Towards the end of the first period, a dark car would appear on the school’s improbably long gravelled drive and proceed at almost funereal pace to the front entrance. A woman Prince assumed was Mr Marquis’s wife would emerge and help him out. He would spend a while sorting himself out, checking his briefcase and adjusting his hat, before she guided him by the elbow the short distance to the steps at the entrance of the school, where a boy from the Lower Sixth would be waiting to take over. He would lead Mr Marquis up the steps and into the school, from where he would be taken to a classroom for the start of the second period.

On Wednesdays, this would be Prince’s class. Mr Marquis would be handed over to the teacher from the previous lesson, who would take his hat and coat and help him with his briefcase before placing him in the right position facing the pupils.

Mr Marquis would remain in that position for the duration of the lesson, his only apparent movement being that of his left hand across the papers spread out on the table in front of him as he spoke in a near-endless monologue. He paused only to ask an occasional question of the class, and gave the impression of being thrown off track if a pupil asked anything of him. He could spend a whole lesson reciting the poetry of Homer, switching without a pause from ancient Greek to the English translation, his head tilted back as he spoke in a quiet voice the boys strained to catch, his unseeing eyes darting from left to right, sometimes filling with tears: the blind teacher reciting the words of the blind poet.

At the end of the period, another Lower Sixth boy would appear to escort Mr Marquis to his next lesson, and that would be the pattern of his day: being led from place to place, never quite sure of where he was, his journey always in the hands of someone else, his destination taken care of.

Prince now had some appreciation of how the teacher must have felt. Since being sent to Derbyshire, he’d had to entrust every stage of his journey to someone else, unsure of where he was going next. It was as if he was blindfolded. Now Niels had told him to be ready to leave Esbjerg first thing in the morning.

‘Am I going straight to Copenhagen?’ He assumed Niels was in charge of the resistance group in the port: he had an undoubted air of authority about him and he was the only person he’d seen on more than one occasion.

‘It’s best you know nothing about your journey. You’ll be told as much as you need to know at the right time. It’s safer that way.’