They took off across the playing fields, Philips pristine in his tracksuit among the small muddy figures. By the time they reached the woods he was flanked only by the fastest runners while the bespectacled, the fat and the surly trailed behind.

We started back to the school.

Potter’s Field was mostly a great jumble of redbrick Victorian buildings but there were also more modern blocks that were clearly residential, and some more ancient buildings, black and crumbling, that looked like something from the Middle Ages. You blinked your eye and a hundred years went by.

Flocks of boys drifted past. They wore straw boaters – the hats on the older boys threadbare and falling to pieces – green blazers trimmed with purple and light grey trousers. All of them lugged books or sports gear or both.

‘It hasn’t changed since Hugo Buck and Adam Jones were here in the eighties,’ Mallory said. ‘A thousand pupils. All boys. All boarding. Three resident staff in every boarding house – House Master, house tutor and matron.’

We paused to look at the statue of the school’s founder in the courtyard of the main building. Not Henry VIII as a fat, bearded king, but as a long-haired scholar and athlete, a lean young man clutching a book, two stone spaniels at his feet – the King Henry VIII who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

‘And it probably hasn’t changed very much since he founded the place,’ Mallory added. ‘Did you know he buried his greatest love here in the school grounds?’

‘What wife was that, sir?’

‘Not a wife. His dogs.’ Mallory indicated the spaniels. ‘Henry buried his favourite dogs at Potter’s Field. We should have a look at their grave. I wouldn’t want to miss it.’

Five hundred years. I couldn’t imagine anything lasting for five hundred years. I was always happy to make it to the weekend.

There was a small graveyard behind the church chapel. Crumbling tombstones, many of the inscriptions wiped clean by time and weather. But the grave of the dogs was easy to find. It was a large square tomb in the very centre of the graveyard with a short epitaph.

Brothers and sisters,

I bid you beware

Of giving your heart

To a dog to tear.

As we walked back to the main buildings a coach was unloading visitors from a local state school’s rugby team. The state school kids grinned with bewildered amusement at the boys from Potter’s Field in their boaters and their green and purple blazers. But the Potter’s Field boys gave no indication that they had noticed, which made the smiles on the faces of the state school kids look like some kind of defensive wound.