‘It’s about why boys should learn to look before they leap, and to leave things as they find them.’

‘Yes, go on,’ said Camilla.

‘It’s about not altering what already works. Not being too ambitious. Not letting other little boys have too much influence over you.’

‘Go on,’ said Camilla.

‘It’s about why you shouldn’t make comparisons. Why you shouldn’t go into caves. Why you should listen to the advice of your elders.’

‘Yes, yes, so what is it really about?’ asked Camilla. She seemed to imply that they were on the brink of it now and needed to make only one more little leap of the mind.

But she had wearied them. She searched the rows of closed faces in vain. I was sitting at the back, lying low and keeping quiet, but I felt that even I had let her down.

‘Let me give you a clue,’ she said. ‘Thomas Hardy was forty-three when he wrote this story, which means that he had been married for almost ten years. He was becoming famous and meeting other women. And as we know, not a woman could alight from an omnibus in sight of Thomas Hardy without suggesting to him another turn that his life might take.’ Camilla looked hard at me as she said this, but whether I was meant to see myself as Hardy or the girl getting off the omnibus I couldn’t decide. But there was terror in it for me either way.

‘And here we find him writing,’ she went on, ‘ostensibly for children, about the damning and diversion of streams, about the small obstacles which hold back the mighty roll of the seas, about the excitement of watching the water change directions, about the havoc it causes, and about the final inadvisability, for spurious parishional reasons, of altering the directional flow of a single solitary drop.’ She paused and smiled – what a marvellous public smile she had – at an image that had formed itself in her mind. ‘Let me put it another way. The climax of this story is reached when the two pre-pubescent males find themselves lost and drowning in the cave, itself screened and fringed by bushes, with nothing to help them but a small supply of inadequate guttering candles.’ She threw back her head and laughed one of those ravening piratical laughs of hers. ‘Now tell me that you don’t know what’s going on in West Poley,’ she dared us all.

There were still pockets of resistance to her, but the small guttering candle lit a common recognition amongst the women. There were some smiles, there was even some laughter, and more than one curious face swung around to see how I was taking all this, alone and masculine on the back row. They needn’t have bothered. It wasn’t necessary. I had already sputtered and gone out.