Sorry Isn't Good Enough
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Synopsis
'One of the best books I have ever read. More like this please JANE BAILEY' NetGalley Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
1966. Nine-year-old Stephaniehas an emotionally absent mum, a limp, and a manipulative friend who walks all over her.But everything changes when Stephanie strikes up a relationship with Mr Man, who always seems pleased to see her. Finally, it seems she has a genuine friend.
When Stephanie's friend goes missing in the woods, no one in the neighbourhood appears to know what has happened to her, but someone is lying...
1977. Stephanie has spent her life trying to bury the events of that terrible summer. When a man starts following her on the train home from London, she suspects the dark truth of what happened may have finally caught up with her.
Praise for Sorry Isn't Good Enough:
'Gripping and surprising, and at turns chilling and heartbreaking' Melanie Golding
'This was a fantastic book. This gripping thriller is a masterclass in tension' NetGalley Reviewer,⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'Bittersweet and touching' Amanda Reynolds
'You will be hooked and not want it to finish' NetGalley Reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'Touching and gripping - a story that will stay with me' Jackie Kabler
'It will stay with me for a very long time' NetGalley Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'Richly-textured, compelling, emotionally complex' Tammy Cohen
'This story was AMAZING' NetGalley Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Publisher: Orion
Print pages: 368
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Sorry Isn't Good Enough
Jane Bailey
I find myself trailing back to those woods over and over. Back, back along the paths that led me there. I was nine years old, and the prospect of telling anyone was unthinkable. I thought I’d successfully blocked it out for thirty years. But something has just happened to jolt me out of this delusion. And now I’m running. I’m running down the platform on Paddington station in my stockinged feet.
Less than an hour ago I was the headline speaker at The Dolphin Project conference in a smart London hotel. Everything had gone better than I’d expected, and I was taking questions when a woman at the back asked me a question I had hoped never to hear. She took me completely by surprise.
‘Do you think your development of this project is in any way connected to your own traumatic childhood?’ I went over suddenly on my right heel. I knew I couldn’t wear stilettos. What a fool I’d been to imagine I could pull off the look. I had no doubt that the question had been intended to trip me up. ‘I mean, as I understand it, you were implicated in a notorious murder when you were nine. Is that right?’
The words I had prepared to say at the end of my talk seemed to pile up at the roadblock of her question. They formed a tailback down my throat. All the clever things I had imagined saying, choking me into silence.
The woman who had introduced me sprang into action. ‘I think that may be a question for another time. Now, we can fit in just one more question … Yes, man at the back in the blue jacket.’
It was another unexpected topic, and I thought it suggested he knew something about my children, but I fumbled my way through an answer. I was so shaken up that I didn’t hang around afterwards, although lots of kind people came up to me to discuss ideas. I darted for the exit and got in the first taxi I could flag down for Paddington.
As soon as I was at the station I allowed myself to relax a little. The truth is, I’m something of a hick from the sticks, and I was feeling quite cosmopolitan standing there looking at the board for train departures, hundreds of people of all nationalities milling around me. I’d been to the conference in my new role as leader of The Dolphin Project for young people. I thought, I’m one of them. I belong to this bunch of busy, worldly individuals. I felt anonymous rather than invisible.
And it was while I was immersed in this special glow that I spotted a man staring at me from about twenty metres away by the warm baguette stall. I ignored him at first, telling myself he must have mistaken me for someone else. The next time I looked he was still eyeing me, and I wondered if this was how it happened, this was how you got ‘picked up’ by a stranger, how love stories started. But of course I knew that wasn’t going to happen to me. This was some weirdo. Or perhaps he was the man standing next to that journalist who’d asked me the last question. It was. It was him. I looked back at the screen. Platform Five. Good.
I started to make my way to the gate when he leant in front of me, almost standing in my path. ‘Stephanie Townsend?’
I looked directly at him, and wondered if there might be something familiar about the eyes. I was about to speak when I remembered another man leaning against a wall once, saying my name with that exact questioning tone, and it sent a ripple of terror through me. I said nothing.
‘I thought it was you,’ he said.
He followed me through the ticket gate, feeding his ticket in like me. I could feel the pulse in my temples.
‘We should talk.’ He took hold of my arm and I yanked it away, panicking now.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, turning myself away, heading down the platform.
I walked briskly and painfully in my unfamiliar heels, passing the first carriage, and the second. He followed.
‘I know what happened. I’m—’
The tannoy cut in with a loud, grating announcement: ‘The train now standing at Platform Five …’
That’s when I took off my shoes and started to run.
My earliest memories of Dawn Webster must be from reception class, in 1961. I have a vivid memory of her mother bending down to hug her at the school gates and calling her ‘poppet’. My own mother lets go of my hand and tells me she’ll be there to pick me up later. To the amazement of our mothers, we start to seek each other out in the playground, and we are inseparable for years.
Dawn wants my loyalty; I want her mother.
Dawn is short, spiteful and smart. She is spoilt and prone to tantrums. I think I know this straight away, from the way she arches her back when she stands. She is tightly sprung. ‘Whatever do you see in Dawn?’ Mummy asks, bewildered. I want to tell her – because it’s simple – but I can’t articulate it. Dawn gives me the time of day; she seeks me out. I am flattered. I want to please her, because when I please Dawn, the world is a better place for a short while. ‘You let her walk all over you,’ says Mummy. ‘You can’t say “no” to her. You’re like someone half-baked.’ But Dawn likes me, I think. Which is more than can be said for Mummy. Nothing I do seems to please her. Also, seeing a lot of Dawn means I get to see more of her mother, who calls me poppet.
We are different to other people. It’s possible that my father, lay preacher and Bible class teacher for the Church of the Three in One, has made up this church himself, because no one else I know goes to it. Dawn, for example, goes to a different Sunday school sometimes, at the end of Plum Lane. So does everyone else. Or else they don’t go anywhere and have a free Sunday. In any case, it makes us different. Every week we press our knees into the hard prayer cushions that Mummy puts out with some other women in hats, then I go to Sunday school.
We don’t have a television. Daddy thinks they ‘brainwash’ you. And Mummy agrees. Dawn watches television, and saves milk bottle tops for Blue Peter and gets to help choose a dog’s name. So does everyone else. I see Blue Peter as a fairly tall boy, painted in the same pale blue as the Websters’ front door, who organises things in a good cause. It’s not until Dawn lets me watch her television in secret (her mother says best not tell Daddy she let me watch it) that I realise it’s a cheery children’s television show, with pets, news and, best of all, instructions on how to make wonderful things from bits and bobs. Later, I make a tie rack for Daddy out of a cornflake packet, and he says I have a good imagination. Of course, my creation is not as good as the one made on the television, because I have no sticky-backed plastic to cover it with. It has a cockerel on the side, though, and half a bowl of cornflakes, which look quite nice.
Dawn has three teddy bears to my one. Mine is called Trevor, after next door’s rabbit who died, and he is threadbare with cuddling. Hers are called Teddy Stroud, Teddy Gloucester and Teddy Hackney, after the places they came from. All their fur is intact.
I know very early on that Dawn has a cruel side. From the way she steps on ants and caterpillars for fun, to the way she happily blames me for stealing apples from the orchard. Her father, who is a short, angry man, is so furious about the owner of the orchard abutting his garden making complaints about stealing, that he cannot let the matter go. He bawls at Dawn until she’s red and shaking and tells him it was my idea.
‘You!’ he shouts, pointing a finger with wide, stumpy nails, just like Dawn’s, but larger. ‘You, of all people! I expected more from you, Stephanie Townsend. You wait until your father hears about this!’ I’m sure I detect a look of satisfaction on his face when he says this. It’s useless to protest. I’ve learnt this. I look at Dawn, but she looks wronged, for all the world like someone who didn’t call me a wimp for not wanting to join her in scrabbling through the hedge at the bottom of her garden and gathering apples in our skirts. I have the measure of Dawn, but still I am loyal to her.
Dawn says she’s a ‘Cockney’, which sounds like something you would keep in a hen coop, but she says it with such pride that it makes me wish I was one too. I don’t know what I am, apart from a freak. She plays with me even though I have a wonky walk caused by a disease when I was little. This is because Daddy didn’t believe in vaccination because God said it wasn’t okay. And Mummy agreed. God decides what diseases we get. So I got a disease and I ‘drag’ my foot. Daddy does believe in vaccination now, and Mummy does too. So Jonathan got vaccinated and he walks like a normal person.
Daddy is always happy to sing me to sleep with hymns and he always has hugs for me. It’s not that I don’t want them – I need them – it’s that I need Mummy’s hugs more. I have to hang onto what I have, though. Mummy hugs Jonathan. Daddy hugs me. I know it’s fair, but it doesn’t feel like it. I watch Mummy carefully, and she takes her lead from Daddy when it comes to things like God and so on. So I try to be like her. I find church a bit like school, full of rules it seems impossible to make sense of. Not being worthy to gather up the crumbs under God’s table makes as much sense as our teacher telling us not to stand with our hands in our pockets. But I try to learn everything I’m taught anyway, and I can parrot the parables to impress Daddy. I need his approval, because it’s all there is. I don’t see that the more he praises me, the less she wants to. Or if I see it, I make no connection. I just keep on digging myself in deeper.
When Daddy accosts me about stealing apples from the orchard (Mr Webster has been treacherous and told him), I speak honestly.
‘It was Dawn’s idea. I didn’t know there was an orchard there. She told me the owner didn’t mind and she’d done it before.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ says Daddy. He is still cross with me, and gives me a slap on the leg for stealing.
I say I’m sorry, but Mummy says, ‘Sorry isn’t good enough.’ She wheels that phrase out every time I apologise, but I’ve never been brave enough to ask her what would be good enough. The worst thing, though, is that Daddy forbids me from playing with Dawn again, as she is ‘a bad influence’. And Mummy agrees.
Well, he can’t stop me from playing with her at school, where I’m endlessly delighted by her mischief and daring. One playtime, she spots that Miss Worth has popped into the infants’ toilets when there’s no one in them. She wears flat brown lace-up shoes and has a furry face.
‘Bet she’s taking a piss!’ says Dawn, nudging me. ‘Let’s go and look.’
I follow her into the toilets, which are in a block in the playground. There is a row of four cubicles, and one is in use. Dawn widens her eyes at me, then kneels down and bends her head to floor level, taking a peek under the toilet door. She turns back to me, grinning. ‘Go on!’ she mouths. I do the same.
There is our elderly teacher, her flesh-coloured knickers around her knees, suspenders exposed, her skirt gathered in her lap. I can only assume that she must have had her eyes closed in concentration when Dawn looked, because now her pinprick pupils focus on me, and her purse-string mouth tightens bitterly. I get up quickly, and we run out into the playground, where we hoot and giggle. I don’t believe we’ve got away with it, and we haven’t. For whatever reason, Miss Worth only picks on me, for being ‘rude and disgusting at playtime’. I am invited out to the front of class after break and given the ruler ten times across my palms and ten times across my knuckles. I set my mouth in a rigid line. I don’t cry. Mummy says crying is weak and manipulative. I am four years old, and I have already taught myself not to cry.
If Dawn thinks it’s not fair that I got punished when she didn’t, she doesn’t say so. When I show her my sore hands and say I wish Miss Worth would die, she says, ‘Fuck her.’
‘Miss Worth is a stupid kant,’ says Dawn, and I agree. We don’t know what this word means, or even that we both have one, we just know that it’s something like a person who is really horrible. I also know it’s French, because when Dawn’s dad was talking about how he called his boss at work a stupid kant, he said, ‘Excuse my French.’ Speaking a foreign language comes in handy when people annoy us.
I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me when I overhear Miss Worth talking to my mother after school. I’m tidying the folders when she says in a low voice:
‘Stephanie is a very strange child, Mrs Townsend. There is something very odd about her. Very, very odd.’
Do they think I’m deaf as well as odd? I’m just on the other side of the classroom with my back to them. Grown-ups can be so dense. The turned back is such an easy trick.
‘What’s she done?’
‘Well, I’m sorry to say, she looked under the door while I was … spending a penny.’
‘Really? I’m so sorry! That’s shocking.’
Mummy yanks me by the hand and walks me home in silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, but it isn’t good enough, because she still seems cross. Because I am odd and shocking.
Our house, with its 1950s bay window and garage, is the first one in the crescent, and so at an angle to Napier Road, appearing to face up the road as we walk down it. Whenever I see it there, waiting for me at the end of a school day, I feel a sense of relief. It has different moods, though. Sometimes it seems to welcome me as I come through the door; other times it sighs, ‘Not you again.’ Either way, I like the familiarity of it. The smell of the floor polish on the hall tiles, the shoes that stand in pairs or on their sides or piled up, high heels and fluffy slippers, offering different possibilities, different roles I can try out. I like the dining room with the toy cupboard that Mummy made, the red carpet she fitted, the black china horse on the mantelpiece – Mummy’s pride and joy – and the wireless on the sideboard with its two knobs like eyes and its wide smiley tuning dial mouth. I don’t like the cruel drawers of the sideboard that contain scratchy hairbrushes and fearsome elastic bands to tie back my hair. I don’t go in the ‘front room’ much, except to read comics, unless it’s the weekend and that’s the room where the fire is made. The bathroom is far and above the most troublesome room in the house. The sink, of course, is where I can wash myself clean. But the curtains are white with spiteful green spots that make them look diseased, like they have a rash. Or else they’re watching me, staring with hundreds of tiny eyes. My own room is the best, because that’s where Trevor lies: my bear, waiting for a cuddle. Trevor always loves me, no matter what. A bit like Jesus, really, only I prefer Trevor. Jesus doesn’t have fur, and I suspect he’s a bit of a clever Dick. He may be a bit smug, too. I feel bad even thinking that, but he does sometimes look smug in pictures. Trevor isn’t smug. He doesn’t expect anything from me, except cuddles.
Sometimes at the weekend, when we are all in the front room because of the fire, I feel as if we’ve all been glued into place: Daddy and Mummy on the sofa, me and Jonathan in the chairs or on the floor. I wonder if we’re really all made of wood or plasticine, and just being moved around by a giant child, who seems to have forgotten about us today.
Things don’t get much better in the class after reception. I’m determined to make an impression on Miss Maddison, who is dark and squat with a line of fur over her top lip. Which I like. I like fur. Although her hair is dark, she has pale, bloodless skin and her forehead looks like a lined parsnip. However, after finding out that we’re going to do Tens and Units this year, I promptly go down with measles, and I miss how to do them. When I come back, she makes no allowances.
‘What is the difference between eleven and twenty-two?’ she asks the class. Nobody says anything. Clearly this is a hard question. Then she writes the numbers on the board in squeaky chalk. We’re asked to work it out in our books. But I don’t need to. I look at the ones, I look at the twos. I know! I know the answer! I put my hand up, tentatively.
‘Stephanie?’
I take in a big breath.
‘Stephanie? Do you or don’t you know the difference between eleven and twenty-two?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it, then?’
I prepare myself for her congratulations. ‘Twenty-two is more curly,’ I say, trying to control my satisfaction.
There is silence. Someone stifles a giggle. Someone else guffaws, and tries to hide it in a sneeze, as Miss Maddison’s face becomes darker and darker. Her eyebrows knit, her mouth purses up.
‘Mock me, would you, Stephanie Townsend?’
I have no idea what ‘mock’ means, and conjure up images of Mummy’s mock cream, which is made of custard and icing sugar. I don’t think I’d like to cover Miss Maddison in mock cream.
I shake my head, but it’s no use. I’m rapped over the knuckles ten times with the wooden ruler and sent to stand in the corner. I should have known it was too easy. I will always be wrong. With my back to the class, I allow the tears to well up. No one can see. One spills over treacherously and makes my cheek sore. I hear her tell the class they can find the difference by doing a subtraction using tens and units. She’s showing them the secret. I revise the image of mock cream. I’d like to squash a plate of it in Miss Maddison’s face like a custard pie.
Miss Maddison is delighted to be able to tell my mother that I’m ‘not the full shilling’, but still I feel she was hoping for something more, something to better the reception class teacher in terms of my weirdness. Even Daddy thinks the curly twenty-twos is funny. When Mummy tells him, he roars with laughter. ‘You have to hand it to her, Kath, twenty-two is curly!’ He chortles and slaps his knee, and I’m pleased because I’m funny.
I don’t feel so funny later in the term when Miss Maddison manages to trump even Miss Worth. We’ve been doing very simple ‘verbal reasoning’. We aren’t very good at full sentences yet, so most of the questions need just one-word answers. The one that I don’t see coming, the trap I fall into like a baby elephant, involves some rubbish or other about a boy called Brian who is very mean and doesn’t share. The question is, ‘Why doesn’t Brian share his toys?’ and the answer goes in a space after, ‘Because Brian is …’
It’s not until I am kept behind after school and Mummy is brought in that I suspect something is up. Even then, I’m not expecting the word my teacher uses about me – ‘depraved’ (which means nothing to me) – to mean so much to my mother. She is shown what I have written. Miss Maddison’s look is definitely one of spiteful glee as my mother silently views the answer in my neat handwriting. After slapping a hand over her mouth, Mummy exclaims that we never use words like that at home, that she can’t think where I could have picked it up. I now know it must be to do with dirt, or women’s bits, which are the same thing. Of course, Mummy knows exactly where I picked it up, although she probably doesn’t know it’s French.
Not long after that, I find out something important about Mummy and why I don’t please her. Dawn is allowed to play with me to help out her mummy, who has had a baby called Karen. I feel sorry for Dawn because she’s no longer the centre of attention. Karen is instead, and Dawn has to make do with a few crumbs of poppety-ness. I think Mummy must feel a tiny bit sorry for her too, because she lets her come over a lot, and gives us both jelly babies. So Dawn and I are unstoppable.
We get bored with playing on the swing, so we try to climb up the sloping swing poles instead, pretending we’re on a climbing frame. When we get our feet off the ground we stop and look at each other. ‘It’s a funny feeling, isn’t it?’ she says.
‘Yes. Funny but nice.’
We stay there for a while, perched just above the ground and enjoying this new discovery of the pole between our legs, when Mummy comes out.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’
I scramble down and try to explain so that she won’t be cross. ‘We were just doing funny-but-nice,’ I say.
‘You what?’
‘Funny-but-nice.’ I touch myself where it feels nice by way of explanation. ‘When we climb up the pole it feels nice here.’
‘Stop that! Stop it! Don’t be so filthy!’
The look of disgust on her face makes my throat ache. I swallow hard. So, I am filthy. This is a clue. This is why Mummy doesn’t love me as much as Jonathan. She sends Dawn packing and rushes into the kitchen to clean down some surfaces with her antiseptic Dettol. I go to the bathroom and wash my hands, without being asked, and tell Mummy.
‘Good,’ she says, her mouth a tight seam as she puts the potatoes on to boil, and I know then that I’m still dirty.
While all this is going on, Mummy continues to attack germs wherever they might be hiding, and it’s amazing where they are. One day, when we have a neighbour round, she lifts me onto her hip and I find myself squishing her breasts to see how spongy they are.
‘Don’t be so dirty!’ she snaps, and I’m left bewildered, and when I get down, I go and wash my hands, and tell her that I’ve done it.
Another time, there’s a picture of an actress on the front page of Daddy’s newspaper. The woman has a low-necked dress which shows off her bosom. She grabs the paper and tears it out. ‘Filthy slut!’ she hisses. ‘Filthy!’
There it is again, that word. Filthy. Like me.
‘Am I a slut?’ I ask.
Mummy screws the offending picture into a ball, which she throws into the wastepaper bin. ‘Not if I can help it,’ she says.
I only half realise, then, that germs are a complex mix of sex (women’s bits) and dirt. I am learning to associate the two.
Germs are invisible, Mummy says, and can spread easily by ‘catamination’. I pull up something to stand on by the sink so that I can carefully turn on the taps. Then, with my newly washed hands, I feel close to tears as I realise I have to turn the taps off again, which means I could pick up the germs that I left on the taps when I turned them on. Sometimes, when I come home from school, I hold my thumbs folded inside closed fists. When my parents ask me what’s wrong, I can’t look at them. There’s a blur across my eyes, but I mustn’t cry.
I become ever more skilled at washing my hands. I learn to turn the taps on with my elbows so that I won’t pass the germs onto the taps. But there are new horrors in store. The germs, the ‘filth’ I am guilty of, clearly has something to do with ‘naughty bits’. I try hard to avoid them, but a boy in our class, Steven Willis, decides to show me and Dawn his willy one playtime. After that, I feel certain he’s cataminated. This means that if I ever touch him, or he touches me, I will be too, with new germs. It seems easy enough to avoid him, but no. Not so simple. Everything he touches becomes cataminated: the desk, his chair, the crayons, and so on. There is no end to the terror.
Things sometimes become so intense and frustrating that I have to find a way out of the horror in my head. There are two ways I have. The first is to rock my head from side to side when I go to bed. If I keep this up long enough, I can almost empty my head of thoughts. It makes me dizzy, but it doesn’t really work for long. It’s too exhausting. The other way I invented out of pure desperation. If my mother comes to say goodnight to me (it’s usually Daddy, but it has to be Mummy for this to work), then I ask her to smooth her hands, back and front, on the white candlewick bedspread. After this laying on of hands, I do the same, in the same spot, thus absorbing her cleanliness and purity. Hey presto! I am clean. This little magic trick only works if Mummy is willing. She certainly finds it daft, but I think she goes along with it because it seems to have a positive effect on me.
Round about this time I start having ‘dreams’, which I somehow know are bad. They take place, interestingly, in the building used for the Church of the Three in One Sunday school (a long, thin room next to the small church hall). Basically, I enter the building and I’m put on a conveyor belt. Every now and then there are ‘stops’ on the conveyor belt, and something is done to me. For example, Steven Willis or the grocery delivery boy might touch me in my funny-but-nice place. Eventually I am taken to one of several rooms off the main room, where a man in a white coat does something to me. This usually involves me being completely passive.
Guilt is never far from my thoughts. One night, when I’m in bed, Mummy wonders why I look so miserable. I can’t explain. So she tells me in her kindest Mummy voice that I can always talk to Jesus. She assures me that this is very easy, because Jesus knows everything in my head already, so I won’t need to explain everything. This is terrifying news. I’m filthy and disgusting and Jesus knows. He knows everything in my head. Now I’m in real trouble.
There’s a picture of Jesus at the top of our stairs, carrying a lantern and looking holy and a bit sad. I keep checking on him to see if his expression has changed, staying awake as long as I can, trying to think what I can do about the germs in my thoughts. The next morning after breakfast, when Daddy is in the bathroom, I ask Mummy for help.
‘Can we have a television?’
‘No. All they do is brainwash you.’
She brushes my hair firmly. I knew she would say this.
‘But I think I would like my brain to be washed.’
She yanks my head back with the brushstrokes.
‘Wouldn’t you like me to have a clean brain, Mummy?’
‘Don’t be cheeky.’
The words cut into the soft flesh of my hope.
I don’t know how not to be a disappointment to her. I have never stopped hoping for signs of my mother’s love. My heavy, blundering hope. Sometimes this wretched hopefulness pulls me along like a giant dog on a lead, and other times it stops at a lamp post and holds me back just as I’ve got into my stride. I don’t want to have the responsibility for it, but it keeps on pestering, eager and panting, until I take it out again.
‘Mummy …’
‘Get your coat on.’
‘You look really pretty in that dress, Mummy.’
She goes to retrieve Jonathan from the kitchen and puts him in the pram. ‘Come on, we’ll be late for school.’
Napier Road has rows of terraced houses with tiny front gardens just big enough to house a dustbin, a pram and a bicycle. They lead down to the old railway cutting, which is covered in long grass and full of coppery slow-worms and adders. The railway track threads through the grassy banks, joining one small, forgotten town to the next, through hills of tatty, smiling sheep, slowly hiding itself in undergrowth like a snake in the grass. Trains used to go up and down the track but they don’t any more. I miss the sound of their chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh when I’m sitting quietly at home. Off Napier Road, with its ragged terraces curling down to the old railway, is the recently built Greenfield Crescent, with farmland behind it. The crescent is where I live, in a semi-detached house with a proper front garden and a proper back garden. There is even a garage, although Daddy doesn’t believe in cars, because they’re dangerous. Mummy doesn’t believe in them either because Daddy doesn’t believe in them, but also because they cost a ruddy fortune. There are a lot of rich people in the country led by someone called Muck Melon, who is the Prime Minister.
‘Bloody Muck Melon!’ says Daddy over his newspaper.
‘Mind your language!’ hisses Mummy. I assume this is because Daddy says the word ‘muck’, which is clearly full of germs.
The people who live in Napier Road are envious of the people who live in Greenfield Crescent. I don’t see this when I’m five, so when Dawn tells me her Daddy owns a huge factory that makes aeroplanes, I believe her.
‘What does your daddy do?’
I have to think about this very hard, because I’m not sure. ‘He works in a shorance.’
‘What’s a shorance?’
‘I’m not sure. I think it’s a big building – a huge building – where he keeps people out of danger.’
‘What sort of danger?’
‘Accidents – where people get run over and crushed, and fires . . .
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