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this, his first day at boarding school, the process would also work in reverse: white daisies would evoke the overweight woman in her late fifties who had been his form teacher, and lower his mood.
    Miss Thoroughgood wrote her name on the blackboard in squeaky letters. The other boys already knew it so they watched him, snorting behind their hands and pulling faces while the teacher had her back to the class. The name – being long – went on and on and he blushed, growing hot as he tried to copy it on the cover of the exercise book on his desk. His fingers slid down his pencil and, scared to look up, he made up the rest.
    Thorpettitoes.
    The name of the mother of the eight little pigs in The Tale of Pigling Bland . Jonathan felt a dull foreboding in his tummy and to make it go away he imagined the birthday cake his mummy had made. Open mouths around the table ready to gobble him up. He screwed up his eyes.
    The other boys had already been at the preparatory school in the Sussex countryside for a term. The little boy understood, more or less, that it would be better for all concerned that he come here. The headmaster had said he was ‘the spitting image of his lovely mother and going to be tall like his father’. These facts were important to Jonathan: such are the facts and phrases small children overhear and collect to form an incoherent reality.
    Another fact: he was not Justin and, certain of this at least, Jonathan believed that once he explained the Daisy-Lady would let him go home.
    Forty-five minutes went by. The seven-year-old was proficient at reading the time and no longer talked of big or little hands. Justin did not come and nor did his father.
    The lady said it was Morning Break. This he knew about: he sang it with his mummy:
    Morning has broken,
Like the first morning,
    Blackbird has spoken,
Like the first bird.
    The teacher told the boys to form a crocodile. Now the mistake would come to light; Jonathan sprang up and tucked his chair in.
    ‘File out two by two,’ Thorpettitoes demanded shrilly.
    Jonathan was bewildered. Other boys jostled, and shoving him into line the boy called Simon took his hand. ‘Now Pigling Bland, son Pigling Bland, you must go to market. Take your brother Alexander by the hand. Mind your Sunday clothes, and remember to blow your nose.’
    Miss Thoroughgood, presuming insurrection, commanded that at the end of break, at the first whistle they must be still as statues and at the second whistle, walk sensibly to the classroom.
    Jonathan gazed disconsolately at colourless sky through a window above a map of the world stuck with drawing pins. Fact: he knew the names of eleven countries. The boys were shouting; the teacher was at the head of the crocodile.
    The daisies in the garden reached his shoulder and were gold in the middle before they disappeared. His daddy said they were spreading and that grass was less trouble to maintain so he did not mention that his mummy had planted them or that he did not like green grass however little trouble it was to maintain.
    Crocodiles were green and slid secretly underwater after their prey. The classroom door bashed him when the boy in front let it go. He held it for a boy with a runny nose who stepped on his heel, pulling off his shoe. The boy did not say sorry. Jonathan bent to do up his laces.
    ‘We are going to be last.’ Simon squeezed his fingers tight.
    The playground was behind the neo-Gothic mansion and a trek from the classroom. The twenty boys crocodiled across a quadrangle of cobblestones. It was a flaw in the conversion from private house to institution that the cloakroom could only be reached by a circuitous route involving going outside without coats. The boys’ pinched faces were whipped by a harsh wind off the South Downs that swirled leaves and twigs around their grey-socked legs. They were not allowed to run.
    Jonathan turned his ankle on the wet cobbles; his new shoes cut into his shins and rubbed the back of his heels.