Part of me felt that Amy should be trying to stop her doing this, and part of me felt Daisy needed to do it and would have found a way of doing it anyway. I hadn’t mentioned it to Mark. I was pretty sure he would have objected, and it was easier just to accept it, the way we had both accepted that it would be a struggle to get Daisy off to sleep every evening, and that sometime in the early hours of the morning she would wake up and come into our bed and Mark would sigh and go off to the spare room.

Mark was aware of Daisy’s twiddling habit, of course. He’d once tried to take something she was rolling around in her hands away from her, and she’d been absolutely inconsolable until he gave it back. Screaming, crying, lashing out, rolling round on the ground. You’d have thought somebody was trying to kill her, or at the very least abduct her. He’d never tried that again.

There were rows of the low chairs the children used set up for the parents to perch on, as if we were an audience of overgrown pre-schoolers. Mark had grabbed the last two seats at the front, facing the makeshift stage. I smiled at Amy and made my way over to settle next to him and wait for the show to begin.

An awful lot of early childhood – perhaps of education in general – is learning how to behave as part of a group. Basically, you have to learn to submit to doing what you’re told, and to get through the boredom that usually follows.

This was not Daisy’s forte, and it was immediately obvious that this had been taken into account when the staff were planning the Christmas performance and working out how to stage it.

A couple of big cardboard boxes had been reassembled and painted to create the curved prow of a ship. Most of the children were sitting in rows on the carpet; others were sitting on chairs inside the boat, visible from the chest upwards. Daisy was right in the point of the prow, wedged into place so she couldn’t wander.

She and the other children were meant to be stars – they were all wearing navy-blue Fruit of the Loom T-shirts with star shapes in silver sewn onto them, and holding silver paper stars attached to silver-painted sticks, like wands. Daisy was rolling her star wand to and fro between her hands – not frantically, but slowly, thoughtfully, with a serious expression, as if she was a junior ballerina executing exercises at the barre.

I had sewn the star on Daisy’s T-shirt late one night, after finally getting her off to sleep. I hadn’t made a great job of it. I was never going to be the costume-making, cake-baking kind of mother. But I’d done my best… hadn’t I?

Could I have done more?

Should I?

Mark called out to her: ‘Daisy!’ She ignored him. Next to her, a small child regarded her in bemusement.