Visible from the playground until its demolition, the blue oblong hull had loomed on Rougetel’s boyhood horizon as the archetypal frontier post, like the two or three cafés in town that it thrilled him to visit with Dyer. A quarterdeck from which to espy, not merely the far riverbank, but, with that divine intoxication Emily Dickinson had flagged in their English class, ‘the first league out from land’.

He was looking across the playing fields. Without speaking, he stepped away from the Rink and took some of his lolloping strides out over the Hard Court. Dyer caught up with him on the football pitch, and they continued walking towards the river.

The blue barge had been on Rougetel’s mind when he climbed over the fence on a cold September evening shortly after arriving in Oxford eighteen months earlier. Never before then had he returned to the Phoenix, but compelled by a desire to revisit the site, he spent that night on the riverbank where the barge used to be. Inside its converted hold during his last summer term, he had changed into his swimming trunks, hopping on one leg like a stork, before diving into the Cherwell to compete against local schools. Yet this time he had found it hard to sleep when he lay down on the wet grass and recalled his races back and forth across the muddy water. ‘I felt I was swimming through these strong dark currents, cold, warm, sometimes clear, and sometimes with my feet in the slime.’

His serious brown eyes drifted to the far bank. They touched the rushes, then swept back over the War Memorial, the cricket pavilion, the playing fields, to the familiar brick buildings, the toothpick mast of the flagpole, and the playground where the two of them had stood but moments before. It had been blacker than tar on that chill September night, and Rougetel had crept away before sunrise.

Now, for the first time as an adult, he was seeing the whole of the Phoenix set out before him in conditions of daylight. It was almost too big to absorb.

‘We followed the path laid by our parents, leaving home, feeling sick at having to come back to school, with no one to talk to about our feelings, not daring to utter them in case we were struck down or mocked …’

A boy was speaking from the years before. The unaccompanied minor from La Paz being led away by the stewardess after kissing goodbye to his mother and father, neither of whom had ever sat Rougetel down and said to him: ‘This is what the deal is.’

His gaze pulled back over the sandpit to the swimming pool erected in Dyer’s last year as a substitute for the Cherwell. His eyes sought the low Nissen hut where he and Dyer had nailed together their wooden weapons. He was hearing the war cries of boys in faded blue corduroys, the splutter of make-believe machine guns.