‘Now you two must make it up,’ Martha said. We looked at one another, and Baba drooped her eyelids until the lashes were fluttering on her cheeks. They were long lashes, like daisy petals dyed coal black. ‘Be off, trash,’ she said, between her teeth, and she turned away again.

I felt like a crow in my navy serge gym frock and my navy knitted jumper. A woman in the village who owned a knitting machine made it for me as a present. I got a lot of presents after Mama’s death. People pitying me, I suppose. My legs were thin and sad in the black cotton stockings, and they were itchy too, because I had been used to wearing no stockings all the summer. I was thin and much too tall for my fourteen years.

‘Jesus, they’ll say you have worms,’ Baba said, the night I fitted on my uniform. She looked pretty in hers, plump and round. Her curly hair was cut short, her face brown from the sun, and she looked like an autumn nut, brown and smooth.

‘What is it, anyhow, between you two?’ Martha asked. Neither of us spoke.

‘You’ll just have to talk when you get there. There won’t be anyone else to talk to,’ she said. She was right. In the convent we would only have each other.