Bertie had not meant that. He had envisaged taking Ulysses in by himself. His brother could then be looked after in the classroom until it was time to go home. This would give him a feeling for the Steiner School, he thought, and would provide more than enough for Bertie to talk about in the Show and Tell.

He then asked: ‘May I take him in myself, Mummy?’

And Irene, who was now not listening at all, replied: ‘Of course, Bertie, of course.’

It was in this way that the whole unfortunate series of events was set on course. There was no real fault on either side: Bertie thought that he had been given permission to take Ulysses to school, and Irene thought that she had merely promised that she would one day take him for a brief visit to the classroom. And there the misunderstanding might have remained, had it not been for a further bit of confusion, this time involving Stuart.

On most mornings it was Irene who went with Bertie on the 23 bus. Every couple of weeks, though, Stuart would arrange to go to work later and would accompany Bertie on the bus, thus allowing Irene the luxury of a long lie-in. Ulysses was a sound sleeper – in the mornings – and so it was not uncommon on such days for Irene to be able to lie in bed until well after ten. And this is what she thought would happen on the morning in question.

Stuart was first out of bed. ‘I’ll take you to school today,’ he said to Bertie when he went into his son’s bedroom to waken him. He had then gone back to the kitchen, and it was there that he received an urgent call from his immediate superior in the government office in which he worked as a senior statistician. An embarrassing report had just been published in the morning papers revealing that slightly under 19 per cent of Scottish children were illiterate when they left primary school at the age of twelve. This was particularly embarrassing in a country that made much of its educational tradition.

Stuart was used to awkward statistics, and he knew how uncomfortable politicians felt about them. On rare occasions there was nothing that could be done, and the statistics had to be left as they were, but usually it was possible to find some other contrary statistic that made things look better from the political point of view.