It was billed as a team-building trip: two nights of camping before the Easter holidays, for the Year Elevens who planned to stay on for sixth form. Now, whenever Mr Clark talks about that excursion, which actually lasted just one night before being aborted, he refers to it by a different name. He calls it my Little Stunt.

I shouldn’t have gone. I only did so because Gramps and I were on the verge of a falling-out. Over slug pellets of all things. Every evening, I’d been sprinkling the little blue balls over my bedroom carpet and windowsill. Every morning, he hoovered them up. And he kept removing the gaffer tape I’d stuck round my windows, and the magazines I’d folded and wedged between the floor and skirting boards. He was always getting mad with me about the mess. I kept getting mad with him for undoing my work.

Not that it seemed to make a lot of difference. I’d still wake every night to find the revolting slimy things squirming across my carpet and climbing the walls above my pillow. Some nights a legion of great fat ones would make it to the ceiling, where they’d disband and explore from the corner of the room outwards, eventually succumbing to gravity and plummeting towards my bed. By dawn, they’d have retreated to whichever crevice they’d oozed from.

On the morning of the school trip, Gramps didn’t get angry for once. He didn’t tell me to stop being silly. Instead, he said that while I was away he’d have the floor up in my room and sort out the infestation once and for all.

So I boarded the minibus as planned with two-thirds of 11C. Equipped with a John le Carré audiobook on my iPod, and a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye, I spent the journey simultaneously listening and reading. Both works that had once entertained me, their purpose now was to distract, to absorb. It was a system I’d recently developed to keep me from listening for suspicious noises. Coupled with timing each breath to eight words for the duration, I successfully completed the seventy-three-minute drive without having to demand that Mr Farley pull over.

Our destination was a fort deep in the Surrey countryside, built in the nineteenth century to protect London from a French invasion, we were told. We disembarked in a field where everyone dashed to secure one of the four-man canvas tents with their preferred roomies. I made no such effort and ignored Amit’s shouts to follow him, so finished up sharing a decrepit brown affair with Lei Pang and Craig Lowe. The Mackies immediately christened it the Bent Tent.