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huge sitting room, which is like three sitting rooms all under one very moulded ceiling, hiding out from a rain shower. Stephen and Paul are playing chess in one section, the girls and their magazines are with me here on the other side of the room, Alex is lying on the middle sofa telling some hellishly long story to Gussy about a commercial he once appeared in, and Gussy is pretending to follow.
    Even in such a short time we have become a little family with Ro like the efficient working mother, Paul like the fun dad always having ideas for games and parties, Stephen like the gangly, distant old uncle, Lorna like the stroppy older daughter, Alice the sweet little girl, Gussy and Alex like the troublesome little boys. I don’t know what that makes me though.
    I just ran this notion past Lorna and Alice who both said, ‘The Governess’, at the exact same time. Scary!
    It’s been pretty interesting so far today. This morning Ro and I were up first and she raced off on her bike to the current location to help Bob organise the move to this one, which left me wandering the grounds alone again.
    Determined not to turn into The Bird Lady Of The Grange, I went exploring. There’s a tiny one-room cottage with two cobwebbed windows sitting behind the rose bushes, which you can’t see from the main house thanks to the tall hedge. An idea came to me that maybe it would be a good place to go and write my journal once the hordes arrive tomorrow. Just as I was tugging away at the latch, a hand appeared from out of nowhere and landed on mine. I nearly jumped out of my body with fright as I’d been so lostin thought that I hadn’t heard a soul. It was Stephen, looking extra geeky as he had bed-head to beat the band and glasses on that are even worse than mine, ( his Dad probably didn’t see reports about possible blindness through contact lens abuse the way mine did).
    At first I was furious, assuming he was trying to stop me looking inside the cottage, but then I realised he wanted to help. The door was wedged closed by a bent-over nail, which puzzled Stephen as he insisted that he’d stored a broken chair inside the cottage only last week. I suggested that maybe Bob had asked Ro to do it for safety. After five minutes of trying to wrench it free using stones, bits of wood, and even the arm of his glasses and my fountain pen, we gave up and headed away from the cottage.
    Stephen didn’t say anything at all as we walked back towards the hedge. The silence thing is getting a bit creepy. I suppose he doesn’t think I’m worth talking to, which is nuts because he talks to Paul and my brother is certainly no conversational prize. And it can’t be that he’s nervous of me because he’s known me for years, since I ran around dressed head-to-toe in yellow and purple. I even used to have a pencil-sharpener collection that he knows about.That could account for it, actually.
    Not that I mind, it’s just annoying when someone who isn’t as cool as you are doesn’t like you. And there are precious few people less cool than me so it feels like a bit of a waste.
    As we walked closer to the main house we started to hear loud noises like a clunking of metal. We stopped a moment to listen and then we heard people screaming and both started running back there as fast as we could. Luckily it wasn’t a case of ‘murder by metal things’, they were shrieks of excitement from Lorna and Alice (and I suspect Alex) when several large rails of costumes arrived with one of the wardrobe attendants and some lifting-guys.
    Until that moment I hadn’t wondered or worried about the costumes, but now I realized that this was what people would see me in, what NICK would see me in, for days on end.
    OK, Alice has just fled from the sitting room with Lorna right after her. My guess is she saw people arrive.
LATER
    I was right. Amber, Bonnie, Hanna and my cousin Sophie all landed here together for the fitting and allof us girls ran upstairs to the new female