Wednesday 28 June

Disaster! I’d left my letter to Rachel (or Brenda) on the hall table and Mum has put in the pillar box with all the letters she writes to Age Concern and Interpol.

I waited for the postman who empties the box at 16:45pm GMT, but he said there was nothing in it. Everything must have been collected at 12:30pm.

I told him it was addressed to someone at The Choir in my parish church.

“Aha”, he said severely, wagging his right forefinger at me. “Then it will have been shoved through the church door, chum, lacking as it does a full and correct postal address, complete with requisite postcode.”

I will have to retrieve it somehow. If the new Vicar opened it by mistake my job would be forfeit, for I might have said some things of which he would not approve (I had, after all, been reading the Song of Solomon before I wrote it), and – oh horror of horrors! What if one of the flower ladies opened it? They all have to sit together at the front every Sunday, just behind the Sunday School, and they’d be bound to mention it to Mum, or even worse, the Vicar.)

I pretended to have another one of my migraines after French Oral, and was excused lessons. I ran as hard as I could to church, but there was no sign of the Letter anywhere. I even peeped into the box where people pay for Parish Magazines and Holy Bookmarks, but as usual it only contained a 10,000-Lira banknote and five IOUs for sums ranging from 5p to 40p.

But no Letter.