The peeping-Tom escapade needed no repetition. It somehow sealed our capsule against intrusion. It also illustrated the practical, even heroic, usefulness of what Dovidl referred to as his ‘strategy’. A more telling instance occurred when school reopened in November and we went off together in mauve-trimmed grey uniforms to The House, a place of detention that groomed the sons of the upper-middle classes for the better class of public school. To me, The House represented seven daily hours of fear, never knowing when I was next to be assaulted by sadistic teachers and playground bullies. I warned Dovidl, skinny and alien as he was, that he must expect to be victimised. He grinned, and told me not to worry.

In the second lesson of the day, a bullet-headed maths master called Horrocks, delighted by my failure to define ‘hypotenuse’, lifted me balefully out of my seat by the lobe of a twisted ear and began dragging me to the blackboard – only to release his grip with a startled expletive.

‘Ruddy hell!’ he yelped, glaring around the class. ‘Who did that?’

‘Did what, sir?’

Rubbing his thigh, he reached again for my throbbing ear – reached, and yelped once more. Swivelling round, Horrocks was just quick enough to catch Dovidl retracting his bowing arm, at the end of which protruded the pointed end of a geometry compass.

‘Stand up,’ screamed Horrocks. ‘Your name?’

‘Rapoport, sir,’ said Dovidl, unrippled in a sea of terror.

‘A foreign boy, new to our ways, I suppose,’ snarled Horrocks. ‘Well, I suppose it is going to be my English duty to teach you some manners. Tell me, Rabbit-fart, do you know what we do in this great country to boys who assault their masters?’

‘No, sir,’ said Dovidl. ‘But in my poor country we have a name for men who torment children instead of going to war and fighting the enemy.’

Horrocks was dumbstruck. A corpulent specimen in his early thirties, he had evidently failed to volunteer for active service out of cowardice or invalidity. ‘I shall ruddy well fight when His Majesty calls me to do so,’ he blustered. ‘In the meantime, someone has to stay behind and drum some maths into your thick skulls before the Army will even look at you miserable lot as cannon-fodder. Now come over here, Rabbi’s-brat, and take your punishment.’

‘You will not touch me,’ said Dovidl. ‘I wish to see the Head.’

Never in the glorious history and voluminous literature of English prep-schooling, from Tom Brown to Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings, has such blank recalcitrance been encountered in a first-morning classroom. If Horrocks was stunned, the rest of us were transfixed by a drama whose outcome could only be epic and bloodstained.

‘And why do you think the Head would wish to see you?’ growled Horrocks, with the bulbous look of a man who pins living butterflies to an album page.