Here is No Hope Close. Well, it’s really called New Hope Close. Mum said this was perfect. New Hope because we were making a New Start. I decided grimly to call it No Hope Close.

Each house has a carriage clock outside the door and widescreen TVs and computers and a fancy silver car. I hate it so much. I hate the school too. It’s very modern, with all the technology in the world. But the kids there are horrible.

Back in the city, everyone waved and said hello and all the old ladies offered you toffees and told you how tall you were getting and all the ‘big kids’ watched out for you if you were getting any hassle and new people were welcomed and made to feel like part of it all. All our neighbours were great. There was old Mrs Robertson downstairs who always invited us in for tea and home-made cake and there was the Jones family upstairs with their half-million or so foster kids and the family just down the road who couldn’t speak a word of English but always waved and nodded and their kids came down to the park for a game of football with us every day. I loved being able to just glance across the street and wave at my friends in their flats.

Hardly anyone speaks to each other at all here. The only person who’s ever spoken to us was our hellish neighbour, Mrs Alfreds. She came round for a ‘chat’ with Mum in the kitchen. She was giving Mum an extremely long, boring litany about all the locals and how much money they earned.

‘At number 44, it’s the Palmers. Mr Palmer’s an accountant. I think he must be up to as much as £60,000 now that he’s got that promotion. Then there’s old Derek at number 50. He plays golf with my husband. They’re both in the championships next week. I’m going to watch, of course, and our John. You should join us.’

Mum smiled politely, but through gritted teeth. I desperately hoped she wasn’t planning on joining the Alfreds. I hate golf. I would rather deep fry and eat my own head than join that dreadful woman and her probably dreadful husband.

‘Ah, Heather. This is Mrs Alfreds – our new… neighbour.’ Mum introduced her with the pained look of a dog whose bone had just been taken away. Mrs Alfreds bustled forward. She was a very big woman who shook my hand so briskly I was taken by surprise.

‘So. You’re at Allwall High. Brilliant school. My John went there. He was prefect two years running, you know.’

I smiled painfully. I wandered over to the window sill to get a drink, shouting inside. Why couldn’t we have stayed in the city?

Just to avert my eyes from the wobbling noisy bossy jellyfish that was steadily making its way around our kitchen, I stared out onto the close.

At the end of the close on the corner was a small brick house. It stuck out like a sore thumb. It was dark with a small wooden door and a wonderful overgrown garden and incredibly strange dark flowers and a weird rusty gate. Before I could stop myself, I asked, ‘Who lives there?’

Mrs Alfreds glanced over at the cottage and shuddered. ‘Oh don’t go there. That’s old Mrs Dassel, and she’s mad. I wouldn’t go near her. She’s a loony. A witch, some say. It’s a horrible house anyway. I would have torn it down and replaced it with a new clubhouse for the golf club. They need one, poor dears, though they’ve got a smashing course.’

And off she went, babbling about boring golf again.

I wanted o find out more about Mrs Dassel. I bet she wasn’t a mad loony. I bet she wasn’t a witch. She was probably just a lonely old lady, trapped in the close like me.

It was about a week later when I first encountered Mrs Dassel. I was trailing home from school, utterly fed up with life, bumping my school bag along each flawless fence, when I spotted someone. Someone I seriously did not want to see. Daniel Harvey, the idiot of idiots, and his moron mates.

I had the misfortune of sitting next to Daniel – partly because no-one would sit next to him except his pathetic gang who were banned from doing so in every single lesson.

‘Carrot head! I’ll get ginger germs! Yuck!’ he hissed, and moved away, making a cross with his fingers. The class giggled, and I went as red as my hair.

The gang was chasing a cat. A black cat, small and sleek, with a purple collar. The cat was running and the boys were running after it, spraying it with Irn Bru and Coke. They were giggling like a bunch of hyenas on helium. I hate people who tease animals for no reason. It makes me really angry. I was faster than them and nearer the poor cat. I picked it up. It was shaking.

‘Here, Danny! It’s that lassie in our maths class – she’s got the witch’s cat!’

‘The witch’s cat,’ I thought.

Daniel Harvey yelled, ‘Geez the cat, Ginger…!’ as he and his gang wandered over towards the close.

I held the poor cat tight. Daniel pushed his way forward, looking fatter and rounder and stupider than ever, his horrible shaven haircut hidden beneath a battered baseball cap, his tracksuit mismatching, his football top so big for him that it dangled above his knees like some kind of tacky dress, his Coke bottle raised above his fat head, ready to pour on me. I was too quick. I darted out of the way and ran without a second look, holding the little black cat. I turned the corner and headed for Mrs Dassel’s house.
 

‘Mrs Dassel!’ I panted, knocking at the door, breathlessly. The boys had got bored by this time and had sloped off to throw stones at the school. A tiny old lady answered the door. She had a wild mass of grey curls and wore a shabby purple dress which reached down to just above her ankles. A tangled clump of multicoloured necklaces hung down and weird, foreign-looking bracelets covered in old coins and carved symbols decorated her tiny wrists. On each finger was a different coloured ring. She wore wrinkled grey socks and scuffed brown sandals over them. Mrs Dassel was obviously very old – at least eighty, and smaller than me and wispy as a feather.

But somehow, she had a strange strength about her and a kind of bright, dancing look in her emerald eyes. She certainly looked healthy enough, despite her frailness and her wrinkled face. She was just so, so, so different from all the other old dears who inhabited the area. She looked at me and smiled with delight. I got the strangest feeling that I’d met her before somewhere.

‘Oh darling! Thank you!’ She scooped the cat up and cuddled it. ‘I was worried about you! Silly Pluto.’ Then she turned to me. ‘Heather. Heather Lewis. You’ve moved into number nine. Yes, yes. Well, however can I thank you for bringing home Pluto?’

Somehow it didn’t seem strange at all that she knew my name.

‘You’re not happy here, are you?’ she asked, softly and wisely, looking me right in the eye.

I shook my head vigorously.

‘Well, I’ll let you into a secret, Heather. Neither am I. I lived here all my life. This used to be a nice place, back then. But about ten years ago they ripped it all down and replaced it with this hateful place.’ She shuddered. ‘Why don’t you move? I hear you think! Because I can’t. I was born and bred in this old cottage.’ She smiled again and I felt calm and strangely happy. A way I’d not felt since we moved. She lowered her voice, gently stroking Pluto and said, ‘I can sense something about you. Something different. You’re not like the fools around here, are you?’

‘I feel the same about you,’ I said.

‘Well, you just let me know if anything’s ever bothering you. And you tell Pluto too. When he’s not tired he’ll sort anyone out! I’ll keep an eye on you. Don’t worry. I can tell when people have got good hearts. Goodbye. Come and see me any time you want.’
 

So that was it. I had a friend. Someone who understood me and understood the way I felt. She isn’t mad, or a loony. She’s a lovely old lady, perfectly sane, very kind and she looks out for me the way the kids did for each other back home.

But she is a witch. No doubt about it. Not a pointy-hat, broomstick, eye-of-newt witch, but she is a witch. Three days later I brought her cat home, Daniel Harvey got excluded from school for three weeks, two of his gang were annoying a dog and got bitten somewhere very sore indeed and Mrs Alfreds’ husband tripped over a squirrel on a golf course and snapped all his clubs.