While the other mothers wear "crochet tank tops and layered skirts and some of them even had the new wedge shoes", at her husband's request Diana dresses in "slim skirts and pointy heels" with matching handbags. The year is 1972, but the family is behind the times. Life, he knows straightaway, will "never be the same". Not seeing what has happened, she drives on, leaving Byron alone with a secret. Distracted by Byron, who thinks time has gone into reverse and wants to show her his watch, she knocks a little girl off her bike. One day, on the way to Winston House and in a hurry following an accident involving a broken milk jug and an ominous quantity of blood, Byron's mother Diana takes a shortcut through the Digby Road estate in her Jaguar. They had lifts with their mothers because they had so far to travel." The Winston House boys did not travel on the bus. They flicked orange peel and cigarette butts at the caps of the Winston House boys from the top windows of the bus. The children who went there came from the council estate on Digby Road. There was another junior school that was closer but it was not private it was for everyone. The novel's subject, as could hardly be clearer from its opening, is class: "James Lowe and Byron Hemmings attended Winston House School because it was private.
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