Slowly, with the help of a few kind masters and a friendly matron, he began to settle into the routines of boarding school life. His name was easy enough to anglicise to Vic, and at school he was only ever referred to as Mackensie – Mac for short. The boys seemed blessedly oblivious to the colour of his skin.

Of course, he would never be part of the popular crowd. Although he could catch a cricket ball without flinching, his legs were too short to be any good at running or football, and he was far too slight for rugger. Whoever invented that terrible, brutal game, he wondered, as he froze on the sidelines with the other weedy boys, trying to work out when to cheer and when not to. The rules were unfathomable and seemed to consist of trying to kill your opponents by crashing into them as violently as possible.

By the third term he discovered that music lessons took place at the same time as games, and persuaded his parents to pay for him to learn the piano. He practised hard, delighting his teacher with his interest in what she called ‘theory’ but he saw as ‘patterns’: chords, scales, intervals and harmonics. On a wind-up gramophone she played scratched recordings of Chopin and Mozart, as well as tracks by Americans with fantastical names – Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton. He loved the classics but he loved jazz more, and before long was starting to improvise and compose his own pieces.

He breezed through science and mathematics, having discovered that the logic of numbers could be beautiful, spending hours learning tables and formulae so that he could apply them instantly to solving a problem. He reached the end of the book before the rest of the class was only part way through, and the teacher gave him the advanced version being used by the form above. Classmates would come to him for help with their ‘prep’, which is what they called homework. In this way he began to find his place.

It was only when his best friend Kenny invited him home for half term that he began to understand how different he appeared to some people, especially adults. As they clambered off the train at Beaconsfield Station, he registered the expressions on the faces of Kenny’s mother and father: surprise tinged with a touch of alarm. They all shook hands in the polite English way, and he and Kenny bundled into the rear seat of a comfy leather-smelling Humber for the short journey to their home.

‘Where do you hail from, Victor?’ Kenny’s mother asked.

‘My father is Scottish,’ he said, to the back of their heads. ‘He and my mother live in India because he grows tea, but they’ve sent me over here to have an English education.’

‘How very interesting. You must tell us all about it over supper. I imagine you find it rather cold here, dear? We’ll bank up the fires when we get home. Do you eat normal food?’