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the street, the odd looks she got from men, and why her old school friends from Collegiate stopped asking her round to play. But most of all the meaning of the word 'whore' which a horrible boy at school had called her mother.
    From that night on things seemed to get worse and worse. Bonny bought herself an expensive new outfit each week, but Camellia was still wearing clothes she'd long outgrown. The parties became more frequent, noisier still, with coarse men rampaging drunkenly up the stairs and often bursting into her room mistaking it for the bathroom. Soon Bonny made no attempt to cover up that men stayed the night, the smell of their perspiration lingered in the bedroom, there were stains on the sheets which were seldom changed and the beautiful rugs in the living room had cigarette burns and beer stains on them. Bonny was often drunk during the day too, sometimes insensible on the settee when Camellia got in from school. Any attempts at housekeeping were abandoned, the only food in the house bread and jam. Camellia had a stodgy school dinner, bought a couple of stale buns from the baker's as she walked home, then Bonny sent her out for chips later.
    Often she was left alone all weekend, a ten-shilling note left on the table to feed herself. But Bonny had only to sweep through the door on Sunday night, a silly soft toy in her arms for Camellia and say she was sorry and it would never happen again, and Camellia forgave her.
    The neighbours were less forgiving, there were no longer polite requests to turn down the music but hysterical screaming at the door and hammering on the windows. Vicious, abusive unsigned notes were stuck through the door, endless warnings of legal action, sometimes threats against her person, but Bonny only laughed and tossed them airily on the fire. She said the neighbours were small-minded and jealous, and that soon she and Camellia would move away.
    It was two weeks before Christmas in 1962, when she was almost twelve, that Camellia discovered her doll's house had been taken from her room while she was at school.
    A sense of foreboding filled her as she looked at the space on the carpet where it been that morning. For some time she'd had a feeling that something very bad was going to happen. Bonny had been moody and withdrawn for several weeks – she hadn't mentioned anything about Christmas, not even about the decorations and there hadn't been any parties at the house for three weeks.
    She plodded back down the stairs. She had grown even fatter during the summer and running was now beyond her. She didn't like anything much about herself, but she hated her size more than anything. Not quite twelve, she was forty-two inches round the hips and she weighed eleven stone.
    'Where's my doll's house?' she asked.
    Bonny was sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigarette and reading a typewritten letter. For once she wasn't made-up, in fact her hair didn't even look as if she'd brushed it and she had a stain down the front of her pink twinset.
    'I've sold it,' she replied, without even looking up.
    'You've sold it!' Camellia was incredulous. 'You couldn't have! You're joking aren't you?'
    I've got more on my mind than making jokes,' Bonny snapped at her, putting down the letter and looking up at her daughter. 'Come on now, darling. You're too old for a doll's house and I needed the money.'
    'But Daddy bought it.' Camellia's eyes filled with tears. 'It's all I've got left of him. How could you?'
    If you really understood how bad things are, you wouldn't ask that,' Bonny retorted defensively.
    It was only now, perhaps because Camellia was angry with her mother that she noticed she didn't look as pretty as she used to. Her eyes had dark shadows round them, her skin looked grey and there were tiny lines around her eyes and mouth.
    'Why didn't you take some money out the bank if you needed something?'
    Bonny looked at the child's reproachful tear-filled brown eyes and sighed. She knew she shouldn't have sold it