‘Well, I told him that I no longer wanted to be a teacher. That I loathed the children and thought he was a total twat.’

‘You said that?’

‘I said exactly that.’

‘Gosh. An ad hominem attack. Okay. Go on.’

‘Then I said that it had been a mistake for me ever to seek employment at the same school where I had been a student and that I no longer wanted to be cloistered in an institution where favouritism and bullying ran riot and we had a special code word for every time one of the girls got knocked up by one of the boys. His face went puce – I doubt anyone had ever spoken to him like this before – and he just stared at me as if I’d gone mad, before bursting out laughing and sitting down behind his desk. You’ve obviously had a bad night’s sleep, Cleverley, he told me. I suggest that you get back to work and we forget this conversation ever happened or you might find yourself in detention.’

‘Detention?’

‘I know! I’m a teacher, I told him, not a student. You can’t put me in detention. But he was right about one thing, I said. It wasn’t just that I’d had a bad night’s sleep. I’d barely had any sleep at all. In fact, I’d been shagging all night long and only got about two hours.’

‘Good Lord!’ said Angela, astonished. ‘And is that true?’

‘Oh yes. I barely got a wink.’

‘I can’t imagine he liked that very much.’

‘He didn’t. He told me that if I said one more word, then he’d fire me. And I told him that he must be as deaf as he is stupid because – hello! – I’d already resigned. Things went rather downhill from there.’

‘In what way?’

‘He took off his shoe and threw it at me.’

Angela sat back in surprise. ‘He did what?’

‘He took off his shoe and threw it at me. His right shoe. Then he took off his left and threw that one too. I was only standing about twelve feet away, but he missed both times, which I thought was a bit lame. It reminded me of that time a journalist in Baghdad threw his shoes at President Bush.’

‘I remember that. He actually dodged them very well.’

‘He did. Lightning-quick reactions.’

‘Still, an extraordinary thing for a headmaster to do.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘And what happened then?’

‘He sort of sank back into his chair and repeated that he had a terrible hangover and wasn’t even sure this conversation was taking place. I told him it definitely was. And I had meant every word. That’s when things started to get strange. He went very quiet, then turned around in his chair and looked out the window and began singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.’

‘“Somewhere Over The Rainbow”?’

‘Yes. From The Wizard of Oz.’

Angela stared at him, utterly bewildered now. ‘But … why?’ she asked.