His trouser leg got hitched up and I was staring straight at the skin above his sock. It was blank, a white I’d never seen before – it was wrong, it wasn’t supposed to be like that, it was shocking.

‘You sure?’ he said when I said, ‘Oh, nothing.’ I suppose I meant there was no colour there – none – but I pulled the trouser leg down and went on wrestling. It was the party for us going and his sister was in a long party dress and he was in long trousers. They were the first middle-class children I’d met and they were very nice. We met over the fence the day before as we were on the stilts and they were trying to get a look at us from the footpath along the back. We became friends straight away and let them try our stilts and they asked if they could give us a party for our going away.

‘Perhaps we should have introduced them sooner?’ Mrs Brown said, but they were both teachers and Charles’s dad was the headmaster and had a really big house so I understood that we had to be invited. And anyway before we could get to the party we had to deal with the lamp. Somebody had broken it and the pieces were lying smashed on the bedroom floor. One of us must have done it in our sleep, we didn’t have table lamps by the bed at home, so that was what did it.

‘Who broke the lamp?’ Mrs Brown asked, and Busola said it was me. I didn’t know it was so I wouldn’t take the blame and shook my head. I’d already decided to leave the talking to Busola, but she wasn’t being fair.

‘You can both go up to the room and come out when someone owns up. Just tell us who did it and you can go to the party,’ which was very fair, I thought, except when we got up there Busola turned on me.

‘It’s your fault, why don’t you own up?’

‘Because it’s not! What if it’s you? It’s on your side!’

‘You coward, you broke it!’

‘You can tell them it’s me all you want, you’re not getting out!’ I said, and that’s how it stayed until they came up to check on us.

‘You’ve got another ten minutes, the party’s starting,’ they said, and closed the door.

So what we did was toss a coin to see who was going to own up.

‘Heads I win, tails you lose,’ she said.

The coin was still in the air when I said, ‘No.’

‘All right,’ she said, catching it, ‘but if I lose, you’re carrying the stilts, all the way home.’