He ordered the boy to take off his shirt and undo his belt. Stannard could see that the uniform trousers were too big for the boy’s skinny waist, so he now had to hold them up with one hand.

The maître d’ moved the boy so that he was standing with his back towards Sir Percival.

‘Hands here,’ the maître d’ said, tapping the top of the dinner chair.

The boy gripped the chair. His trousers fell down. The white men cheered.

‘So it’s not true about their cocks!’ one hooted. ‘Thieving bastard’s got a tiddler!’

Stannard knew what it felt like to be jeered at, to be helpless and humiliated. He was ashamed to be part of the same race as these crowing loudmouths, and he could not bear to see what was about to happen. Suddenly he felt an iron grip around his bicep.

‘Don’t make an exhibition of yourself,’ Leon hissed at him. ‘Stand up straight. Eyes front.’

Stannard forced himself to obey. He saw the boy’s hands clenched round the wooden chair-back. He saw his head bowed in shame and knees quivering with fear. He heard Sir Percival announce, ‘The penalty for theft, as laid down in club rules, is fifteen strokes of the whip.’

‘Hear! Hear!’ one of the men in the dinner jackets said.

Sir Percival raised his right arm and pulled it back, holding the horsewhip diagonally behind him. He took a sight on the accused boy’s buttocks, then swung his arm and brought the thick whip down to strike a wicked blow that made its victim wince in pain as a welt began to form across the top of his thighs.

The maître d’ pulled the food thief up straight and put him back in position for the second blow.

One after the other, the strokes rained down upon the boy’s naked body, criss-crossing his thighs, buttocks and back in a pattern of raised skin, bruised flesh and the occasional glint of blood where more than one strike had hit the same spot.

The boy cried out on the third stroke as the pain became more than he could bear in silence. By the sixth he had started to cry. Sir Percival, meanwhile, was scarlet-faced, his chest heaving with exertion, for he was well into his late sixties, overweight and unfit.

As the chairman paused to mop his face, the black servants looked on impassively. Stannard felt their silent rage at the cruelty and injustice they were witnessing.

The boy had been accused of stealing food that had been discarded by the men and women for whom it had been cooked. It was obvious the lad was in need of a decent meal, and Stannard was willing to bet he had parents and siblings who were equally malnourished. What possible harm had he done?