7.

Barney

We now had four dogs: two lurchers and two boxers. Bertie was golden, Cindy was brindle, both Candy and Flossy were red and white. Bertie was still aloof and wary of children. Cindy was a trash bin for leftover food and constantly on the search for something revolting to eat, preferably excrement. Candy and Flossy were sedate and sensible, apart from when they were excited.

Then Barney arrived. He was a gleaming ebony lurcher puppy who had found his way into my mother’s car when she was visiting a litter of Bertie’s puppies.

He was kind, and he was tolerant, so we took full advantage. I lay all over him, playing with him, kissing him, stroking him, until Dad declared, “For God’s sake, leave that poor puppy alone. He needs a rest. Hurrumph,” and then, under his breath: “We all do. Go and read a book, why don’t you?”

Andrew was sitting on the floor, eating something he’d found under the table. I was wearing my favorite multicolored checked jacket, which must have been bought in America. I tugged it down with both hands at the front, something I’d seen people do when they made a deal, and headed out of the back door. I signaled for Andrew to follow me.

Moments later, I could feel his hot breath on the side of my face.

“I’m scared,” he said. “How are we going to get down?”

I had laid my jacket carefully on a straw bale at ground level because this was a climb that was unsuitable for business attire. We were now some twenty feet above the ground, on the second-from-top row of bales in the barn. Earlier that week, I had noticed a rope attached to the metal rafters and a plan had hatched. The rope was an invitation.

“Don’t be wet.” I adopted my cool, older-sister voice. “You’ve seen Tarzan. How do you think we’re going to get down?”

I flicked my head toward the rope. Andrew said nothing, but I knew he’d do whatever I did. The fact that we both might die didn’t occur to him. He didn’t do logic.

I adjusted my lucky red neckerchief, sized up the leap and the angle I would have to hit the rope, spat on my hands and launched myself at it. Andrew screamed.

I hit the rope just right, gripped tight and swung to the other side of the barn. I kicked off the bales, swung back again and was sitting beside my brother, laughing, before he had got to the “m” of “scream.”

“Easy-peasy,” I said. “It’s all about timing.”

I took Andrew’s pudgy little hand in mine. It felt clammy. He looked at me with baleful eyes.

“Do I have to do it?” he asked, voice quivering.

“If you want me ever to recognize you as my brother, yes, you do,” I replied.

It seemed a fair enough request.

I showed him once more how to jump off the bales, grab the rope and swing. This time, I slid down a bit and then, hand over fist, lowered myself to the ground. I stood, feet wide apart like a cowboy, looking up at him. Now he would have to jump, because there was no other way of getting down.

Half an hour later, having exhausted my persuasive vocabulary, I walked away and left him there. If he wouldn’t jump, he’d have to stay put. Tough luck.

By lunchtime, my mother had noticed he was missing. He was usually the first at the kitchen table.

“Where’s your brother?”

“Who?” I said. I had already cut him out of my life. He was no brother to me.

“Andrew—where is he?”

“Dunno.”

Mum headed out of the back door, across the gravel parking lot, past the row of four stables and down the slope that led to Hollowshot Lane. I followed at a distance, interested to observe the maternal instinct of a bloodhound. She found him, sobbing, where I had abandoned him.

“There you are,” she said, with a hint of surprise. “Now what sort of a pickle have you got yourself into?”

Andrew couldn’t really speak, he was crying so much. He was terrified, and hungry.

Mum stood on the barn floor with her arms outstretched, begging him to jump.

“I’ll catch you,” she promised.

Andrew eyed her from above. He was paralyzed. Mum continued to bargain with him until, eventually, he inched himself to the edge of the straw bale.

“You won’t catch me, Mummy. You can’t. I’ll use the rope like Clare did.”

“Clare?” My mother sounded surprised. “Did Clare know you were here?”

“She made me come up here,” he answered.

Well, that sealed my fate. I thought it hardly my fault that I had foreseen Andrew’s keenness to follow me up the mountain but had failed to anticipate his lily-livered attitude to coming down. I hid behind a wheelbarrow as my mother called my name. She was not doing so in a friendly manner.

Soon, Mum turned her attention back to getting Andrew down. She spoke to him softly, coaxing him to jump. Her arms were once again outstretched, but Andrew remained suspicious.

“Come on, darling. On three,” Mum called up. “One. Two. Three!”

This time, Andrew launched himself like a big lump of rock toward the rope. His fat little fingers grasped it and he started to slide down. I was now running toward the barn, crying.

“Put one hand over the other, don’t slide! It’ll burn!”

I was right, but it was too late. Andrew let go. He fell faster than my mother could move back into position to catch him and, as he hit the ground, we all heard the crack.

Andrew spent the next month in plaster, his leg broken in two places. Mum pushed him around in a stroller, his leg sticking straight out in front of him. I have a sneaky suspicion that he quite enjoyed all the attention, until his leg got itchy inside the cast. I offered to scratch it for him with a knife, but my mother intervened and effectively put a restraining order on me. I was not allowed within ten feet of my brother.

~

It was the summer of 1979. Mum had taken us down to Glorious Goodwood for the first time. We spent the first two afternoons on the beach at West Wittering, and then we were allowed to go to the races. Even though our father was a trainer, Andrew and I did not go racing often: my mother did not believe in children being in the office, and the racecourse was my father’s office—as well as the yard, the gallops and the office itself.

Anyway, on this occasion, we were allowed to go racing, and I remember it clearly for a horse called Kris. We stood on the rails about two furlongs from home and, as the horses cantered down to the start, I said I liked the one in the orange colors.

“Apricot,” my mother corrected me. “Those are Lord Howard de Walden’s colors.”

They looked orange to me, and they were easy to spot. When the field came back past us, they were flying. I had never seen horses travel so fast, and I was thrilled by the sound they made—I could hear the jockeys shouting at each other, the hooves thundering and the whips cracking. For the first time in my life, racing had made my heart pound. As the field came by again, I could see the orange/apricot colors of Kris surging clear. He won easily and was crowned champion miler of 1979.

The trip to Goodwood was a fun diversion from “the move.”

The main house that went with the stables—Park House—had lain empty for a couple of years, and my parents decided that it made sense to sell The Lynches and put the money into converting the fourteen-bedroom house that adjoined the yard into a more manageable family home. So they divided it into two, making the back end of it—where my mother and her brothers had lived with Nanny—into permanent staff accommodation. The front end had five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a sitting room, a drawing room, a dining room and a playroom. Even at half the size of the whole house, our end was still enormous.

My parents explained to the dogs what was going to happen. Andrew and I listened carefully, so we knew our parents were taking us all to Park House to have a look around.

The dimensions were amazing, with huge bay windows and high ceilings. You could play tennis in the drawing room. I know because we tried.

I ran up the stairs, with Barney bounding ahead of me and Flossy puffing behind, to check out the bedrooms.

“Don’t take the dogs up there,” my mother shouted from the hall with a sigh that said she knew it was too late. “Yours is the room on the left.”

I walked into the biggest bedroom I had ever seen, with a sash window in three sections looking southward toward Cottington Hill. It was the same view I had had from my cupboard at The Lynches, but it seemed so much larger; instead of looking at the television antenna from the same height, I was now looking up at it. The hill seemed the size of a mountain from down here.

My new bedroom had a sink in the corner. This gave me real pleasure, as it meant that my toothpaste was now safe from my brother’s habit of squeezing it in the middle and not putting the top back on.

Having paced out my bedroom and discovered that it was exactly five times as big as the cupboard I’d had as my room at The Lynches, I explored the rest of upstairs. There was a wide flight of five stairs leading up to another landing, with an enormous mirror on the wall ahead. To the left was the room that had belonged to my grandparents and would now be my parents’. There was a third door on this level, and it was closed. It was stiff and creaky and, as I pushed it back, a layer of dust was blown up in the breeze. On the shelves were rows of shoes, covered in a thick film of dust.

There were brown-leather brogues, black dress shoes, heavy shoes with steel-capped heels, jodhpur boots, long, black hunting boots and velvet slippers. It was a museum of carefully stitched, long-unworn, handmade shoes—the shoes of a man who had long since left us.

Grandma had moved her things out to the Pink Palace, but she had left this strange memorial to her late husband. I closed the door and wondered whether to tell my mother. For some reason, I thought the sight of her father’s shoes might upset her.

The next time I opened that door, the space had been transformed into an airing cupboard. I don’t know where the shoes went.

We went from a cut-off, quiet existence to being at the heart of everything that was happening.

The “Old Kitchen,” where my grandmother’s cook had toiled away in the dark, was turned into a utility room, and a new kitchen was built on the north side of the house, looking out over the driveway and next to the office. This became the hub, with an endless stream of people coming through the back door.

Breakfast at Park House was like going to the theater. It was a mini-drama every morning, with the regulars—my father, his assistant trainer, my mother, a nanny or au pair and us—joined by an ever-changing cast of extras. Owners who had come to see their horses, a jockey riding work, pupil assistants, visiting foreign students, family members—all played their part. When we were more than eight for breakfast, which was often, we moved into the dining room, where there was a little hole in the wall connecting it to the kitchen so food could be passed through.

Andrew and I reveled in our new surroundings. We had a flat lawn for the first time, and it was as big as a football field. We built a Grand National assault course from old doors, tires and branches for Barney to learn to jump. He followed us like a lamb, jumping up at my arm as I ran between “Becher’s Brook” and “the Chair.”

He was so fast and agile that he made it look easy. I struggled to keep up, leaping across the width of a door that was perilously balanced on two croquet hoops. Barney had sailed over, but I banked it, stepping on the middle of the door. It came crashing down on my foot.

“Ow!” I bit my lip as I winced in pain, trying to be brave in front of my little brother. Barney shoved his long nose into my armpit as I sat on the lawn nursing my left foot.

Later that day, when I still couldn’t put any weight on it, my mother took me to Basingstoke Hospital. I had broken my big toe. Andrew had little sympathy.

“Nothing serious then,” my father said when we got home. “You’ll be riding in the morning, won’t you?”

I wasn’t sure whether it was a question or a command but, as it happened, riding didn’t really hurt. Walking did. Running was out of the question. Andrew tried the assault course alone.

“S’not as much fun,” he muttered, and gave up.

We settled into life at Park House quickly, but as it was so close to the racehorses there were strict rules. Andrew and I were not allowed into the yard on our own; we had to have an adult with us at all times. We were not allowed to ride our ponies through the yard, except during breakfast, when all the racehorses were in their stables. We were not allowed to run down the tarmac stretch known as the “Straight Mile.” This was the main thoroughfare between the yards and led to the indoor school and the swimming pool.

We were definitely not allowed in the “Color Room,” where all the silks belonging to Dad’s owners hung in an open closet, as if on display. That was the room where Mill Reef had recovered from his broken leg, and was now the domain of Spider, the Traveling Head Lad. There was a sign on the door telling everyone who entered: “God help anyone who helps themselves to anything in this room.”

In the Color Room, Spider prepared the bag needed for each runner—passport (for the horse, not the jockey); girths; colors; chamois leather, a paper-thin, super-light square of gray polystyrene-type material that acted as a saddlecloth; bridle; grooming kit and bucket. The saddle would belong to the jockey and was as big as the weight being carried by the horse would allow. Some saddles weigh only a pound and are so tiny they are no more than a means of hanging stirrups on either side of a horse’s back.

As for the swimming pool at the far end of the Straight Mile, we didn’t need to be told not to swim in it. It was freezing cold, ten feet deep and circular. Despite a filter system and a boy using a stick with a net to fish out droppings as fast as he could, the water wasn’t exactly crystal clear. There was no chlorine, as that was bad for the horses, and there were often “fragments” floating on the surface.

~

That winter, it snowed. The Downs were covered with a crisp, white duvet and my father decided to take advantage. He did not spend that much time with us as children. We did not go on summer holidays together because he was busy, he was always doing something “important,” and in the winter my parents took a break in Barbados with other adults. Having a holiday with children was not my father’s idea of fun—at least, not until we were old enough to ski.

The snow on the Downs gave him an idea. He told my mother he was taking us sledding. We all climbed into the white Subaru truck, which had its yellow winter shell covering the back of it. Andrew and I shared the front passenger seat and flung our two sleds into the back of the truck. Dad stopped at the garage and picked up two sections of long rope.

“Right, you two—this will be the best fun ever,” he said when we got to the top of the Downs.

The whole place was still: no birdsong, no horses galloping, no people. All was quiet. Dad tied both ropes to the tow bar at the back of the truck and looped them through the front of our sleds.

“Hang on tight,” he said as he climbed back behind the wheel.

The silence of the snow-clad Downs was split by the roar of a Subaru engine and the screams of two children clinging on for dear life. I don’t think my father realized quite how fast it felt behind the truck as he tore up the side of the gallop. Andrew and I kept swinging into one another. The uphill bits were just about manageable but, when we started going downhill, we had no way of stopping ourselves from catching up with the truck. I was terrified we were both going to end up as mashed potatoes underneath the exhaust pipe.

“How’s that! Fun, eh?” Dad shouted out the window. I waved at him, my face fixed in a grimace. Andrew had such a thick Puffa jacket on that he could hardly move. There were tears streaming down his face from the icy-cold wind and exhaust fumes.

“Brilliant. Let’s go again!” Dad was enjoying himself, at least. He put his foot down and took off. Andrew was caught unawares and fell backward as his sled lurched ahead. His legs spun right over the top of his head as he performed a backward roly-poly and was left sitting in the middle of the gallop. I was on the same side of the truck as Dad, so tried waving at him to stop, hoping he would see me in the mirror. He did, but, unfortunately, he thought I was telling him to go faster—so he did. I was screaming with terrified urgency:

“Stop! Stop! We’ve lost Andrew. Daddy, stop.”

All he could hear was the roar of the engine, and all he could see was one child behind him, seemingly having the time of her life. Dad was enjoying the challenge of controlling the four-wheel-drive truck as it slid over the snow and was lost in his own dream sequence, pretending he was a rally driver. Eventually, more than a mile away from where Andrew sat crying in the snow, Dad stopped.

My voice was hoarse from shouting, so all I could do was beckon to him and point at the empty sled beside me. Dad got out of the truck.

“Oh, how did that happen?”

I pointed back down the gallop to a little dot in the snow.

“That’s a shame. He missed the best bit,” Dad said. “Do you want to stay there for the ride back?”

I shook my head as vehemently as I could, and my father looked rather disappointed when I made a run for the passenger seat. Poor Andrew was all cried out by the time we rescued him. Dad pulled him to his feet and told him not to be so pathetic.

My mother, initially delighted that her husband was, for once, wanting to spend time with his children, was not so thrilled when we got back. That was the last time Dad took us anywhere on his own over the Christmas holidays.

~

As well as “the move” to Park House, 1979 was a big year because Andrew went away. At the age of seven, with his freshly cut blond hair and his chubby cheeks, he was deemed old enough for boarding school. He looked so smart in his sweater and tie, with his cap pulled firmly on his head and his socks so high they nearly met his shorts.

When he said good-bye, I’m not sure either of us realized that he wouldn’t be back for weeks. He wasn’t just going to a new school—he was going to prep school, where he would board fulltime.

“He needs the discipline,” I heard my father say. “It’ll make a man of him. It didn’t do me any harm.”

“He’s only seven.” I heard the warm baritone of Dad’s American cousin Uncle David, his voice fluffy round the edges because of his beard. “I’d hang on to this bit as long as you can. He’ll be a man long enough, and you might find you liked him better as a little boy.”

Grandma thought sending Andrew away was a fine idea and couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been packed off to boarding school yet. The truth was that my parents weren’t at all sure any good school would take me. I had had a bit of trouble, you see.

The school for “nice children” had decided that I didn’t really fit in. I was a bit rough around the edges, a bit loud and a bit too inclined to get into a fight. Having been taken away from there hastily, to keep it quiet from my grandmother, I was sent to Kingsclere Primary School. Keeping it quiet didn’t work.

“She’s a tomboy,” my grandmother said, as she dropped two sweeteners into her cup of coffee. (Never sugar, always sweeteners, carried in a little gold pot she kept in her bag.)

“That’s the trouble,” she continued. “She needs to learn a little decorum. Some manners. How to behave like a lady.”

She would never sit down when she popped around for a chat. She always stood and kept her coat on, as if she were too busy to stay. Or as if she would rather be somewhere else.

“I can hear, you know,” I mumbled under my breath as I sat in the corner with Flossy, curling my arms around her and burying my face in her neck.

“She’ll be trouble all her life, I can tell.” Grandma was in full flow now, and my mother knew better than to try to defend me.

“A proper little urchin. No wonder they couldn’t handle her. Well, they’ll sort her out at the village school. Make or break, I’d say, and at least it’s not costing you anything.”

Grandma sighed and glanced at me in the dog bed.

“Bloody waste of money educating girls,” she said. “I mean, beyond reading and writing, what exactly is the point?”

I caught my mother’s eye as she raised her eyebrows.

“Right you are”—this was Grandma’s favorite phrase, a catchall for any situation—“Right you are. I’m off. Let her hair grow a bit, will you?”

She patted Flossy and me on the head as she strode out of the kitchen. As she shut the door, I noticed that my mother stopped grinding her teeth.

So I started midterm at the local primary school. I thought it would be fine, because my best friend, Heather Cox, went there too. Her father worked in the yard and her mother worked for my mother with the ponies and the hunters. We were pretty much the same age and had known each other since we were tiny.

I walked in that first day with Heather by my side, and everyone stared. I smiled and said, generally, to the air around me, “Good morning. How are you?”

There were titters. Snorts of derision.

A girl with earrings bumped into me. I don’t think it was an accident.

“Think you’re better ’n us?” A big boy called Darren was cracking his knuckles.

“Not at all,” I said, as politely as I could. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Most certainly I am.”

My mother had always taught me that good manners would get you out of a sticky situation. For some reason, in this instance, the politest voice I could summon had the opposite effect.

There was a ring of them now, all around me. Heather tried to say something but was pushed out of the way. I motioned to her to get out while she could. They were pulling at my sweater, ruffling my hair, spitting at my shoes. When one girl tried to pull my backpack away, it was as if the pin had been pulled out of my hand grenade. I lost it.

“You bitch,” I shouted. I kicked, I hit, I bit and I took the storm of punches coming back my way without a whimper. I was just beginning to get the situation under control when Mrs. Cook came into the playground.

“And what on earth is going on here?” Her voice did not need a megaphone. She was a human trumpet.

I froze, my fist just above my right ear. The girl with the earrings, who was now on the concrete of the playground on her back, me sitting astride her with my left hand around her throat, started to scream.

“Miss, Miss, she’s trying to kill me,” she said. “I did nuffink. She’s a mentalist.”

The evidence was against me. The crowd had dissipated. There was just me, the girl with the earrings and a boy with a nosebleed, saying, “Miss, she punched me. Look, Miss, blood.”

I could see Heather a few feet away. She tried to stick up for me, but there wasn’t much point. I said nothing. The last time I had tried to be polite it had worked against me.

“You, come with me,” said Mrs. Cook, pointing at me. “Let Joanne get up. Brian, you’ll be fine. It’s just a bit of blood. The rest of you get into class. Now.”

She took me to the headmistress’s office, where she sat me down and gave me a glass of water.

“It’s your first day,” she said. “It will get better, I promise, but fighting is not the answer. Really, it’s not.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Now, go to your first class and try to keep out of trouble. At least for the rest of the day.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, as I crept out of the room.

As I walked into the classroom, late on that first morning, thirty pairs of eyes turned to look at me. I searched for a desk that was free and saw Heather waving at me. She had saved me a place.

As it turned out, the fact that I could punch a boy and make his nose bleed and that I wasn’t frightened of Joanne Jones worked in my favor. My stock had risen considerably that morning. The tough boys avoided me at break time and the girls looked a little wary.

Heather and I sat on the concrete tube in the school yard while younger children climbed through beneath us, eating our chocolate biscuits. I didn’t really care if the rest of the school didn’t want to talk to me, as long as they weren’t trying to rip my backpack off my back.

The evenings and the weekends were hard. I got back from school, and Andrew wasn’t there. We may have had our fights, but he was my partner in crime. We didn’t have to explain things to each other, or apologize, or feel awkward. Andrew was the only person in front of whom I didn’t feel the need for a disguise. Our life wasn’t odd to him, because he’d lived it alongside me. Now, I didn’t have him and, worse than that, he was having a set of experiences of which I was no part. Meanwhile, I was having a very different set, from which he could not save me.

I took Barney for long walks under the hill and down the Far Hedge. As we came back across the Starting Gate field he jumped up at my arm and ran rings around me, going “loopy-loo,” as Dad called it. Some dogs are far more sensitive to human moods—I wonder if they can smell sadness—and Barney seemed to know that I needed him. When I came home from school, he was the one who came running to greet me; in the evenings, I curled up in his bed with him to watch TV or read a book.

He was such a fine-looking animal that Dad decided Barney should follow his father, Bertie, into breeding. This was a good idea in theory—Barney had a beautiful temperament to go with his looks. In practice, it was a nonstarter. Barney wasn’t interested in sex.

“Come on, boy,” my father would say encouragingly. “It’s really not difficult.”

Barney was in the covered lunging school to give him and Willow plenty of space. She was a pretty brindle lurcher, smaller than Barney and keen as mustard to win his attention. Barney didn’t know what to do. He sniffed her and made as if to play, but it was clear that Willow was not interested in games. She wanted sex, and she wanted it now.

My father moved outside to allow them privacy, but was watching through the gaps in the wooden sleepers that made up the circular wall of the lunging ring. From there, he saw Barney start to shake, then saw him walk to the far side of the school, where he was violently sick.

“Bloody dog,” my father muttered. “Spends so much time playing with those children that he doesn’t realize he’s a man.”

Bertie was drafted in to “see to” Willow, and Barney came back to the house in shame. I hugged him tight and stroked his head. Much as I would have liked to see baby Barneys, I was on his side. Willow looked a bit too desperate to me.

~

Back at school, they had some sort of trading market going on. They all brought pencils, pens, sweets and badges and swapped them, or bought each other’s things with money.

Money. Now there’s something I didn’t have. I was given £1 pocket money per week and, frankly, even in 1979 that was not enough. Andrew didn’t have to worry because, at his prep school, there was a tuck shop where you could buy “on account” and it was put on the school bill at the end of the term. At Kingsclere Primary School, all deals were done in cash. This was going to be a problem.

Not only were there things I wanted, there were things I needed if I was to be a part of the gang.

I remembered that I had seen money somewhere, lots of notes and coins. They were sitting on the shelf in my father’s dressing room. Money could buy me out of trouble, money could buy me friends, and money was sitting there, just waiting to be used.

That evening, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom, through the far door and into their bathroom. On the right was the dark walk-in wardrobe that served as my father’s dressing room. There were suits hanging from the rail and ten open shelves with folded-up shirts, polo shirts, sweaters and, in one section, all of his riding gear. On the other side were two long, open shelves. There were hundreds of socks, piles of underpants and a tray with cuff links on it and a few watches. On this tray was the money.

I took a few coins at first, stuffing them into my pocket. Just a few pounds in fifty-pence pieces. After a few weeks, I started taking the odd pound note, and then it seemed sensible to go in there less often but take a bit more—maybe a five-pound note to see me through the week. Then I got worried that Dad might notice his sterling deposits disappearing, so I decided to get clever. There were piles of American dollars and French francs that he used only when he went abroad and therefore never counted. So I started to take them. He’d never notice.

“Half a pound of toffee bonbons and half a pound of pear drops, please.” I had been a regular customer at the village sweet shop for some time now.

Norton, who had been Grandma’s chauffeur, was spending his retirement taking me to school. He had gotten used to the daily detour and was waiting for me out on Swan Street.

“I’m sorry, love,” said Mrs. Carpenter from behind the counter, “we don’t accept foreign notes.”

“Really?” I replied. “But two dollars are equal to one pound, and I’m giving you five dollars there instead of two pounds. You’re doing well out of it.”

“It’s no good to me, love,” responded Mrs. Carpenter. “I can’t spend it, can I? When am I going to be going to America? I’m sorry, I can’t take it.”

“Right, not a problem,” I said efficiently. I was not to be beaten. “Just hold those for me, will you?” I pointed at the paper bag on the scales. “I’ll be back in a tick.”

The Kingsclere branch of Lloyds Bank was right next to the sweet shop, so I dashed out onto the street, signaled to Norton that I’d just be a few minutes and ran in. There was a line and when I got to the front I had to stand on tiptoe to see over the counter.

“Can I change these into pounds, please?” I asked.

“Minimum transaction $50” came the clipped reply. “And you’ll need your passport.”

“But I just need this note changed. Really, it’s quite important, you see, and I’m in a hurry and I just need some pounds. Please.”

“Sorry. I can’t help you,” she said.

Damn. Damn and blast. As if my money wasn’t as good as anyone else’s. Technically, of course, it wasn’t my money, but that’s not the point. I stomped out of the bank and got back in the car. Norton drove me to school. I was still fuming when he picked me up that evening.

“Clare, a word,” said my mother as I walked into the kitchen.

“What?” I said sullenly.

“It’s not ‘What?,’ it’s ‘Pardon?.’ Now Mrs. Jessop tells me she saw you in the bank this morning.”

Mrs. Jessop was our housekeeper, a sweet, kind, slightly stooped lady of about sixty who reminded me of Madame Cholet in The Wombles. She did the crossword every day and collected used stamps. I loved Mrs. Jessop. I couldn’t bear that she’d seen me. Oh God. This was terrible.

“She said she didn’t want to confront you in the bank, as it would have embarrassed you.” My mother fixed me with her direct gaze. “So, what were you doing there?”

“I was opening an account.” I said it with so much confidence that I almost believed myself.

“That’s funny,” said my mother. “You already have an account with Lloyds. I have been putting money into that account since you were born and, one day, when you are old enough and trustworthy enough, you will be able to use it. It seems that day is some way off.”

Oh God. I let out a big sigh and slumped back on the window bench.

“I talked to Norton,” my mother continued. “And he told me that you have been going to the sweet shop in the village every morning for the past month. Where have you been getting the money to spend on sweets?”

Silence.

“I give you pocket money every week, and that is all you have to spend, so you must be getting more from somewhere. Where are you getting the money?”

I could feel my cheeks going red. It was so annoying the way they did that. I felt as if I was being backed into a corner. I could say I was earning the money, but my mother would know that was a lie. I could say Grandma had given it to me, but we both knew that was pretty unlikely. I could say I found it.

My mother was still looking into my eyes. This was horrible. She took my backpack and started rummaging through it while I objected. When I tried to grab it back she slapped my hand.

“Watch it, young lady,” she hissed. “Just watch it.”

Then she found the dollars.

“This is why you were in the bank, is it? You were trying to change these? You little thief! What the hell is wrong with you?”

I had my head in my hands now, rocking back and forth. There was so much I wanted to explain. How £1 a week pocket money just wasn’t enough, how money was the only way I could have any status at school, how I hated being taunted for being rich, how I missed Andrew, how everything was just awful. But instead I just bit my bottom lip so hard it bled.

“I’ll tell your father,” my mother was saying. “I’ll tell him.”

A chill went through my body, and it wasn’t just because of the threat of telling my father. Something awful had happened. I could feel it. I ran out of the kitchen and locked myself in my room. Half an hour later, I heard the truck my father used pulling up outside the back door. There were voices in the kitchen.

I snuck down the stairs and out of the side of the house, coming around to the truck without going through the kitchen. The back flap was down, and I could see a black head, the mouth slightly open and the tongue lolling out. It was Barney.

I ran toward him and cradled his head in my arms. He had been coursing a hare and run straight into a fence post. The impact had cracked his skull. He was unconscious and, as I held him, I felt his breathing stop. I buried my face into his neck and started crying, my whole body heaving and my throat burning. This was all my fault. This was my punishment because I was a thief.

“I’m so sorry, please don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die. I won’t do it again, I promise. Oh God, don’t let him die.”

Dad came out and put his hand on my shoulder. He put his other hand by Barney’s nose and then closed his eyes.

“He’s gone,” he said. “He wouldn’t have felt a thing. I promise you.”

Barney had died because I had done a bad thing.

“I’m sorry you had to see this,” my father was telling me. “Your mother will be upset you’ve seen him, but this is what happens, I’m afraid. If you have dogs, you will see dogs die.”

We buried Barney in the orchard, with a cross and flowers. Andrew came back from prep school and we stood by the grave together, holding hands as we cried. The one thing I couldn’t tell Andrew was that I thought it was my fault. He would hate me if he knew that.

I never went into my father’s dressing room again.