A few of the mums were sniffling and dabbing their eyes with tissues. Further along the front row, Billy’s dad sat with his head bowed, as if he was struggling manfully not to join in with the weeping.

But Mark was stony-faced, and Daisy wasn’t singing.

With Amy’s encouragement, she had got to her feet, a beat behind everybody else. Her mouth was open, but it was obvious that nothing was coming out of it.

She didn’t know the words. She didn’t know how to pretend to know the words. She didn’t know how to sing. Of course she didn’t. How can you sing if you’ve barely learned how to talk?

And yet she did sing… At home sometimes, in the garden, when she was as good as alone, sitting on the grass with flowers in her hands, twiddling them. She had a habit of picking the flowers, and I let her – they weren’t precious prize flowers or anything like that, after all, and Mark wasn’t really into gardening and would barely notice. And as she played, she’d sing – a song without words, a kind of gentle ululation that rose and fell and repeated itself without coming to any particular conclusion.

She had stopped rolling her star round between her hands, and was gazing questioningly beyond all of the parents at the ceiling, as if there might be something there that would make sense of all of this. But clearly no answers were forthcoming.

Then, with the resigned air of one who has been forced by unenviable circumstances to find her own solution, she turned her back on the lot of us and started twiddling her star again.

A small, barely suppressed titter of laughter ran around the room. I managed a smile myself – it seemed like the most suitable, the most sporting response. Kids, eh? They’re so new to all of this. She just hasn’t got the hang of it yet. I knew the laughter wasn’t meant unkindly. It was the kind of thing you might see on an out-take compilation – the funny little girl who thinks the best thing to do with an audience is not to face it! But I hated it. I hated this whole thing, and all I wanted was for it to be over.

But it wasn’t. It went on and on.

Amy induced Daisy to turn round and sit down again, and she did, and carried on twiddling, and the story began to unfold.

It was about the stars sailing through the night sky to deliver the Star of Bethlehem in time to light the way for the shepherds and the three kings to find the baby Jesus. When they had all made it through the final song – ‘Little Donkey’ – there was heartfelt applause, and the staff looked relieved and the children looked delighted and the parents looked pleased and proud.

All except us and Daisy.

Daisy had got through it, somehow, but every time she was expected to get up and sing she’d pulled off the same trick as for the first song – she had turned her back on everyone. People had actually stopped laughing about it. It was as if there was an unspoken agreement to turn a blind eye to it, the way you might to somebody muttering to themselves on the bus.