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and you simply wouldn’t be quiet. I went up to try to get you to lie down and go to sleep. So did Ga. You simply wouldn’t see reason. So Harry went up and he gave you an almighty whack and you shut up straight away.’
    If I’d done something really bad, I tried to talk myself out of being blamed. I didn’t exactly fib. I simply told stories.
    ‘
I
didn’t do it,’ I’d say, wide-eyed, shaking my head. ‘Gwennie did it.’
    I’d sigh and shake my head and apologize for Gwennie’s behaviour. Gwennie was one of the imaginary friends who kept me company during the day. Biddy and Ga found this mildly amusing at first but the novelty soon wore off, and I found myself being punished twice over for Gwennie’s misdemeanours.
    ‘You must always always always tell the truth, Jac,’ Biddy said solemnly. ‘You mustn’t
ever
tell fibs.’
    Try telling that to a storyteller!
----
    Which girl in one of my books always
tries
to tell the truth? She lives with her grandparents, just like I did when I was little
.
----
     
    It’s Verity in
The Cat Mummy
.
    I try very hard to tell the truth. That’s what my name Verity means. You look it up. It’s Latin for truth.
    I can be as naughty as the next person but I try not to tell lies. However . . . it was getting harder and harder with this Mabel-mummy situation.

    The Cat Mummy
is a very sad book (though there are lots of funny bits too). Many children write to me to tell me about their pets. They’re very special to them. They say: ‘Dear Jacqueline, I’m nine years old and I love reading your books and I’ve got a cat called Tiger and a guinea pig called Dandelion. Tiger is stripy and Dandelion loves
eating
dandelions. Oh, and I’ve got a mum and a dad. I’ve got a little brother too and he is a
pest
.’
    They nearly always mention their pets
before
their parents and brothers and sisters, as if they’re much more important. The sad thing is, pets don’t live as long as people. I often get the most touching tear-stained letters, telling me that some beloved hamster or white rat has died.
    I decided to write a story about a girl whose old cat dies. She feels terrible and wishes she could preserve her in some way. She’s just learned about the Ancient Egyptians at school and it gives her a very very weird idea!

 
    8
    Shopping
    I LOVED LIVING as an extended family at Fassett Road. I liked all the little routines of my preschool life. We would walk into Kingston every day to go shopping. It was a fifteen-minute brisk trot, a twenty-five-minute stroll. Biddy stuck me in my pushchair to save time. It was a pleasant walk, across a little blue bridge over the Hog’s Mill stream, down a long quiet street of Victorian houses, some large, some small, past the big green Fairfield, past the library, until we could see the red brick of the Empire Theatre in the middle of town. (I was taken to see
Babes in the Wood
there when I was little and loved it, though I found it puzzling that the boy Babe was a girl and the Old Dame clearly a man.)
    Ga had already developed arthritis and could only walk slowly, so we strolled together, peering at everything along the way. We had our favourite houses. She would always pause in front of a pretty double-fronted house with four blossom trees in the garden. ‘
That
’s my favourite,’ she’d say, so of course it was my favourite too.
    I live in that house now. My grandma is long dead, but I’ve hung her photo on the wall – and a replacement china Mabel sits underneath.
    Shopping was very different in those days. I loved going to Sainsbury’s, but it wasn’t a big supermarket with aisles and open shelves and trolleys. The Kingston Sainsbury’s then had beautiful mosaic-tiled walls like an oriental boudoir. You queued at the butter counter and watched some white-overalled wizard take the butter and pat it into place with big wooden paddles. You couldn’t afford very much butter so you always had margarine too. They were both so