I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

Her school kept her on that programme for the rest of that year and I let them, on Mrs Boateng’s advice, because she said something to me that I have not been able to improve on.

She said: let her keep the lunch. Take away everything else, but don’t make the first thing you do be taking away her lunch.

Here is the last thing, and it is the reason I have written any of this down.

The fridge has been full since the August. Deliberately full — I over-buy and I know I do it and I have stopped pretending it is about convenience.

And in the March, cleaning her room, I found half a bread roll wrapped in a napkin in the drawer of her desk.

Seven months after she moved in. In a house with a full fridge.

I did not say anything about it. I put it in the bin and I did not mention it and then I sat on the landing for a while.