Half term was gone. The students were back. Chetwood sprang to life again, empty halls filled with chatter, empty classrooms with clutter, empty dormitories with interpersonal drama. The people Walden envied least in all the school were the Heads of Year. She took my mascara—That’s my mascara!—Well I heard he said to her that she said something mean about me because so-and-so told her that I—

And the real problems, of course, mixed up with the ordinary chaos of humans living with other humans. Pastoral work was listening, patiently, so patiently, for the signal through the noise: the bullying hidden under of layers of He’s a loner, though, isn’t he, the academic struggle underlying I didn’t let her copy me, Miss, she just took a photo when I wasn’t looking—listening, thinking, and above all watching for the truest danger sign among teenagers: the sudden change. Who has gone quiet when they used to be loud, or loud and disruptive when they used to be quiet? Who has lost weight rapidly, who has given up doing their homework, who has developed mysterious bruises and then abruptly quit the swimming squad? The underlying causes—growth spurt, new friend group with bad study habits, clumsiness and coincidence; or eating disorder, depression, peer-on-peer abuse?

It happened at Chetwood, as it happened everywhere. Parents could spend a fortune trying to future-proof their children, but no one could make them entirely safe from the present.

It was November, the start of Autumn II, the worst half term of the academic year. Eight long uninterrupted weeks until the Christmas break, waking in the dark, going to bed in the dark, spending the brief hours of sunlight trapped in offices and meeting rooms and classrooms. Now came the dreary slog through the worst parts of the curriculum. Children learned incrementally; skills took time to develop; you had to put the hardest stuff as late as possible in a two-year course while still leaving yourself time to revise and consolidate before the public examinations in summer. What it always came down to was a block of hell with your exam sets in late November. Over and over in the staffroom you could hear teachers saying to each other, “If we can just get through it all by mocks!” Mock examinations, in January, were worse than the actual GCSEs and A-levels, because the students had a fraction of the time to revise almost the same amount of material. Year Eleven looked frazzled, and Year Thirteen grim, as the dark times bore down on them.