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and so saved their honour. He started being saintly when very young. For instance, he refused to breastfeed every Friday because he was fasting. He’s the patron saint of sailors, pawnbrokers, unmarried girls, children (because of a bizarre incident with some boys who were trapped in a pickle barrel) and people who sell perfume. Now he’s Santa Claus as well. He’s probably the most successful saint.
    When the bag of money landed in front of me, it put me in mind of St Nicholas straight away. I could have asked him for guidance. Or I could have asked St Matthew, who is the patron saint of money. Or I could have called the police. Or my dad.
    Personally, I ran across the field shouting, ‘Anthony! Anthony! Come and look at this!’ I was that excited, you see.
    I’m not sure now that it was the best idea.
    When I got to the house, it was still dark but there was a light on in the kitchen and I could see Anthony making toast. I tapped on the window. He jumped in fright, but then he saw who it was and let me in.
    ‘What are you doing out there? You’re freezing. Where’ve you been? Have you been out all night?’
    My teeth were still chattering. I said, ‘I’ve found . . . I’ve found . . .’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Come and look.’
    Anthony put his coat on. He could tell I was excited, but he wasn’t that convinced. ‘This had better be something that other people can see.’
    This reminded me of what the woman had said at Huskisson House. What if you could see things that weren’t there? What if it wasn’t as optical as I thought it was? But when we got to the hermitage, the bag was there. I pointed to it.
    Anthony said, ‘What?’
    ‘You know when you tell people Mum is dead and they give you stuff?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Well, I told God.’
    I pulled back the box and Anthony saw it – a big bag stuffed with money. His face glowed. He says now that it’s still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He was so happy just then.
    ‘And it’s from God, you reckon?’
    I nodded.
    ‘Well, he really wanted to cheer us up.’
    It needed the two of us to carry the money back across the field towards the house. Think of that. More money than we could carry. I wanted to spread it all out on the dining table so Dad would see it when he got home and be of good cheer, but Anthony said we mustn’t tell Dad about it.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Tax.’
    I had to ask him what tax was.
    ‘If Dad knew about it, he’d have to tell the government, and if they knew about it, they’d want to tax it. At 40 per cent – that’s nearly half of it. We should just hide it and go to school.’
    But we couldn’t. We had to know how much was there. We tipped the money on to the table.
    ‘Anyway,’ Anthony said, ‘if God had wanted Dad to have this, he would’ve sent him a cheque in the post.’
    It was hard to argue with that.
    I started to help him count. At first we just tried to count all the tenners using our ten times table, but we lost track of which ones we’d counted. The room seemed to be filling up with notes. Then Anthony had the idea of counting them into piles of a hundred, and then counting the hundreds. But even that was no good. After ten minutes the whole floor was tiled with wads of money. We couldn’t find anywhere to sit, let alone count. So then we tried making them into piles of a thousand. There were 229 piles of a thousand. Plus 370 pounds change. That’s 229,370 pounds. Or twenty-two million, 937 thousand pence.
    For a while we just looked at it. Then Anthony picked up a thousand pounds and put it crossways on top of another thousand. Then he picked up another and put it crossways on top of that. Then I picked up a pile and put that on top of the other three. Then Anthony. Then me, and on and on building a tower of cash. We got it almost as tall as me before it fell over. Then we both started laughing.
    That was the first time we played Cash Jenga. We played it every night for the next week. The highest we ever