I asked her who drove it. But a ten-year-old girl has scant interest in make, model or driver. She eyed me indignantly. ‘I don’t know which blue car you mean,’ she said. I tried to describe it and realised how all cars are essentially the same, four wheels, a colour, a vague shape, a vague length. ‘But the man? Do you know a plump man who hangs around the school? He has glasses, Rosie. Thick glasses and he always wears old clothes.’ She screwed up her face. ‘What do you mean, hangs around the school?’ ‘Tries to talk to the children?’ She shrugged her shoulders and I gave up. Two weeks later the riddle was solved for me. * ‘Lucky for me these were in fashion in the sixties.’ Ruth was laughing as she turned up on the front doorstep dressed in a billowing denim smock with long, bell-shaped sleeves. She gave a little twirl before smoothing the material over her bump. ‘I can’t believe the rate at which the little blighter is growing.’ She gave a comical, sideways look.
