‘What do you want to know for?’ Saul would have sing-songed at my asking, a hard brown sweet doing a dance across his gums. If I’d found a convincing response, his next question would be, ‘And what do I get in return for showing you?’

So, I waited. News would reach me once the ship had docked. It had no distance to travel.

We were in the staff room on a prep day before the start of term when Miriam Calder announced it proudly, apropos of nothing: ‘He has a specialism in science, you know.’ Our school administrator was spooning sugar into a cup of tea she’d prepared for Mr Crane. ‘A specialism,’ she went on, ‘that he will be sharing across the whole school.’

Ruth French and I were sitting on the low, soft chairs, piles of folders on the table in front of us. We snapped up our heads.

‘Sorry, did you say “he”?’

It was Ruth who asked; my mouth was wide open in disbelief.

Never, in my living memory, had there been a male teacher at St Rita’s. A male headteacher, yes. Before Mr Crane came Mr Bartle, who died just before I moved up to the senior classes. But a man serving as mere teacher alone… ? Mr Crane had been deputy to Mr Bartle in the years leading up to his death – he was preparing to take over, the outgoing head expected to retire, not die – but Mr Crane had done no time in front of the whiteboard then. I could only draw up memories of him speaking from the front in chapel, and of him standing at Mr Bartle’s shoulder in his office. You needed to travel back fifty years, and several feet along the row of framed school photos in the main corridor, to find another male face looking out from that teachers’ middle row.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Miriam, relishing this eking-out of information, ‘our new staff member is most definitely a man. Did you not know?’

We didn’t. She knew we didn’t. We knew that Mr Crane had found no new likely candidate for teacher training on the island – an offer I had in my time seized on breathlessly, aged eighteen, ending the terrifying idea that I would need to go to the mainland to find a career. There is an invisible line on Lark dividing those who live by their intelligence and those who lean on physical abilities. I was able to rig up a snare and raise the game by beating, all useful to my gamekeeper father – everyone on Lark had a second skill – but my true strength was my brain.

‘Will you actually be a real teacher?’ Paul had asked. Eleven years old and he thought he knew it all. ‘Don’t you have to go away and do a degree for that?’