The rest of the drive is silent apart from the hiss of rain on the roof and the frantic rhythm of the windscreen wipers. There is nothing to distract Tommy from his father’s words as they sound over and over in his mind. He has never heard anything like them. Most of them mean nothing to him, and the pictures they paint are so horrible that he decides he must have heard them wrong. They don’t fit in the safe leather interior of a Star 11.9. And the story itself: had it been Daddy’s version of ‘If’, with guns and swearing? You’ll be a man, my son … It hadn’t quite sounded like that, though. It hadn’t sounded, really, as if Daddy had been talking to him at all. He decides to try and forget the whole thing. The thought of it makes him feel sick and his shoulder is hurting enough already. He stares at the back of his father’s head, at the neatly barbered nape of his neck, too neat to ever have been in the same place as a man with half his skin ripped away, or a man with no head at all. He shivers, and feels sick, and listens to the wipers clatter back and forth.

When they get home, Tommy is not allowed to sit in the kitchen but is sent straight upstairs to his room, where he gets painfully out of his filthy, soaked clothes – his left arm is no use at all by now – and into his pyjamas, listening all the while to Daddy and Mummy arguing downstairs. His baby sister starts to scream. Tom pulls the quilt up over his head.

Much later, after Daddy has taken his gun and gone out to revenge himself on the furred and feathered creatures of the moor, Mummy comes into Tom’s room. She has run a hot bath for him, and lets him lie in it for what seems like hours. As he clambers out, Mummy waiting with a fluffy towel, she notices his shoulder, which is bruised black and khaki.

‘Does it hurt?’ she asks, and he shakes his head, not wanting to be any more of a damned disgrace. He can’t sleep that night, because every time he turns over, the pain goes through him like electricity. The next day Daddy drives into Exeter. Tom hears Mummy dialling the telephone and a little while later Dr Henderson, short and wide, stretching the buttons of his old-fashioned waistcoat which he decorates with an ornate watch fob, arrives. He takes Tom over to the window, examines his shoulder briefly and nods his head.

‘You’ve broken your collarbone, old chum. How did you manage that?’ he asks, in that kindly but distant voice that doctors reserve for children.

‘I fell off a pony,’ says Tom.