‘I wondered that too. I asked him whether he was all right and he spun back and, in a rather good soprano, sang of how someday he’d wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds were far behind him. Then his face went a strange colour, sort of lavender I’d call it, and I asked whether he needed some water. There was a bottle on a side table and I turned around to pour some into a glass and, when I turned back, he’d taken his trousers off. He’d gone quite mad, you see.’

Angela frowned. ‘As a clinical psychologist, you must understand that I don’t much care for the word mad.’

‘No, but there’s really no other way to put it. He stood up and danced around for a little, then sat back down again, in his shirt and underwear.’

‘Good heavens. It sounds like quite the cri de cœur.’

‘Then he started calling me Roger, for some inexplicable reason, and said that he’d fought with T. E. Lawrence in the Battle of Aqaba. A man of peculiar tastes, he said of Lawrence. I pointed out that, as far as I was aware, Lawrence had died in the thirties while he himself could not have been born until the late sixties, and he stood up and told me I was a fool to believe all the rubbish that’s written in the newspapers, that Lawrence was alive and well and living in a commune in Milton Keynes. At that point, I called one of the school secretaries and she came in and found him lying on the sofa, weeping like a baby. An ambulance was called, and that, as they say, was pretty much that.’

‘What an extraordinary start to your day,’ said Angela.

‘It was. And it was annoying too, because it meant I had to repeat my resignation to the school secretary. What about today’s classes? she asked. Bugger today’s classes, I told her. Bugger the classes, bugger the students, and bugger you! You should have seen her face! And then Martin Rice came out of his classroom, I suppose he must have heard the commotion, and asked what was going on, so I said I’d resigned and I knew full well that he was the person who’d got Sarah Wilmot from Year 10 pregnant, that he was responsible for the Code Purple.’

‘And was he?’ asked Angela. ‘If so, it’s a matter for the police.’

‘I have no idea. But I’ve had my suspicions, and he didn’t deny it, just went a little pale, and said that if I repeated that to anyone, then I’d be eating my dinner through a straw for the next six months, so I marched right up to him and punched him in the nose, and I think I must have broken it because there was blood everywhere. He doubled over and didn’t even fight back! That’s what you have to do with bullies, isn’t it? Beat them at their own game. The boys were delighted, of course. They all stood up on their desks and started shouting encouragement at me, like we were in the last scene of Dead Poets Society.’