‘Billy! Billy, mate! Break a leg!’

It was the tough-looking dad who’d glowered at us in the queue: he’d also made his way to a seat in the front row, a couple of places along from us. A lively looking boy in brown who was sitting on the carpet waved frantically to him, and the man gave him a big thumbs up sign and an encouraging smile. Suddenly he didn’t look quite so tough after all.

Next to the boy was my friend’s daughter, Lydia, wearing blue and holding a baby doll, beaming and blushing as her mother looked on fondly from a seat somewhere behind me.

Billy and Lydia were Joseph and Mary, obviously. The children who had been entrusted with the responsibility of leading roles. Children who were not only conscious of their parents sitting in the audience, but were pleased and proud to have them there, and determined to impress them.

But Daisy seemed not to see us that way, as people she could please or disappoint, or exert any influence over – when she noticed us at all.

Mark fell to staring gloomily into space. I wanted to say something to him, to make him feel better, to jolly him out of it, to remind him that I was there too – anything, from I don’t think she saw you to she’s probably feeling a bit overwhelmed to don’t they look lovely?

But I couldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t be able to comfort him.

And now it was showtime.

I had a slightly sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as Donna, the pre-school supervisor, stood in front of the stage and gave us the spiel about fire exits and not taking photographs until the end and not sharing them on social media, and reminded us that a video recording was being made and would be available for purchase.

Meanwhile Amy picked her way round the edge of the audience and slipped into the boat. The other children shuffled along, and she sat down next to Daisy in the prow.

Next to me, Mark was rigid with tension. Was it anxiety he was feeling? Or humiliation? Or shame? What was the name for this – this sense of falling forward into a dark pit, of not knowing what you were hurtling towards?

Donna withdrew to press a button on the CD player that had been set up on a table at the side of the stage. Music began to play: ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, picked out on a piano.

The children got to their feet and sang, their high, thin, clear little voices mingling to create a kind of music that is purer and more hopeful than any other that humans are capable of: the choir of the very young. The sound of people who are finding their voices, whether sweet or warbling or robustly off-key: who haven’t yet learned to think of themselves as able to sing or not, or to distinguish their own voices from the effect they create by mingling with everybody else.