had been equally appalled by the ridiculously expensive car and the fact that Prunella had been wearing a sapphire tiara during the daytime.

She certainly hadn’t expected her sister to send her very own children to a place like Deep Valley Farm.

But so it appeared.

Megsie, Norman and Vincent were thrilled. New blood! People to play with! People to share the chores with! Rich people who might have access to chocolate!

‘When are they coming, then?’ asked Norman, pulling on his wellies, which, as usual, were damp inside. (I hate that.)

‘Next Tuesday,’ said Mrs Green, doing up Vincent’s shoelaces and putting on her coat inside out. ‘We’ll have to tidy.’

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The Diary 5

I’ll stop there for a minute because no one’s interested in tidying, for crying out loud. Let them get on with it. It’s raining really hard here now. All the children are ready for their close-ups. The poor chickens are sitting in the pretend mud, which is getting thinner and thinner because of the rain. Devil is still too fat to work and Beryl has gone on hunger strike. If it goes on like this we certainly won’t survive the next three and a half months.

Jackie Durran, our costume designer, has come to show me my khaki uniform. She is an absolute genius, who wears mad hats and invents all these brilliant things for people to wear, like Mrs Green’s costumes, which all remind me of a cottage garden. You’ll hear about the khaki uniform later in the story.

But wait! The pattering upon the plastic roof of my palatial trailer (it has pelmets) has stopped! Chris Stoaling, our Second AD (see Glossary), has knocked and said we’re off to shoot the arrival of the Rolls-Royce. Massively exciting. I am going to pull on wellies and rush down there to get in the way.

My wellies, by the way, are never damp inside. That’s because my Dresser (see Glossary), Helen Ingham, makes sure they are clean and toasty every day. Only the actors are cared for in this way – everyone else has to wash their own wellies. Helen, or ‘H’ as she is known, is very funny. We giggle a lot.

Just arrived. Oh, it’s started to rain again. Everyone’s standing about in the mud looking glum. We’re not shooting the arrival of the Rolls-Royce. Massively boring. Better get on with the story then. There’s nothing else to do . . .

Might call this bit Chapter Two. Why not? It has a nice ring to it.

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The Story 5

Chapter Two. The day before the arrival of the Gray children, everyone got a bit tense. The children had been too excited to sleep and had woken up grumpy as a consequence. Vincent was feeling resentful because Norman had made him promise to wash the bedclothes with Megsie instead of scratching the piglets. He’d been stewing on this for ages and finally decided to do something really naughty and steal Norman’s last sweetie from the secret tin.

I had better explain something here; I don’t know about you but I wasn’t really allowed sweeties when I was little. My dad used to buy us a sixpenny ice-lolly on a summer Sunday but that was pretty much it. Perhaps because of this I wanted and loved sugar in all its forms more than anything else in the world. The situation for the Green children was similar because during the war there was hardly any sugar in the whole country and certainly not enough for people to have sweeties every day. They were allowed about two ounces of sugar a week per family, which is about one bite of a Mars Bar. To share. So you can imagine, after a few months of that, the very thought of a sweetie would just about drive you mad with desire. So mad that you might consider stealing someone’s last one, especially if you were cross with the person to whom it belonged. Vincent was very cross with Norman, so he crept into the best parlour, climbed up on to the dresser, took the secret tin down and opened it. There, at the bottom, was the last sweetie. A lemon drop. Not, you might think, the most exciting sweetie in the world, but for all the reasons I have just mentioned, the thing that Vincent wanted more than life itself. He took it out, replaced the tin, got down from the dresser and then made his one mistake. A fatal mistake. He decided to open the sweetie there and