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.

And Mrs Boateng said: Mr Falk, your daughter has one of the highest averages in her year.

Then she said: she’s on the debating team. She helps with the Year Seven reading on Wednesdays.

Then she said: nobody in this building has had a single problem with Talise in five years.

I asked those four questions in about eleven seconds and I have gone over them since, one at a time, and every one of them came from a sentence my mother had said to me on a telephone.

I had not invented one of them. I had been handed all four, over years, in small pieces, and I had carried them two thousand miles and unpacked them in a school office in front of a stranger.

And I have wondered since what that woman thought of me in those eleven seconds, and I have decided that I already know, because of what she did with her face, which was nothing at all.