That’s definitely what was going on, but I don’t suppose it was much fun with Hope banging on the door. I’d thought the business-class toilet would have more room – I couldn’t risk letting Hope go in on her own and locking herself in – but we couldn’t wait, so we ended up walking all the way back through the dimmed economy section, where people were trying to sleep, with Hope loudly declaring, ‘My knickers are wet!’ ‘Why didn’t you go at the airport when I told you?’ ‘I didn’t need to.’ It was so long since Hope had had ‘an accident’, I hadn’t packed a change of clothes in my hand luggage and I was dreading asking the stewardess for a towel for the seat, but it got worse in the cubicle when Hope pulled down her knickers and saw the blood. None of the books gives any advice about how to tell a mildly autistic child in an aeroplane loo that they’re having their first period. Hope was only just eleven, so I hadn’t expected it to happen yet, even though I knew that plumper girls sometimes got theirs before they went to big school.
