As the front door opened, my daughter, Holly, shouted, ‘Mum, I’m back.’ ‘How was cadets?’ I asked, as she came bounding in. ‘It was great, we learnt how to pitch a tent,’ she replied. Holly was the eldest of my four children. Her stepdad Lee was a cadets leader, and she’d jumped at the chance to join.
Then one day, Holly told me she had a boyfriend, a lad called Logan MacPhail who went to cadets. ‘Are you sure you’re ready for a boyfriend?’ I asked. ‘You’re only 14.’ ‘Yes, I am,’ she replied. ‘He’s really nice.’ Later, Lee told me, ‘He’s a quiet lad, but he seems all right.’
After a few months of dating, Holly brought Logan round, and before long he was spending every weekend at our…