‘This chap I’d turned down. He’d got his cricket whites on, and there were these big green grass stains all down his front, right down to his knees. He was just standing there, watching me clean.’

Claire felt a prickling along her arms.

‘I didn’t know what he wanted at first, but I knew it wasn’t right, something wasn’t right. He was blocking the doorway. So I just said, oh, hello, how are you, then I tried to go past him, but maybe that was what he wanted. He got me up against the wall, you know, by the throat.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Well, I just thought, that’s it, I’m going to be strangled by a Malaysian chap in the loos! Then he – you know, he did what he wanted to do, I suppose. Then somebody came past at one point, and he let go a bit, and I got away from him and ran downstairs and went straight over to the lodge, looking for my manager, you know. He was sitting in there eating this big plate of chips from the canteen. I told him what had happened and he said, That’s terrible, June, but you do know the cricketers are going home tomorrow, don’t you? So you won’t have to see him again.’

She laughed in a bewildered sort of way, and started emptying Claire’s bin.

‘But June,’ Claire said. ‘That’s horrendous.’

‘Oh, I know it is, I know, but what can you do?’

‘I don’t know, but there has to be something. Nothing was done? Really nothing at all?’

Oh no, June said, nothing ever got done. It was just the job, wasn’t it? And other things happened to other scouts in other colleges. Abuse from the students: things thrown at them, or horrible things left in the rooms for them to find. Assaults by the students, too. Sexual assaults. Exposing themselves. But that all got hushed up.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s just how it has to be. They’re just young lads, after all, aren’t they? They don’t really know what they’re doing.’

Claire felt dizzy, dazzled with unfairness. June carried on talking for the both of them. Anyway, she was saying, most of them weren’t like that, most of them were good as gold. Chocolates at the end of the term, sometimes, and a thank you card. Once in a while, some of them even came back for a visit. She’d had one lad who’d called her Second Mum. That was before she moved to the women’s college, of course. Girls didn’t tend to do that sort of thing. They were much more reserved. She missed the lads sometimes. You couldn’t really wish a criminal record on them, could you? Not at that age.