I won’t cry. I won’t.

‘But I thought I was … I thought I was their class teacher,’ I say, gulping back tears now. ‘Isn’t it my job to nurture the children here, to make them feel happy and relaxed in their everyday life, not just through following a strict curriculum? Am I wrong?’

I blink, hoping to disguise the pools that are forming in my eyes. Her words have hit me hard and she knows it.

‘No more singing in class,’ she repeats, as hard as a stone. I clasp my hands together, I twiddle my thumbs. I can feel my heart thumping and perspiration breaking through onto my navy blouse. My dress sense was also deemed inappropriate so I had to ‘tone it down’ and wear only black, navy or other suitably muted colours in case a flash of colour might poison the poor children’s minds.

‘Can I ask you a question before I go?’ I say, taking from her silence that she has now finished chastising me. She puts her pen down, pushes back her glasses and tilts her head to the side, waiting.

‘Go ahead,’ she says. ‘Quickly. I don’t have all day.’

I’ve wanted to ask her this for so long. I need to know the truth.

‘Why did you hire me in the first place?’ I ask her, looking her right in her steely grey eyes. ‘I genuinely would like to know, because all I’ve ever done here seems to be wrong in your eyes. I’d like to know how on earth you thought from my application and interview that I would fit into your establishment?’

I can’t even bring myself to call it a school. It’s like an institution, like a military operation, a horrible place that people actually pay for. I didn’t even think such ancient, right-wing places existed any more.

She puffs out a snigger and takes off her glasses.

‘Oh, I think you already know the answer to that question, Mrs Malone,’ she says to me, emphasizing my husband’s surname.

I knew it. I bloody knew I was hired because I’m a doctor’s wife and not because of my own credentials or what I could bring to the job. I’m humiliated, I’m insulted and I’m hurt right to my very bones.

I stand up tall, willing myself to hold my cool, but the adrenaline pumps within me, as does my pride, my intellect and everything I have worked for since I left Loughisland to study in Dublin, a world away from my family and the place I called home. I think of my father’s face the day I graduated, his cheeks pink with pride and a tear in his eye he couldn’t hide and didn’t care to.