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seen other children do. Once I drew another house much smaller than the one where I lived. It was in the corner of the page.
    ‘And who lives there, Jackie?’ my teacher asked.
    ‘My uncle,’ was all I said, and again she made no comment.
    I watched as a boy sitting near me drew a big yellow sun, its rays spreading right across the paper. I reached for the darkest crayon in the box and drew dark clouds followed by dots of rain.
    Over the next few weeks our teacher showed us letters of the alphabet, which were placed next to pictures she had pinned up around the room. I tried to stretch my mouth into the required shape and join in with the rest of the class when asked to repeat the sounds she made.
    ‘A is for apple,’ we chanted, ‘B is for book,’ but by the time a picture of a cat was held up, my mind had wandered and the letters were blurred. By the end of the first week of trying to learn the alphabet, I had hardly progressed beyond ‘A is for apple’. Simple arithmetic confused me, but when she showed us a large cardboard clock and turned the hands round, I was able to give her the right answers.
    We learnt to sing songs and the teacher kept time on a triangle. I tried to remember the words to ‘The Wheels On The Bus’. When we heard it start, we all stood up and raised our arms to make circles in the air in imitation of wheels turning. Twenty little bodies swayed to the beat as we sang with more enthusiasm than tunefulness.
    But it was drawing I liked best, and gleefully I stuck on the gold stars that showed how well I had done. I was the first child who managed to draw a face with not just a nose and eyes but a bright red mouth full of rather large teeth. For that particular picture I was given more praise. Some of my drawings were pinned to the classroom walls alongside other children’s. Others I took home to show my parents. But, unlike my classmates, I knew my pictures would never adorn the fridge or kitchen walls.
    At the end of each day, as soon as my coat was on, I would pick up my satchel and go to the gate where my mother was waiting.
    ‘Well, Jackie,’ she would say, ‘I hope you’ve been good.’ Then, smiling at the other mothers, who were at least a decade younger than her, she would walk slowly away, with me at her side.
    ‘What did you learn today?’ was the one question she always asked as soon as my coat was hung up in the hall. I would show her the drawings I had done. ‘Very nice, dear,’ she would say, before she folded them neatly, then handed them to me to keep in my room.
    After the first day I had stopped protesting that I didn’t want to go to school. Each morning, after washing and brushing my teeth, I dressed myself in the clean clothes my mother had laid out the night before. I took pride in the fact that, apart from plaiting my hair, I could get myself ready without help. Once breakfast was finished, it was time to leave the house. I would walk beside my mother until we reached the gates, where groups of mothers chatted as they watched their offspring walk into the playground.
    But those days, when I knew my mother must have breathed a sigh of relief at my improved behaviour, were not destined to last long.
    They dwindled away when my uncle introduced me to his next friend, who, for the first time, came to his house.

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    I never knew the name of my uncle’s friend, a chubby little man with twinkling eyes and an easy manner. When I met him, I wasn’t scared. Certainly there was nothing about him that would have alerted anyone to what lay behind the pleasant exterior.
    ‘Look, Jackie, I’ve brought you a present,’ he said, as soon as he sat down. His pale, podgy fingers, with a sparkling ring on the smallest one, disappeared inside his jacket pocket and came out holding a small parcel. Inside, there was another soft toy: a pink pig with a key protruding from its side. ‘You can add that to your collection,’ he said. At the time I didn’t question how he knew