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smoothed her hat with her long thin fingers. I thought that she was going to cry. She often did. Usually did, in fact. Once when we were all on holiday together in Wimereux she cried and moaned all day because our father and her father were going out fishing in a little boat together, and she wanted to go too. Andthey had to take her, and she was most dreadfully sick all day and we were jolly pleased. Because none of the rest of us were allowed to go, and she was the eldest and rotten. And here she was wrinkling up her mouth and smoothing her hat and blinking away, and I knew the tears were coming and just because of an old chamber pot.
    â€œWe caught you some fish today.”
    She went on blinking. And smoothing.
    â€œBecause you’re a Catholic,” said my sister.
    â€œThey aren’t very big, but big enough, and Lally has cleaned them and everything.”
    She stopped the blinking thing and sat on the edge of the bed.
    â€œThank you,” she said in a sort of twisty voice.
    â€œPerhaps,” said my sister, “if you go to the lav just before we go to bed you won’t need to use it. And then,” she said happily, “I can have it back.” She was holding the chamber up in the air like a tea-cup and looking at the marks on the bottom. “Or else I’ll have to use my camel I won at the fair, and it’s small.”
    Angelica snuffled and buried her face in her pom-pom hat.

    Sitting under the apple tree was rather pleasant after that. It was a lovely tree, old and sort of leaning away from the sea winds. The bark was all rumply and covered with moss and lichens, and on one branch there was a bunch of yellowy-green mistletoe growing. And that’s why it was our most favourite tree. My sister was squashing the scarlet berries from some cuckoo-spit in a tin. She squelched them round and round with an old wooden spoon. We were making Hikers’ Wine. When we had squashed them into a pulp we poured them into an orangeade bottle, with the label still on, and then filled it with water. Then we used to go and leave it in the gully at a good place, and hoped that a hiker, feeling thirsty, would spot it and think how lucky he was. And of course it was deadly poison and if he drank it he’d probably die, which was fearfully funny. We had done this with about five bottles and they had all gone when we went to look the next day. The gully was full of the beastly people all clambering up in khaki shorts and green or yellow shirts, to see the smallest church in England. And we thought that Hikers’ Wine might put them off. Or kill them off. And it looked exactly like orangeade …had the same colour, and little bits of skin and orange-sort-of-stuff swirling about in it. It was better than setting rabbit traps for them, which we did … but they always seemed to avoid them. Feet too big, I think.
    â€œThe trouble with her is,” said my sister, squashing away, “that she’s potty.”
    â€œI think it’s because she’s a Town person … and because she’s going to be a Nun.”
    My sister stopped squashing and looked at me with a mouth like an “O”.
    â€œIn Czechoslovakia,” I said.
    â€œYou’re a fibber!”
    â€œGod’s honour.”
    â€œWho said?”
    â€œI heard Aunt Freda tell our Mother.”
    â€œWhy is she going to be one in Czechoslovakia? Why not in Hampstead or somewhere?”
    I took the tin away from her and did a bit of squashing, because they weren’t quite mixed up and some of them looked like cuckoo-spit berries still.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “Probably that’s where you have to go to be one. Probably it’s a sort of factory place where they specially make Nuns.” We cried out with laughter. The sun was getting pale and a wind came shuddering up among the grasses making the lupins bend and nod like people agreeing. From the house was a good smell of