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village. It’s smashing whizzing down the hill on your bike with your feet off the pedals, but Pete’s got a puncture. Mum won’t let me take any more spoons outside, and if I haven’t got spoons, I can’t get the inner tube out. She says I left them in the garden last time, and she didn’t have enough for the prunes. I told her Terry had taken them out to eat mud with, but she didn’t believe me.
    I told Pete about the two girls I’d seen. He didn’t seem too keen, but I told him they might be good for a snoop around Mrs. Eastfield’s house. He wanted to go down to the church, but I told him he had to come and sit on the fence with me and wait for them. He nearly went into a mood, but when I told him about the plans for the new camp, he came up the Chase with me to have a look.

    Auntie Ida said she wasn’t moving the horrible man. She said he’d been there forever and she wasn’t getting a ladder out, and anyway she couldn’t do it on her own as it would be much too heavy, and we’d have to put up with it and she didn’t have anywhere to put him anyway, and she was really cross about the sheet and the blanket and would have to spend hours scrubbing the mattress with Dettol, and where was she going to find a rubber sheet for the bed, and Mimi should have grown out of that by now, and I was a really cheeky girl, only just arrived and telling her what to do about the painting, and what was Dad doing sending us with no change of clothes, only our pyjamas (that she’d had to stick in the kitchen sink for soaking, and however were they to get properly dried and aired by tonight with the weather so changeable she had no idea), and a couple of pairs of knickers and some socks with holes in, and if Mimi was so silly that she wouldn’t go to the toilet upstairs, there was another one by the back door she would have to use.
    Then Auntie said she had to go on an errand and she’d be about an hour and a half but we weren’t allowed to stay in the house on our own. We were to go up to the village, Bryers Guerdon, to Mrs. Wickerby’s to post the letter she’d written to Dad last night. Auntie gave us threepence for the stamp, but nothing extra for sweets or anything.
    She opened the back door and squinted, looking across and down the garden. Finn pushed past her and ran up the path, round the henhouse and back.
    She said we weren’t ever to go out in the garden when the tide was out in the creeks because Mimi might get sucked down in the mud, which wasn’t fair if we had to stay in with all the windows shut and boil up like we were in a jungle or something. When I asked why the windows stayed closed all the time, she told me to hold my tongue. I thought it’d be even more dangerous if the tide was in because Mimi might fall in the water and get herself drowned, and that would be much worse than getting stuck in the mud, because at least then I could always pull her out before her head went under, but I didn’t dare say anything.
    Auntie gave me very clear directions how to get to Bryers Guerdon and said we weren’t to dawdle and were absolutely not to go down to the old church — absolutely not, under any circumstances, she said; it was completely forbidden. I had to check the time by the big clock in Mrs. Wickerby’s, and after an hour and a half Auntie would have got back. Whatever happened, we were absolutely not to go down to the church, absolutely not. If she hadn’t returned, we were to wait for her in the Chase, and not come back over the creek into the garden, and she said most particularly we had to wait just by the old farm cottages, and not near the bridge. She made me promise, so I crossed my heart and licked my finger and spat, but she looked a bit shirty, as if she didn’t like me doing it.
    Mimi and me went round to the front of the house, out through the gateway and over the bridge. Sitting on the fence, in exactly the same place as yesterday, was the boy, but this time he had another boy with