Primary school art lesson – a lurch in the stomach – ‘Draw a picture of your bathroom at home.’ What bathroom? Luckily the child is resourceful – what is the room that the tin bath is filled in on Sunday evenings? So I draw a picture of our kitchen: red gloss paint below a black line, shiny cream paint above. The decor of the basement kitchen of that 1950s terraced house is etched in memory by the realisation that our house is lacking, maybe even that our family is lacking?

Scholarship child at high school. My friend’s parents have a cottage in The Lakes. I’m invited along as company for Mary. I overhear a conversation between Mary’s parents and a couple of their friends in the next room: ‘Oh, we like Mary to mix with all sorts.’ In two fleeting moments in her school life, this child has learned her place in the world.