At this heresy there was an audible intake of breath from Luella and several other people sitting around earwigging, then they all rose up and surrounded me like a posse and led me into a back room. It was dark and gloomy, with a sparse selection of hard chairs and a Formica table, and I thought they were just going to incarcerate me in there and go away, but it turned out that this was where the Literary Society held its meetings.

So they all sat round the table and looked at me expectantly and I waited for Luella to introduce me … and waited.

She was slumped in her seat picking at the skin around her fingernails, but after about a year and a half she looked up and said brusquely, ‘Tina Devino. I expect she will tell you all about herself.’ Then she folded her arms and looked unamused, like Queen Victoria crossed with the Empress of Blandings.

Well, never have two and a half hours gone so slowly, although that particular workshop usually overran, especially with questions and answers and worksheets. However, I’d hardly even got into it before Luella started fidgeting, sighing, rolling her eyes and muttering things like, ‘Get on with it!’ and ‘I thought you were going to tell us how to write a novel!’ and stuff like that. Then she flatly refused to do the questionnaire I handed round, which usually broke the ice and got everyone bonding and talking.

When it got to her turn to answer she said she never read books and wasn’t interested in them and she couldn’t remember ever writing anything, and what was the point of all this? Really, she was just a great, glowering black hole in the room, sucking everyone else’s creativity and enthusiasm into it, and clearly she intimidated the life out of the others for it was like getting blood out of a stone to get them to say anything.

To lighten things up I made a little joke about Devino being a good name for a writer, because having a name near the beginning of the alphabet meant you were usually on the first couple of bookshop shelves nearest the door, and that was it – a red rag to bully Luella. Clearly, being Whimpergreen and the last one to be called for anything in school had rankled all her life, though I should think no one would have picked her anyway if she had always looked like that.

She tossed her pencil down so hard it ricocheted off the table and nearly hit the woman opposite, who had to duck. Luella said she wasn’t getting anything from the session and it was a complete waste of her valuable time, and then stormed out, leaving a nasty silence.