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also that she and I got on so well. After supper that day Julia told me to go to my room because she had to talk to our parents about something important. Obviously, I was incredibly curious about her secret business, and hid behind the half-closed dining-room door. I couldn’t see the three of them, but I could hear everything they said. It was the first time I heard Julia use her rhetorical skills for a specific aim. I can tell you one thing – not many people are able to stand up to her when she’s set on achieving something. Actually, I’ve never met anyone who could. She’s an incredibly persuasive speaker – she can argue the case for almost anything, and she does it with wit and charm besides, if she feels like it. She can also get a little intense when things don’t go her way, but that didn’t happen very often.
    She started by asking my parents on what grounds they could justify two of their children being worthy of an expensive education, and the third not. Then she proceeded to make a powerful argument for my as yet underdeveloped but clearly highly promising academic aptitude. She painted a gruesome picture of the rough and dangerous social environment that awaited me at the comprehensive, and of the cruel bullying that vulnerable girls like me tend to suffer in such places. She said she needed to be near me to look after me at all times, and especially at school – did my parents even have the slightest inkling what a jungle it was out there? What monstrosities schoolchildren were capable of inflicting upon their weaker peers? She illustrated this point with a few well-chosen examples that included locked cupboards and toilet bowls and that made my mother gasp. She said that of all three of us it was me they should have sent to private school, as it was clearly I who was the most fragile and in need of extra care and attention, much more so than she and Jonathan ever had been. She said she really couldn’t follow my parents’ logic. At all.
    And then Julia made my parents feel even more ashamed of themselves than they no doubt already did: she must have stood up – I heard a chair moving. She lowered her voice rather than raising it, and spoke very quietly and intently – that’s a method I’ve seen her use on many later occasions, too. She probably also used her hands – Julia gestures a lot when she speaks, and the movements of her hands are fluid and calm, and very effective. They can hypnotize you if you’re not careful.
    ‘I need to protect Amy, especially at school, can’t you see that?’ she said. ‘And I won’t even mention the double standards behind your decision not to pay for a proper education for your youngest daughter, who is already so cruelly disadvantaged by nature. Amy will have to struggle with health problems for the rest of her life ,’ Julia said, very quietly and clearly. ‘I’m sure you never hesitated for a second when deciding whether or not Jonathan was worth the investment. Did you? Jonathan isn’t one bit more intelligent than Amy. In fact, I’m pretty sure the opposite is the case. And neither is he more talented than her – he’s just louder and more confident. The key difference is quite simply that he is a man . Are you seriously telling me that you’re not prepared to pay the tuition fees for your youngest, sickest child simply because she’s a girl ? Or,’ and here Julia paused as though she couldn’t quite bring herself to say what she felt she had to next, ‘are your motivations even more sinister? Is it precisely because Amy is sick that you think it’s pointless to invest your money in the education of this child? Is it because you think she will die sooner than us, and that paying for proper schooling would therefore not be worth it?’
    My mother was so upset she couldn’t respond at all. I felt pretty bad about it, to be honest – although I appreciated Julia’s campaign, I thought she’d gone a bit too far. Dad tried to refute her