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first thing the children asked the next day was whether she had a brother called Harold. She said she had a brother called John. Her face was set in a stony stare. Miss Stand-off, they called her. A boy asked in front of his mates if she were planning to run away to sea any time soon. Voices followed her around the school ground as she walked on her own. ‘Harold, Harold,’ they chanted. ‘Where are you, Harold?’
    She considered going to the swimming baths for the day, but if she did that she would miss the geography lessons that made senseof the maps she and John studied, the arithmetic she excelled in, and English, which always earned her the best marks in the class. If she learned what she needed to know, she decided, she would rescue herself, in time.
    Her teacher, a skinny older man with a hairless head, told Nellie, grudgingly, that her daughter had a gift, but there was no need for her to be forward. She shouldn’t get ideas above her station. Girls needed to be practical in their disciplines, and when it came to being top of the class it would do her no good at all if she let the boys see how clever she was. Besides, with trouble like theirs, it didn’t do to stand out.
    ‘We do not have troubles at home,’ Nellie said.
    ‘Oh, then please accept my apologies, Mrs Batten,’ the little man said, his eyes glittering with amusement.
    The truth was, they still didn’t know where Harold was. The scandal, real or imagined, wasn’t going away easily. The ‘case of Harold Batten’ rumbled on through the news for several weeks. The boy in Australia was now reported as having been born in Melbourne under a different name again. It didn’t seem possible that he was their Harold Batten. Nellie said that Jean must remember to refer to Harold as Frederick if she were ever asked about him.
    It was around then that Nellie began betting on the horses, going to the tote on her own, carrying a big bag with a brass buckle.

CHAPTER 4
    JEAN LEARNED TO USE A COMPASS after her father returned from the war.
    The letters from Fred had continued to arrive in bursts from overseas. There would be long silences and then a flurry of his correspondence. Some contained descriptions of places he had visited, though little of the horrors he witnessed, just a passing reference now and then to ‘some poor devil with both his legs blown off’. He told them about Paris and the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, about the way the French drank wine and ate well even though food was scarce, but it was amazing what they could do with a snail or two, and food gathered from the countryside, about the lilac trees blooming, the little chimney pots on the roofs of the houses, the horse-chestnuts greening all along the vast length of the Champs-Elysées , the most beautiful avenue in the world, though by Jove he wouldn’t mind the sight of the oak trees along Symonds Street.
    Elysées was the French name for the Elysian Fields, he wrote, the place of the blessed dead in Greek mythology. This elicited a sharp snort of laughter from Nellie. ‘He needn’t give us the Greeks and French wine,’ she said. ‘We actually need more food of our own.’ All the same Nellie wrote steadfastly every week whether there had been a letter from Fred or not. ‘Although what have I got to tell him?’ she asked Jean one Sunday. Sunday was her day for writing letters: to Fred, and also to one of her two brothers still fighting overseas, and to her mother in Invercargill, failing in health and still longing for ‘the old country’. Her mother had never got over homesickness, and now, Nellie said with a catch in her voice, she would never go home.
    ‘Nothing but gloom,’ Nellie continued, answering her own question. ‘Harold in trouble and nowhere to be found. John gone all peculiar on me, up and staying out late. And never enough money. No wonder Fred doesn’t write much. What can he say about our problems?’
    Jean stroked the side of her mother’s face.