'How d'you do, my name's George.' This is what he has been instructed to say. But Henshaw just carries on making gurgling noises and flapping his ears.

Some of the boys come from farms, and George thinks they smell of cows. Others are miners' sons, and seem to talk differently. George learns the names of his schoolfellows: Sid Henshaw, Arthur Aram, Harry Boam, Horace Knighton, Harry Charlesworth, Wallie Sharp, John Harriman, Albert Yates…

His father says that he is going to make friends, but he is not sure how this is done. One morning Wallie Sharp comes up behind him in the yard and whispers,

'You're not a right sort.'

George turns round. 'How d'you do, my name's George,' he repeats.

At the end of the first week Mr Bostock tests them at reading, spelling and sums. He announces the results on Monday morning, and then they move desks. George is good at reading from the book in front of him, but his spelling and sums let him down. He is told to remain at the back of the form. He does no better the next Friday, and the one after that. By now he finds himself surrounded by farm boys and mine boys who don't care where they sit, indeed think it an advantage to be farther away from Mr Bostock so they can misbehave. George feels as if he is being slowly banished from the way, the truth and the life.

Mr Bostock stabs at the blackboard with a piece of chalk. 'This, George, plus this' (stab) 'equals what?' (stab stab).

Everything in his head is a blur, and George guesses wildly. 'Twelve,' he says, or, 'Seven and a half.' The boys at the front laugh, and then the farm boys join in when they realize he is wrong.

Mr Bostock sighs and shakes his head and asks Harry Charlesworth, who is always in the front row and has his hand up all the time.

'Eight,' Harry says, or, 'Thirteen and a quarter,' and Mr Bostock moves his head in George's direction, to show how stupid he has been.

One afternoon, on his way back to the Vicarage, George soils himself. His mother takes off his clothes, stands him in the bath, scrubs him down, dresses him again and takes him to Father. But George is unable to explain to his father why, though he is nearly seven years old, he has behaved like a baby in napkins.

This happens again, and then again. His parents do not punish him, but their evident disappointment in their firstborn – stupid at school, a baby on the way home – is as bad as any punishment. They discuss him over the top of his head.

'The child gets his nerves from you, Charlotte.'

'In any event, it cannot be teething.'

'We can rule out cold, since we are in September.'

'And indigestible items of food, since Horace is not affected.'

'What remains?'

'The only other cause the book suggests is fright.'

'George, are you frightened of something?'

George looks at his father, at the shiny clerical collar, at the broad, unsmiling face above it, the mouth which speaks the frequently incomprehensible truth from the pulpit of St Mark's, and the black eyes which now command the truth from him. What is he to say? He is frightened of Wallie Sharp and Sid Henshaw and some others, but that would be telling on them. In any case, it is not what he fears most. Eventually he says, 'I'm frightened of being stupid.'

'George,' his father replies, 'we know you are not stupid. Your mother and I have taught you your letters and your sums. You are a bright boy. You can do sums at home but not at school. Can you tell us why?'

'No.'

'Does Mr Bostock teach them differently?'

'No, Father.'

'Do you stop trying?'

'No, Father. I can do them in the book but I can't do them on the board.'

' Charlotte, I think we should take him into Birmingham.'

Arthur had uncles who watched their brother's decline and pitied his family. Their solution was to send Arthur to be schooled by the Jesuits in England. Aged nine, he was put on the train at Edinburgh and wept all the way to Preston. He would spend the next seven years at Stonyhurst, except for six weeks each summer, when he returned to the Mam and to his occasional father.

These Jesuits had come over from Holland, bringing their curriculum and methods of discipline with them. Education comprised seven classes of knowledge – elements, figures, rudiments, grammar, syntax, poetry and rhetoric – with one year allotted to each. There was the usual public-school routine of Euclid, algebra and the classics, whose truths were endorsed by emphatic beatings. The instrument deployed – a piece of India rubber the size and thickness of a boot sole – had also come over from Holland, and was known as the Tolley. One blow on the hand, delivered with full Jesuitical intent, was enough to cause the palm to swell and change colour. The normal punishment for larger boys consisted of nine blows on each hand. Afterwards, the sinner could barely turn the doorknob of the study in which he had been beaten.

The Tolley, it was explained to Arthur, had received its name as a Latin pun. Fero, I bear. Fero, ferre, tuli, latum. Tuli, I have borne, the Tolley is what we have borne, yes?

The humour was as rough as the punishments. Asked how he saw his future, Arthur admitted that he had thought of becoming a civil engineer.

'Well, you may be an engineer,' replied the priest, 'but I don't think you'll ever be a civil one.'

Arthur developed into a large, boisterous youth, who found consolation in the school library and happiness on the cricket field. Once a week the boys were set to write home, which most regarded as a further punishment, but Arthur viewed as a reward. For that hour he would pour out everything to his mother. There may have been God, and Jesus Christ, and the Bible, and the Jesuits, and the Tolley, but the authority he most believed in and submitted to was his small, commanding Mam. She was an expert in all matters, from underclothing to hellfire. 'Wear flannel next to your skin,' she advised him, 'and never believe in eternal punishment.'

She had also, less deliberately, taught him a way to popularity. Early on, he began telling his fellow pupils the stories of chivalry and romance he had first heard from beneath a raised porridge stick. On wet half-holidays, he would stand on a desk while his audience squatted around him. Remembering the Mam's skills, he knew how to drop his voice, how to drag out a story, how to leave off at a perilous, excruciating moment with the promise of more the next day. Being large and hungry, he would accept a pastry as the basic price of a tale. But sometimes, he might stop dead at the thrill of a crisis, and could only be got going again at the cost of an apple.

Thus he discovered the essential connection between narrative and reward.

The oculist does not recommend spectacles for young children. It is better to let the boy's eyes adjust naturally over the years. In the meanwhile, he should be moved to the front of the classroom. George leaves the farm boys behind and is placed beside Harry Charlesworth, who is regularly top in tests. School now makes sense to George; he can see where Mr Bostock's chalk is stabbing, and he never again soils himself on the way home.

Sid Henshaw carries on making monkey faces, but George barely notices. Sid Henshaw is just a stupid farm boy who smells of cows and probably cannot even spell the word.

One day, Henshaw rushes at George in the yard, barges him with his shoulder, and as George is recovering himself, pulls off his bow tie and runs away. George hears laughter. Back in the classroom, Mr Bostock asks where his tie has got to.

This presents George with a problem. He knows it is wrong to get a schoolfellow into trouble. But he knows it is worse to tell lies. His father is quite clear about this. Once you start telling lies you are led into the paths of sin and nothing will stop you until the hangman slips a noose around your neck. No one has said as much, but this is what George has understood. So he cannot lie to Mr Bostock. He looks for a way out – which is perhaps bad enough anyway, the start of a lie – and then he simply answers the question.