‘Pull your trigger!’ They made a firing squad with their fingers and guns, ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’

Some of them were older than us, but I wasn’t worried because everyone was watching and Busola was a girl so it wasn’t as though they were going to move in and beat us up. They were following behind.

We passed a shop window, at an angle to the street, and I could see me and Busola holding hands in silhouette under the awning. Behind us, in bright colours lit up on the street, was a tail of cowboys and Indians, a big posse of feather headdresses and cowboy hats and pop-guns. They were after us.

Caps were going off and some not exploding – Click! Pop! Snap! Bang! – and I expected to get an arrow in the back of my neck. But it never came.

‘Nigger! Nigger! Pull your trigger!’ Then the loud bit, ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’

It was to show they were in charge and we weren’t. We weren’t from there, so they couldn’t know anything about us. If they were anything like us, they wanted to kill something, and go home and have ice cream, and come back and do it again tomorrow.

‘Just ignore them,’ Busola said.

I gripped her hand tighter and tried not to take off. We weren’t going to run, we weren’t going to play.

Pop! went the guns. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ they shouted.

The baying for our blood fell away as we moved steadily out of the town – packs of children licking into their ice lollies, the bristle of feather and contorted faces, screams of ‘Nigger! Nigger!’, the alarm of shrill, noisy laughter, voices shouting themselves hoarse – all falling away into a kind of deafness as we made our way steadily uphill, towards the endless summer of white clouds tumbling out the blue, up over the brow of the hill and round the corner to our turning on the right.

‘How was that?’ they asked when we got in.

‘Fine, thank you very much,’ Busola said. ‘We didn’t find anything to buy but we’ll take our stilts home to show, if that’s all right.’

Mr Brown had built us both wooden stilts and we’d spent most of the holiday practising on the steps of the back garden. We were quite good at it by the end because that’s how long it took to introduce us to the headmaster’s children across the road and until then we had to play by ourselves. We had outings – for me to swim and put my head under the brown water in the river, to pick strawberries, go for picnics in the Forest – but it didn’t get started until we were wrestling Charles with his sister on the lawn to keep him pinned down.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, because I stopped suddenly.