Tom sits in the train, watching oak trees through the window. The engine is climbing up the valley from Bovey Tracy, trailing a thick cloud of smoke. He leans his forehead against the glass. The golden slope of the moor is bright in the sunlight – it has been raining, and the sky is still slate-dark in the east, but here it is clear and everything is gleaming, newly varnished. The train crawls into the cut before the village, a lush grotto of hart’s tongue ferns, huge shuttlecock ferns, ivy and escaped rhododendrons, deep, shining green. Viridian. Hooker’s green. All at once he is thinking about Kerala. There had been a sunken lane that had run across the plantation towards one of the hamlets. In the monsoon it had turned into a frothing stream and his ayah had kept him away from it, but when it was dry he would play in it, imagining that he was the last of the Mohicans. The details of his old life are almost gone now. The plantation makes him think of Daddy, and he growls with frustration.

Hawksworthy Station is a tiny village halt with a granite ticket office and an absurdly neat ornamental flower bed. Tom gets down, greets the stationmaster and climbs the creeper-festooned steps. The school bursar has given him two shillings – writing the sum down on a piece of notepaper which he slipped, ostentatiously, into an envelope marked Capt. J. Collyer – for travel expenses. Tom has incurred no such expenses in the couple of hours it has taken him to get here from Tiverton, so, reluctant, somehow, to go straight home, he wanders down into the village and buys a packet of twenty Gold Flake cigarettes and a penny bag of mint humbugs at the shop. He goes into the churchyard and lights up, thanking the bursar as he does so.

Leaning against a gravestone, Tom takes stock. He has got through his first year at Bishopstone, and it hasn’t been all that bad. He happens to be rather good at cricket, good enough to be captain of the junior colts team. He is on the big side for his age, which keeps the bullies away. Not that there is a great deal of bullying at Bishopstone. It is Daddy’s old school, and Daddy had remembered it, with great affection, as a citadel of Englishness, as hidebound in its traditions of institutional savagery as a nabob’s elephant-foot trophy. But to Captain Collyer’s dismay, the stories that his son has brought home with him in the holidays tell of a school into which dreadful fingers of rot are creeping. Rot in the form of modernity, of progress. Of kindness, even. In 1932 the school will be opening its doors to girls. Rot. Absolute rot.