The trouble with older brothers, thought Lucy, wasn't the especially fact that they were older, noisier, bigger, or left football boots and other stuff all over the house - it was simply that they were boys. And that they also lived in the same house as you did.

Not that Lucy didn't love both her brothers. Jamie was always - well almost always, willing to come into her room and remove the spiders that always seemed to manage to get in around the old window frame and Christopher let her borrow his Nintendo game where you had to collect animals for your Noah's Ark - but although she knew they loved her as much as she loved them, they were still boys ... and there was nothing to be done about that.

It wasn't their fault they were boys, she realised. They would have made really awful girls anyway, and she couldn't imagine either of them wearing a dress, or playing with dolls. Not that Lucy particularly liked wearing dresses, except for school, and she wasn't that fussed about dolls, not since before her eleventh birthday.

She still had her Pooh Bear and Tigger, but nowadays they sat on the shelf above her bed, rather than share the bed with her, which was a good thing, because, as her dad said, Lucy was a fidget-bottom when she was asleep, and rolling over onto a stuffed toy, even a fairly soft stuffed toy, tended to make a person wake up before they were ready.

But now, Lucy had to admit, there were times when she missed her brothers - like now, when they were both away camping with their friends' family and especially when her best friend, Molly, had just moved away with her family, to a new house on the edge of town - and that was simply miles away and meant that this school holiday had been really boring.

Mum and dad had done their best, of course, but there were only so many times a girl could walk around supermarkets and department stores, when she knew that they weren't shopping for anything for her in particular.

Dad wasn't any better, either. He had suggested that Lucy and he could go to the country park and spend an hour or two on the big boating lake there, but somehow Lucy had managed to get into a mix-up with one of the oars and that had ended up with dad tripping over and falling head first into the water.

In all honesty, Lucy thought, he had made much too much of a fuss about that - when he stood up, the water had only come just above his knees anyway, and he had dried off in the warm sunshine - eventually.

So today, with dad out for the afternoon, playing golf with Uncle Stan-who-wasn't-their- real-uncle-but-an-old-family-friend, and with mum stripping wallpaper from the walls of the spare bedroom in the attic space, Lucy found herself sitting in the little summer house, idly flicking through the pages of one of Jamie's books about history - really ancient history, from back when the queen was called Victoria and kids not only didn't have computers, they didn't even have televisions!

Not only that, she read, most kids had to leave school and get jobs when they were thirteen - and they were the lucky ones, because, as the book said, quite a lot of kids didn't even have a school to go to.

Having no school to go to sounded a reasonably good idea to Lucy, at least at first, but then school had to be better than working in something called a "mill" for twelve hours a day. Twelve hours! That was longer than the cricket matches that dad and Uncle Stan-who-wasn't-their- real-uncle-but-an-old-family-friend watched on Sunday afternoon on the telly!

From the upstairs window at the back of the very top of the house, Lucy could hear mum singing along to a record on the radio, and for a few moments felt a bit guilty that she hadn't stayed to help mum with the wallpaper stripping for a bit longer, but honestly, it was so hard on the shoulders and elbows and made her fingers sore, gripping hold of that scraper thingy.

Lucy put her book to one side and reached for her bottle of orange squash. It was a bit warm now, as it had been standing in the sunshine for half an hour or more and she wished she'd put it under the bench seat, in the shade, but it was better than nothing, and she couldn't be asked to walk back up the garden, climb the steps to the patio and then trudge through to the fridge in the kitchen - especially as she had an awful feeling that mum may not have refilled the jug of squash.

She sighed, licked her lips, and carefully screwed the top back on the bottle, wiping her fingers on her denim skirt, before picking the book up again. Sticky fingers on books were a definite no-no in the Parker family and she licked them and wiped them dry again, just to be on the safe side.

It was then that she noticed the strange-looking man, sitting on the old tree trunk in the field, just across the lane from the back gate of the garden. Lucy was sure he hadn't been there even half a minute ago, but she could have been wrong, or maybe she just hadn't noticed him, but with that funny tall hat on his head, she couldn't see how she wouldn't have noticed him, so he must have only just got there.

Closing the book, Lucy stood up and stepped out onto the grass, looking around, as if she was studying the flowers and shrubs in the garden, and the two apple trees - anything, rather than make the man think she was watching him. After all, she was Lucy Parker, not "Nosey" Parker, as she had to keep reminding some of the less pleasant boys at school.

The man didn't look up, not even when Lucy reached the back gate, so she moved sideways, so that the old hedge mostly hid her from his view, and then peered through the leaves, to get a better view of him.

He was carrying a sort of walking stick, which he held upright in front of him, his hands resting together on its handle, and his chin resting on his hands and although his eyes seemed to be open, he didn't seem to be looking at anything in particular, just staring across the field, towards her left as she looked at him.

The black hat on his head was rather "cool", Lucy decided, after several long seconds; she had seen hats just like it in books - and especially in the book she had just been reading. Men apparently wore them in the Victorian days, although some men seemed to prefer little roundy-type hats, called bowlers.

Lucy wondered if that meant they played cricket, because she knew from dad and Uncle Stan-who-wasn't-their- real-uncle-but-an-old-family-friend that they had bowlers in cricket. Whatever the answer, the man in the field didn't look like he was anything to do with cricket, not with that dark grey suit and the high-collared shirt with the funny butterfly-shaped tie.

She knew from seeing them on the telly that cricketers either wore white things, or else very brightly coloured shirts and trousers, which the men sometimes called "pyjamas", although why anyone would play cricket in their pyjamas, even on a warm day, Lucy couldn't even begin to imagine.

Suddenly, the man turned to look towards her and Lucy jumped. It wasn't just that he was looking roughly in her direction, but he seemed to be looking directly at where she was standing, and she could have been sure that he couldn't have seen her through the thick hedge.

For about one second, she thought of ducking down and crawling away to one side and then making her way back up the garden, but that would make her look so silly, especially if mum happened to look out of the top window - which she probably would, if Lucy started doing something daft ... it was a knack all mums had, Lucy had long ago learned.

"Besides, this is our garden and I'm allowed to look at whoever I choose," Lucy said out loud, although only just out loud, as she didn't want the man in the field to hear her. She pushed her shoulders back, and, as casually as she could, walked back along to the gate, leaned on it, look straight over towards the man - and waved.