Dear Ma,

I would like to tell you about things after you left me at the station. The journey was alright except that the rain was pouring down the window, which meant that we couldn’t see much. I passed the time by trying to talk to to the person who was in the same carriage as me but when that didn’t work I just decided to think about what the stables that I was going to live at would be like. Red brick stables, chestnut and piebald horses peering over the door, great piles of hay and comfortable chairs to watch the sea on a balcony jutting out over the beach. When I finally arrived my new foster family was the last to arrive. I didn’t really like the look of them. The man ( later I found out that he was Mr Bangleshuttle ) had a short clipped beard and was wearing a brown tweed suit. The woman ( Mrs Bangleshuttle ) had blonde hair tied up in a bun, and was wearing a black dress. It was the girl who I most didn’t like the look of. She had a dark blue dress and a sneering smile. But that wasn’t what scared me. It was her eyes. They were the darkest green you could imagine; like dark pits of molten emeralds. They really did scare me, Ma.Anyways, that night was not how I expected it to be like. The stables were nothing like how I’d imagined them to be like. There were no horses which meant that there were no comfy piles of hay, the balcony just had a small potted plant on and nothing else and the beach was just a thin thin strip of brown sand before a long stretch of murky water that is called the sea but to me looked like a long stretch of icky mud. That night was one of the worst nights that I had ever had ( even worse than the night at Aunt Maggie’s ). The bed was hard and itchy so I hardly slept a wink. There is a school that is 2 miles away and I am going to walk there every day, starting on the morrow. I don’t want to worry you Ma but there are these big black and white things that Mrs Bangleshuttle says cows and are totally harmless but they look like they could kill you with their eyes. There are also animals called geese, sheep and chickens but I don’t want to frighten you with what they look like. I’ll just say that I will never, ever go near them. I must go now as Mrs Bangleshuttle is stomping up the stairs shouting threats that she will do if I am still awake and she only sent me to bed 5 minutes ago. Missing you lots.

Your daughter Maya