I’d been in about eight different foster homes by the time I was 14. The newest was in Kent, and like all the previous ones I had a foster mother but no foster father – since this was the decade after the Second World War, most ladies who had lost their husbands or boyfriends needed to make a bit of cash wherever they could, and taking in foster children was common.
The only difference was that at the new one, when I was 14, I had a sort of ‘foster sister’ – the mother’s 17-year-old daughter. Joanne was very pretty. She had the sort of smile that always suggested teasing, which made her even more attractive, I thought. But her mother had never let her go out on a ‘date’, so she’d never had a real boyfriend.