The children are starting at Devil’s Slide, a small local school just outside Ague. We leave the house on the dot of eight a.m. Jack and Emmy trudging down the hill behind me towards the butterscotch truck. The ground is still covered by snow, the surface crisp and frozen into a layer of ice as delicate as the sugar crust on top of a crème brûlée. The morning is quiet and still. Lumps of snow balance precariously on the ends of boughs like dumb-bells in the hands of a man on a tightrope. Occasionally one falls and hits the ground with a soft plop. The sun is only halfway up the mountain and the town is in shadow. It’s cold and the children complain. I daresay Jack is dreaming of his overheated-car run to Wormley House, maybe Emmy is suddenly feeling nostalgic for her happy clappy morning assembly at the local nursery – or maybe they just want to dispense with the notion of school attendance altogether.

I get the door of the truck open before noticing that Emmy has turned tail and deserted. Her tartan skirt flaps up to show pink pants as she legs it back to the cabin, kicking up puffs of snow in her wake. When I catch up with her she shrieks and drops limply to the ground.

‘Oh, please come on Emmy.’

I try to hook my hands under her armpits but she cunningly changes tack from 1960s college student to paraplegic.

‘I can’t walk,’ she announces.

‘Why not?’

‘My neck hurts.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Broken,’ she mutters.

‘Oh, that’s not good. How did that happen?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Was it broken when you woke up this morning?’

Five years spent with Jack have made her understandably wary of the fourth degree and she quickly spots the potential ambush in this one. ‘No,’ she says carefully, ‘it broke just now.’

‘Do you think it will be broke for long?’

‘Yes, forever,’ she says, voice cracking bleakly. She turns her head away and I take her shaking body in my arms.

‘Mummy, Mummy.’ Tears leak down her face, ‘I can’t go to school today because my neck is broken and you can’t go to school with a broken neck and that’s not just it I’ve got nits in my stomach and nits are catching and so I can’t go to school with nits in my stomach and a broken neck.’

‘Oh, Emmy.’ I look at her blotchy face. Her eyes are wet, her thick lashes clumped together like black spikes of a garden rake. Oh, God.

‘Children have to go school and that’s that,’ I lecture as I clip her into her seat.

‘Why?’ says Jack.

‘Because they have to.’

‘But why?’

‘Because it’s the law. Everyone has to go to school.’