Dear Joy,

Are you all right? Did you not get my last few letters? You haven’t answered for a bit. So if your letters cross with this one, sorry, but I couldn’t wait to tell you my good news.

There’s been a drawing competition going on here for the past few months. Not just for lads at Huntercombe but all the other borstals too. At any rate we had to make a sketch of either an entire building or just a little piece of one in detail. I chose to do two different kinds with a bridge to join them up. I don’t know why. I thought it would be something different. Anyway the first one that I drew was of the chapel I can see from out my window, except I made it look as if a bomb had hit it! Then I did another building right out of my head. I wanted it to look like something from 100 years off in the future.

Well, they must have really liked it after all because today I heard from my housemaster that I’ve only gone and won it! And wait until you hear the best part of it. First prize is an apprenticeship. It’s with a proper firm of architects. So once I’ve done my time in here they’re going to put me up in digs with them in Surrey where they work and guess what else? They’ll even pay me. A pound and fifteen shillings a week! And that’s supposed to go up every year, if I …

His excitement had spread on to three more pages.

After this, the modest plans she’d made seemed more like obstacles to Charlie’s progress. She was thrilled for him, and wrote back saying so; but it had crept in slowly, the despair of what she’d do without him. If she didn’t have her brother to look after on the outside, she’d have no ground beneath her feet, no sense of purpose or direction. She’d end up thieving, back in borstal as a revoke, time and time again. Her prospects would amount to nil. The only signs she’d get to paint would be the ones she daubed on bits of cardboard saying, SPARE CHANGE PLEASE and HOMELESS HELP ME. So, the next time she heard Mrs Graham asking other girls in hobby hour about their competition pieces, she’d raised her hand and said, ‘Am I too late to enter something, miss?’

She’d tried to win it fairly. Every minute that she’d had to spare – before lights out, before the morning call to the parade ground – she’d drawn and drawn. But the pictures that she’d made had no sophistication. All her buildings had the look of gingerbread. She couldn’t get her roof to slant away into the distance at the proper angle, or space her windows evenly as they got smaller. Her big mistake was telling Mal of her frustrations in a letter, thinking he would write back with a dose of bluster to inspire her confidence. Instead, he’d given her a cheat’s solution.