Until quite recently, Denham Hall had been boys-only; even now, boys outnumbered girls in a ratio of 2:1. This discrepancy had two effects. The first was a general feeling, cheerfully shared by both sexes, that boys were standard issue, whereas girls were an anomalous deviation from the norm. The second effect was that each year, the school’s position on puberty was determined by the relatively small number of girls in the top forms. If most of these girls had developed discernible breasts, then adulthood was in vogue. But this year, only two out of the twenty-five pupils in the incipient eighth form – boys and girls – had started puberty with any real conviction. There was Des Kapoor, who had an unreliable glitch in his voice and faint inverted commas above the corners of his upper lip; and there was Sophie Witrand, cup size 32A and growing, fast. Neither Des nor Sophie had any social heft. The cool kids in their year-group were Milly Urquhart, Ludo Hall, and little Rhiannon Jenkins – all still small and slim and smooth-skinned, their snub noses only just beginning to morph into more distinctive shapes.

These three set the tone: for now, the currency at Denham Hall was immaturity. The children seemed innately to understand that their un-sprouted bodies were approaching expiry date, and that this made them all the more valuable. Theirs was a clean, clear beauty, crystalline in comparison to the maculate adult world with its coarse dark body hair and pendulous flesh. Menstruation was regarded with particular disgust. Yet paradoxically, the accoutrements of puberty were de rigueur: bras were worn, legs were shaved, deodorant ostentatiously applied. The ideal was to display all the sophistication of adolescence, while maintaining the physical purity of childhood. Anyone who actually needed the deodorant would have been ‘minging’.