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‘To be poor and look poor is the devil outright.’ I knew then I would not go on the outing with my friends. I wished Amy would come home, she would get my ticket. She had been on one outing for a day and another for a week, both for starving dockers’ children. She just joined on the end of the queues and when the woman said Amy didn’t look very starving, Amy still didn’t run home in tears, she just acted her part out.
    I went to see my friends off hoping that the woman at the brakes would see me and insist on my going, but Ivy was watching me carefully and I knew she would tell the woman I was rich, so I looked the other way when the woman smiled at me. I went home feeling I was happier when I didn’t know I was rich. Mother said, ‘Disappointments are good for young people,’ which stemmed my tears because I felt angry.
    One day the Sunday School included in an outing Len and Amy who left in the early morning with their sandwiches and a whole penny each to spend. The excursion was cancelled at the last minute but the vicar threw open the vicarage gardens for the children. Amy persuaded Len to spend his money while she was spending hers and finally they went home. ‘Did you enjoy the day at the sea?’ asked Mother innocently. ‘Oh, yes,’ cried Amy, ‘It was lovely.’ Then you are a little liar,’ Mother said, ‘for I have been watching you from the bedroom window.’ Amy had forgotten that Mother could see across the railway to the vicarage gardens. Mother reproved her, and off Amy went to bed in a temper. First Amy paid a visit to Mother’s room and tore the velvet off Mother’s best hat, then satisfied she went to bed. Father grumbled at Amy for her sins, then she crept to his chest of drawers and tore into little squares some photographs Dad’s best friend had taken of him. She did not put them down the lavatory through fright as I would have done. She laid them all out in his drawer so he could see them. Although I knew she was beyond the pale for the terrible revenges she took on those who crossed her, I thought she was as brave as any war heroine and I was secretly jealous of her. I could never have faced Mother’s, ‘Oh, Amy, Amy, how can you be so unkind?’ I would have drowned in my tears, whereas Amy was pleased to the last. She would have made a wonderful suffragette.

Chapter 6
A Winkle-Eyed Lot
    The Great War, or the 1914 war as we called it, the birth of my youngest sister, and starting school for the first time are all wrapped up in the same memories and I never knew which was the worst thing out of these three.
    My father arrived at Valetta on the day that Marjorie was born and so she received the middle name of Valetta. I didn’t know whether it was in honour of the War, the place or my father. I was very jealous that my young sister was famous because of her name, and I was annoyed that she had been born at all. When people would say, ‘Little Marjorie Valetta, a war baby,’ or Mother would say her last baby, little Marjorie, was a war baby, they all seemed to say it so proudly, and little Marjorie would look all modest. Yet I knew she felt pleased and famous, and I used to grit my teeth because I always wanted to say, ‘Only just,’ which would have earned me a sad glance from Mother.
    I have hazy visions of my father going off ‘to the front’ for before leaving Mother in tears she had to help him lay all his kit out in the little back yard so it could be checked and inspected by him in a military fashion.
    He didn’t have to go to war, he was forty-nine and too old, but he had joined the Territorials to get a holiday each year and when war broke out, feeling guilty that he would have had a holiday without fighting, he volunteered for the Royal Fusiliers in London and gave his age as forty-six. Mother said he shouldn’t go, but Father felt he must. He couldn’t go back to