Mr Dellal is the art master. One of the Shakies – he’d been a stretcher bearer, wounded on the Somme and again at Cambrai (this information delivered to a pair of sniggering book-droppers one afternoon by an enraged Mr Meade) – Gabriel Dellal is small, wiry, limping. Before the War, he was a student at the Slade. Mr Dellal is a proper artist, in fact, with a gallery in London. He has taken an interest in Tom’s own work, though work is the last word that comes to mind when Tom thinks about art. There is nothing work-like about drawing, or painting with the watercolour set that Mum bought him a few Christmases ago, a small black tin box with the mysterious word Cornellissen printed on a gold label. It is … Tom doesn’t honestly know. He throws away his cigarette end, pops a humbug into his mouth and stands up, stretches, feeling the sunshine on his back, the first day of the holidays. Drawing and all that stuff, that art, is just what he does. Why wouldn’t you, if you could? Take a stub of a pencil and a bit of paper, and catch a bit of the world as it glides past like a big, gorgeous butterfly. It’s no different, really, from cricket, Tom decides. If you could bowl a decent off-break, you’d do it. You’d more or less have to: like a duty, in a way.

Lake Cottage is a mile outside the village, up a steep lane that climbs between high banks towards the moor. Three steep granite steps lead to a lichen-encrusted wooden gate, and beyond it, a cobbled path winds between flower beds and shrubs to the front door. Tom loiters at the bottom step, chewing a couple more humbugs to mask the smoke on his breath. He has wandered slowly up from the village, enjoying the air, which smells of heather, sweet new bracken and the lanolin tang of sheep dung. Elderflowers hang their creamy umbels over banks of yellow gorse and purple heather, ragged robin, trailing vetch, herb Robert. It reminds Tom of the Monet landscapes that Mum had taken him to see at the Courtauld, the last time they had gone up to London. Not quite real, like the paintings, which shimmered like mirages from a distance, but up close were all thick paint and brush marks. He scrapes a sticky blob of humbug from his front teeth, climbs the steps and clicks the latch on the gate.

His brother and sister are playing in the garden, climbing in the huge old apple tree that guards the northern side of the house. When they hear the gate they jump down and run towards him, shouting his name in their reedy voices. Dora is nine, and Ivo is seven. They are both filthy: Dora’s white pinafore is streaked various shades of camouflage from the bark of the tree, and Ivo is simply coated with mud.