‘Because he has a letter from a higher authority, telling him how I must be treated,’ said Dovidl, resuming his seat.

Horrocks flushed, slammed out of the room and did not return before the bell released us for break. At the resumption, Dovidl was summoned to the Head’s office. ‘What happened?’ I whispered when he returned, expecting to see him doubled up in agony after the thrashing of a lifetime.

‘Nothing much,’ shrugged Dovidl. ‘There was a piano in the room, so I went over and played some Schumann, apologising that this was not really my instrument. The Head had a violin from his cupboard, so I played a Bach partita. He tried to look fierce but I saw a tear in his eye and I squeezed the notes until it dropped. He said I deserved the cane for talking back to Mr Horrocks, and what was this instruction from a superior authority?

‘I said it was a note I had brought from Captain Mortimer Simmonds, who is on special assignment to His Majesty’s forces, perhaps he had not received it? He blew his nose and I played some more. Then he gave me a cup of hot chocolate and asked did I know Mr Albert Sammons, and could I get him to address the school on prize-day?

‘You see, Mottl. There is a class system in England, but it is not life class. The real world is divided into two classes of humans: those who make things happen and those who let them happen.

‘I,’ he concluded, ‘belong to first class.’

His avowal of superiority came as no surprise. Dovidl had a way of making people do what he wanted. There had been no letter from a ‘higher authority’, no request for special treatment. In those authoritarian times, parents or those in loco parentis would never have dared to tell a headmaster how to treat his pupils. Dovidl had invented the letter in response to the threat, turning thought into swift action by means of a flowing musical improvisation. Where the rest of us would tackle a problem by resorting to precedent, Dovidl transcended the events at hand and injected the unforeseen. In any crisis, he was wholly unpredictable and hence unconquerable.

Having seen off the maths brute, who departed before Christmas for a post in the pay corps, Dovidl was acclaimed as a class hero and I shared the glory as Antony to his Caesar, Eden to his Churchill. Even Johnny-Isaacs-next-door came seeking my company. Like the explorer H. M. Stanley, I was acknowledged less for my own merits than for having brought forth a popular luminary, a Dr Livingstone, from the heart of darkness. But I did not mind taking second place. It was a role I had been groomed for – being agent to artists, footstool to genius, fixer behind the scenes. For the first time in my conscious life, I felt entirely happy and fulfilled.