35: The Cricket MatchClementina had spent the last eight years living in a boy’s reform school. Even though she didn’t like being surrounded by so many boys, with no girls to play with, St Dominic’s wasn’t so bad. Most of the time she was free to do what she pleased. She’d mostly forgotten her mother, who’d died when Clem was five. Her other sisters had gone to heaven too. Her big sister, Marian, tried to act as though she was her mother, but Clem wasn’t very happy about that. At least she still had her father.
Clem was sitting on the stone steps at the front of the reformatory, trying to play cat’s cradle. Every time she got past four or five of the stages she went wrong. She kept trying, getting increasingly frustrated with her own ineptitude. Whenever she thought at last she’d got it,
