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‘I like my daddy's watch.'

But the next day he saw that she had tidied it away. He found it folded inside some of his white summer socks in the top dresser drawer.

He liked to walk slowly around the house in Westbourne Grove. There were lots of things to look at. He recognised some things, English things that had been translated into the houses of Mama's friends in Valencia. Now those houses seemed too flimsy and too pretending to be English, with their pale Spanish marmalade on the marble breakfast table, and tea and dusty sponge cake at four o'clock in the afternoon heat. In calle San Vicente the house had wooden slatted shutters and potted ferns and tiled floors that echoed, but this house had a sombre authority that absorbed disturbing sounds into wool rugs and heavy curtains and thick sofas.

It wasn't as big as Mr Gardiner's house, where he had lived for as long as he could remember now, ever since the night his father came into his room and kissed him goodbye – after the big quarrel that he listened to, when there was so much shouting, his father shouting, his mother shouting, and sometimes he half remembered that Mr Gardiner had been there that night to help Mama beg Papa to stay. But that couldn't be right.

He gave up and went back to examining the ivory boxes and carvings that Flora collected. Above them the dark photographs in their ornate little gold frames of his aunts when they were girls, with long black hair and shiny long dresses, each looking frozen and solemn for the camera. He liked the pictures of his father and uncles, tall young men with straw boaters and high collars, standing by a rose trellis, or boating on the river. Sometimes Flora cried and hugged him when she told him about Papa's brothers who had died in the Great War. She pointed out all the names and histories of the people in the frames on the walls, and she even pulled out a scroll with a family tree. She showed him the ink line that went from Papa, all the way back to a king of England, and pointed out the coat of arms for
the Colchester knights. She took an ink pen and carefully drew a new line and wrote Ralph's name on the chart. She waved her plump hand at the walls. ‘Of course, one day, dear Ralph, this will be yours. I simply can't understand how your father could have abandoned his own flesh and blood.'

He missed the sunny courtyard garden at the house on calle San Vicente, and the maids who sang in the kitchen; that was home, but he understood that this house was somehow a part of him too, and he had come here to learn that. And because they were his and his father's, he began to love the faces in the photographs, and to love the aunts who seemed so much older and stouter than Mama, and their funny shut-in house, surrounded by the London fog and the noises of motor cars and feet hurrying by outside. He began to feel more a Ralph than a Ferdinand. Ralph Colchester. He thought it was a good name.

‘Mama, might we visit Mr Gardiner's boy, in his garden?' Ralph asked her as they walked across Kensington Gardens. She squeezed his hand so tightly that it hurt. She knelt down in front of him. ‘We are not going to mention Mr Gardiner again. Do you promise me?'

He nodded, but in his room at the top of the tall stucco house he found that he missed Mr Gardiner a lot, more than Papa even. He had no real memories of Papa, but Mr Gardiner he thought about and missed almost every day, but there was no one to tell about the homesickness that weighed on him in the thick London fog, where you had to be on your guard not to bump into something in the cold, yellow smoke.

He was playing with an old board game of his father's in the upstairs lobby, when he heard his aunts talking in the hallway below. He leaned forward to peer through the banisters and saw they were dressing to
go out. Over their long English dresses they were putting on long, old-fashioned coats like fitted dust covers. Both had heavy rolls of hair piled up round their faces.

‘She does try awfully hard, though,' Cecily was saying.

‘But really, don't you find her a little bit eager, a little bit payingguest? You can tell she's been in service.'

‘I hardly think housekeeper to the family of a banker is the same as being a housemaid, Flora.'

‘And housemaids have that smell in their room, don't you know, something so very housemaidish. It clings. What did you say her parents were?'

‘Something in trade. He was a joiner I think.'

‘I see. I never quite understood how she met and married Robert, and yet there it is. But we have Ralph, and Ralph is such a dear. Though not very like Robert to look at.'

‘But so like Robert in spirit.'

‘So like dear Robert in his manners.'

Cecily was pinning a spike with a big pearl on the end through her hat. Flora was carefully putting on her gloves, working each sturdy finger into place. They took it in turns to check in the hall mirror, and then each took an umbrella from the hollow elephant foot by the front door. They left behind a silence that settled in the hallway. Ralph carried on staring down through the banisters. After a while he stood up slowly and went back to his room.

He was turning the pages of a favourite book about steam trains, when Mama came in and said they must go out to the haberdasher's. He needed shirts for school, his father's school. She bustled around the room, tidying, opening and closing drawers, picking up from the floor, scolding his bad habits of disorder. He was aware of her perfume, the
smell of lavender soap, and something oily she rubbed on her hands. He had never noticed before; he wondered if this might be the smell that betrayed something bad, something he didn't understand.

The trunk in the hallway filled him with terror, but also excitement. If he got inside, he could shut the lid and be completely hidden. It began to fill with folded trousers and shirts; two pullovers and cricket whites; scratchy woollen socks; two pairs of elastic garters to keep his socks up – which he must do at all times; two long striped ties which he had to learn to knot; six clean and folded handkerchiefs. Every item had a label with his name embroidered in red. Mama sat each evening by the lamp, sewing on the labels with tiny, careful stitches, peering closely at the needle. Finally a large fruitcake was wrapped in greaseproof paper and tucked into a corner. The lid went down and was locked.

He had never been parted from Mama before. But it was so kind of the aunts to make sure he could go to his father's old school and learn to be a gentleman. He was lucky to go, and after all he was nine now, old for the first form.

In a tall room with a stuffy smell, the headmaster sat behind his desk and jollied Mama along with stories of tea parties and cricket matches. He said best not to visit for the first few weeks, let them settle in.

After Mama left, Ralph stood in the middle of the enormous hallway with boys clattering up and down the stairs. A big boy slapped him on the side of the head. ‘Come on. Wake up, you. Get yourself to your dorm and unpack.'

He hated the greasy mutton lumps that tasted of fat in the evening meal, the dry sponge roll and smear of red jam. At bedtime he put on his fine Spanish cotton pyjamas. They still had a faint whiff of oranges,
of hot sunshine and even, he imagined, Mama's familiar lavender smell. Tears began running out of his eyes. He had found a place to stand, hard up against the window, half hidden behind a curtain, letting the cold glass touch his burning face. He heard a noise of clattering feet coming along the corridor, bursting in through the doorway.

He turned to see a gang of boys piling in, clapping and chanting, ‘New snoot, new snoot.' Twelve or thirteen big boys. And before he could react he was pulled and knocked onto the floor. The boys began to pile themselves on top of him, one after another, the weight crushing down; he couldn't breathe; it hurt so much, and still the pile grew heavier as boys thudded on top. He felt the room blackening. Then they were up, all stamping on the floorboards, sounding like a train wreck, jeering and cheering. Ralph lay curled up on the floor, shuddering with sobs.

‘Look at the cry baby,' said a tall boy in disgust.

That was the first day of the new regime. The boys were systematic. They were dedicated. The masters looked away. The cake wrapped in greaseproof paper disappeared on the first day. He was pushed, punched, and his food was stolen at meals. His compass and gym shoes were taken and he was put in detention for missing kit. In the common room in the evening no one would sit near him. They said there was a horrible smell of farts.

He asked if Mama would come and live near his school so that he could go home at weekends, but Mama wrote to say that she had wonderful news. She was going to marry Mr Gardiner. Ralph would spend the term-time holidays with the aunts, and then in the summer he could come out to Valencia. And although it broke her heart to be so far from her boy, she was willing to bear it for his sake. Wasn't he so lucky to be attending such a wonderful school? Think how much he would have learned by the time she saw him again in the summer. How proud she would be of her big, clever boy.

The days went by slowly. Then weeks and months crept past, cold and windy. The rooms were too tall and lonely, and there was nowhere really to curl up and feel safe. You never knew when a master or a prefect might be standing behind you, where a pinch or a slap might come from. He wrote letters and letters to Mama, but Matron brought them all back. He had to copy them out again, missing out the bits she had put a line through. Did he really want to upset Mama, when she so very much wanted to hear how he was happy and making a success of things?

He folded up the letter that had come from Mama that morning, saying how she thought of him having such fun with the other boys, and put it in his locker. He had to get undressed for rugby.

Ralph stood on the muddy sports field in shorts. The winter air was ice, slowly numbing his body. His fingers were bright red, white at the edges. The leather ball slapped him in the face. Three boys hurtled towards him and he went down in the mud. Next summer seemed a lifetime away. It would never come.

For his half-term exeat he stayed with his aunts in the tall and becalmed house in Westbourne Grove. He wrote a long letter, with pictures, the neat little flames from the time his tormentors set his bed on fire. At the end of the road was a post box. He had a feeling that the letter would never get to Mama.