The Wystan in Bertie’s name was, of course, after Wystan Hugh Auden, or W. H. Auden as he was usually known. Irene admired Auden’s work and liked the name. Bertie did not. She had introduced him to Auden, of course, concentrating on the more accessible poems, but Bertie had not responded as warmly as she might have wished. She had read him ‘If I Could Tell You’, and he had listened intently, but then he had shown by his questions that he had clearly missed the point.

‘Why does Mr Auden,’ he asked, ‘say that all the brooks and soldiers will run away, Mummy? How can brooks run away if they haven’t got legs?’

‘Auden used something called personalisation, Bertie,’ Irene explained. ‘He makes inanimate things talk, or have attitudes. It’s very clever.’

Bertie thought about this. ‘And then he says that perhaps the roses really want to grow. How can roses want to do anything, Mummy? They haven’t got brains, have they?’

‘Mr Auden is very clever,’ said Irene patiently. ‘He makes us think about the world by making the world think. That’s frightfully clever, Bertie.’

Bertie looked thoughtful. ‘We learned some poems at school,’ he said. ‘There was one about some daffodils. It was when Miss Harmony was still there. She told us to close our eyes while she read it and try to think of daffodils. And then she taught us some Burns.’

Irene was silent for a moment. ‘Burns is a folk poet, Bertie. He really isn’t very deep.’

‘She read us a poem about two dogs,’ Bertie went on. ‘There was this very grand dog, you see, and this other dog …’

Irene looked pained. ‘I know all about that one, Bertie. It’s very sentimental, you know. A lot of Burns is.’

Bertie remembered something that his friend, Tofu, had said. ‘Tofu asked Miss Harmony whether she could read something from another of Mr Burns’s books. He said that there was a book called The Merry Muses of Caledonia and the poems were very rude. Miss Harmony said no and went very red.’

Irene glared at Bertie. ‘That boy, Tofu, is …’ She did not complete her sentence. She disapproved of Tofu and would have preferred it if Bertie had chosen some other friend: Olive, for example, to whom she had given every encouragement, and whose mother was a member of her Melanie Klein Reading Group. But Bertie seemed to have set his face against Olive, and even went so far as to say that he hated her. Children were always saying such things, of course, and then deciding the next moment that the hated person is their best friend.