Once Mrs Skerritt came into the room and caught him at it, though she did not exactly see Clay for looking at herself.

‘Ah dear,’ she said, ‘in the end things is sad.’

She would often half cry, and at such moments her hair would look more than ever like so many lengths of grey string, or on windy days, a tizz of frayed dish-cloth.

On this particular day when she caught Clay looking at the photograph, his throat swelled, and he dared to ask:

‘Why is my name Clay, Mum?’

Because by that time he was seven, and the kids were asking worse than ever, and bashing him up (they were afraid that he was different).

‘Why,’ she said, ‘let me think your father wanted Percival that is after Mr Stutchbury but I could not bring myself I said there are so many things you don’t do but want take a name a name is yours take pottery I said I’ve half a mind to try my hand if I can find some feller or lady you never know I may be artistic but didn’t because well there isn’t the time always so much to do the people who have to be told and who have to be told and then Dadda’s incurable illness so I did not do that only thought and thought about it and that I believe is why you was called Clay.’

Then she went out the back to empty the tea-pot on a bed of maidenhair which tingled perpetually with moisture.

So the kids continued to bash Clay up, and ask him why he was called that, and he couldn’t tell them, because how could you even when you knew.

There were times when it got extra bad, and once they chased him with a woman’s old cast-off shoe. He ran like a green streak, but not fast enough in the end – they caught him at the corner of Plant Street, where he had been born and always lived, and the heel of their old shoe bored for ever in his mind.

Later, when he had let himself in, into the garden of the leaning house, lost amongst collapsing lattices and the yellow fuzz of asparagus fern, he cried a bit for the difference to which he had been born. But smeared his eyes dry at last, and his nose. The light was rising from the bay in all green peacefulness, as if the world of pointed objects did not exist alongside that of the dreamy bridal shoe.

But he did not embark. Not then. His ribs had not subsided yet.

Once Clay dreamed a dream, and came down into the kitchen. He had meant to keep the dream to himself. Then it was too late, he heard, he was telling it to his mum. Even though his mouth was frozen stiff he had to keep on, to tell.

‘In this dream,’ he said, ’the steps led on down.’

His mum was pushing the rashers around, which went on buckling up in the pan.