminded of Peg’s maxim: ‘An idle brain is the divil’s forge’. She soon saw how Matron Brownleys liked to see everyone fully occupied in some useful task. When Netta saw the dormitories and the row of iron bedsteads crammed into each room she wondered when the children ever got any privacy to daydream and play alone. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Since that her last encounter with Gus, she realised what she knew about young children wouldn’t cover a button.

The boys and girls slept in the purpose-built wings and shared the large communal rooms that made up the original house. The old drawing rooms and gracious high-ceilinged reception rooms may have seen more gracious days but now they rang with the laughter and noise of children. There were scuffed skirting boards and smears up the wallpaper, a clutter of gumboots and gaberdines in the hallway. The managers had done their best to furnish it like a real home but the regulation green paint and treacle-coloured woodwork, with a canteen smell of boiled vegetables hanging over all, gave it an institutional air.

In the stable block the infants were playing on tubular seesaws, with nurses in starched uniform waiting for the older children to return from their day schools around the district. As they piled out of a school bus Netta was relieved to see that they were all in gymslips and cardigans, in the local school uniform, not set apart in the orphanage grey garb of the Cottage Home children who had come to Stratharvar School during the war.

Four girls of about fifteen were summoned to meet her, to be instructed how to cut out the pattern and make up the costumes. Four very different girls sat silently, taking in Netta’s own pretty dirndl skirt and neat blouse with its Peter Pan collar, examining her strap sandals. There was Vera who wore thick-lensed glasses and Pat whose face was one blotch of erupting pimples. Beryl was the smartest of the bunch in a neat cardigan and bottle green gymslip with white ankle socks. She had braided her hair in a criss-cross of plaits over her head. Then there was Polly Liddell: a hawk’s face on a sparrow’s body. Her wide sad brown eyes reminded Netta of that cornered look on Dixie’s face at their first encounter at Brigg Farm: sharp, defiant and nervous.