It had happened towards the end of his second year. Then, the craze was not diabolos or apple-scented gel pens, but model aeroplanes from World War Two – a memory still relatively fresh. The words that Dyer assembled to salvage the incident were impregnated with astringent smells, of Araldite, turpentine, paints in miniature tin pots.

For his eleventh birthday, he told Marvar, his parents had given him, at his whining insistence, an Airfix kit. The cardboard box contained three rails of grey plastic components which had to be twisted off, painstakingly glued together, then painted with appropriate camouflage and markings to denote whether the aircraft belonged to the Allied or Axis forces. When he stuck on the last transfer, it filled Dyer with a sense of accomplishment that he could conjure even now, to balance on his fingertips this three-dimensional object, the first which he had created all by himself. He hangared the plane in his bedside locker on top of his stamp album, to bring out and dive, handheld, through the air – bursting from the clouds on an unsuspecting, imaginary enemy.

One morning he opened the locker and found the plane gone.

For the next forty-eight hours, nothing seemed emptier. He kept coming back to look inside. Distraught, he challenged the other boys in his dorm – Finnock, Garridge, Trundle, Stook, Croach – and was met with blank or smirking denials. The matter of a missing model aircraft was too minor to take up with his housemaster, a remote and preoccupied figure who had been held prisoner by the Japanese in Singapore. Dyer’s parents were far away. He tried to cry himself to sleep without making a noise.

Two nights later, he stood in the bathroom brushing his teeth when a boy entered wearing a red tartan dressing gown. In the mirror there appeared the freckled rather pale face of Rougetel, a shy ‘newbug’ from the dorm on the next landing. An unusually gifted pupil, and already ‘a ledge’, in Leandro’s word, for completing his maths prep in minutes, Rougetel had suffered terribly in his first term from homesickness – his parents lived abroad – and Dyer had gone out of his way to comfort him after he ran away one day. This had developed into a friendship. Rougetel helped Dyer to solve Slimy’s more difficult fractions. When Dyer’s grandmother took him to the Mitre for lunch, Dyer invited Rougetel along. During the last hols they had independently sent each other polite Christmas cards.

Swallowing hard, Rougetel stepped up to the basin. After a furtive glance around, he bent forward with his face nearly touching the mirror, like Dyer’s mother, so close that Dyer could see the indentation in his chin, as if a pencil had been pressed to it – and he whispered to Dyer’s reflection: ‘Look in the sandpit.’ The need to keep his voice down made it sound like the putter of a distant propeller.