I was ten, and away at boarding school in deepest Wiltshire. I was far from home and I didn’t want to be. It was a diet of Latin and stew and rugby and detentions and cross-country runs and chilblains and marks and squeaky beds and semolina pudding. And there was Basher Beaumont who terrorised and tormented me, so that I lived every waking moment in dread of him. I had often thought of running away, but only once ever plucked up the courage to do it.

I was homesick after a letter from my mother. Basher Beaumont had cornered me in the boot room and smeared black shoe-polish in my hair. I had done badly in a spelling test, and Mr Carter had stood me in a corner with a book on my head all through the lesson – his favourite torture. I was more miserable than I had ever been before. I picked at the plaster in the wall, and determined there and then that I would run away. I took of the next Sunday afternoon. With any luck I wouldn’t be missed till supper, and by that time I’d be home, home and free.

I climbed the fence at the bottom of the wall of the school park, behind the trees where I couldn’t be seen. Then I ran for it. I ran as if bloodhounds were after me, not stopping until I was through Innocents Breach and out on to the road beyond.

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