Long life: Polite silence on my old prep school’s possible paedophile

It is usually a mistake to return to places one has known as a child. I have only once been back to the large, white-stuccoed, early-Victorian manor house in Hertfordshire where I was born and brought up, and it was a dispiriting experience. Although the house was near to the town of Ware, less than an hour’s drive from central London, it was set in unspoiled country alongside a village in which the names of some of the inhabitants had been there in the Domesday Book. Apart from a small row of bleak pre-war council houses on the edge of the village, there was nothing there to offend the eye or to suggest proximity to a great city.

My parents, finding the house too expensive to run, sold it in 1959, when I was 19 years old, and I didn’t go back for some 20 years after that. But when I did, I found that everything had changed dramatically for the worse.