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over the terrace and into the old play garden.
    He had noticed that she dressed in long clothes now and her hair was up; it had surprised him. Suddenly she looked quite grown-up, so that explained a lot. Girls were different when they were growing up; they couldn’t run or catch a ball, something to do with the way they changed shape, Benton Minor had said. Exercise made them ill. Yes, even her face was different – longer – and you could see that there were bones in it. This change had only happened recently though, because at Christmas her face was still similar to the one that had cried on the platform as she waved him away when he first joined the school. He had thought how round she was then, a round face and round body on top of frilled combinations, the blue sash of her white dress making her look like an Easter egg.
    And then she’d sent him a drawing of the guinea-pigs with tears running from their eyes, and next to them, a girl in a dress with a blue sash with tears too. I love you, she’d scrawled in big joined writing, come home. There were kisses too. He had felt such a longing, a missing as he sat on his bed in the dormitory which was always dreary because the windows were so small and so high and his own tears had begun.
    But then the paper had been snatched from his hand and a prefect had held it up to the dormitory and had gripped his hair, turned his wet face to the dormitory, shouting that cissies would not be tolerated. Harry could still feel that hand tearing the hair from his head and he pulled his cap on harder.
    He remembered how the bugger had made the other boys form two rows after they had collected wet towels from the latrines, forcing him to run down between the rows while he was beaten. He shrugged his shoulders and clicked his tongue at the pony. His father was still asleep. He remembered the first stinging pains even now. At first it seemed as though his new friends were reluctant but the prefect called in his study chums to stand in the row too. One to every four of the younger boys and he was made to run back through the rows again. When he wouldn’t tear Hannah’s paper up he was made to run again and again. It was the noise he could never forget, it was like the baying of hounds after a fox. When the prefect grabbed him by the neck at the end of the fifth run and held the picture up in front of his face he did not see guinea-pigs but instead there was the swing rope and the horse-chestnut tree with Hannah whirling round and round as he pushed her faster and faster, hearing her laughter go on and on. When he still would not shred the picture into pieces he was taken to the latrines and his face was pushed into the water closet and he was sluiced in flushing water until his heart pumped for lack of air. It was this which made him do as they said.
    He looked up. The sun was shining through the thinning mist, not hot yet but bright. Don’t write to me again, ever, he had told her in his next letter home.
    The hedge dipped and Harry could see the fields widening out into moorland; it wouldn’t be long now. Yes, life was easier with just his friends. But sometimes, in the strangest of places, he would still remember that laugh as he had swung her round beneath the tree.
    The sun had a glimmering of warmth at last and the hedge was clearly visible growing out of the high-banked stone; full of grass with honeysuckle climbing all over the hawthorn. When the sun was high the honeysuckle’s scent would begin to fill the lane and by the time they returned it would be at its strongest. The track dwindled to a narrow strip of baked earth which wound round the flattened granite boulders lying amongst the heather. There were trees over to the right, about half a mile away.
    ‘Head for that, m’boy.’ His father was awake now and pointing. ‘We’ll follow the stream until we come to the pool. You remember it, don’t you?’
    Harry nodded but he didn’t. The pony was sweating now but at the