THE FIRST INKLING that anything was amiss caught me unawares, so smug was I then about my “on-the-right-track” parenting. My son, at nine my eldest child, wouldn’t enter a bike race during a schoolfriend’s birthday party. I was alarmed by his uncharacteristic reaction, his furiously tearful objections to joining in. “I’ll come last,” he said. Coming last wouldn’t matter, I reminded him. Taking part was what counted.

“Not at school,” he told me, “at school it matters if you come last — people laugh.”

The rules of the bike race were tweaked to make him feel better; it was no longer a question of who came first or last, but who could don the silliest outfit from the dressing-up box.

When I questioned some of the assembled mothers, a couple admitted their sons had come home from his boarding school with stories that my son was on the receiving end of nasty gibes. It is hard not to overreact when you suspect that your child is potentially a victim of bullying. So I gathered my wits and my argument, trimmed of accusations, and approached the school counsellors, politely suggesting that I thought my son was having a hard time. I didn’t use the word bullied.

We’ll look out for him, they said. To allay my fears they said that a member of staff to whom our son could relate would be identified as somebody he could turn to in a crisis. They hadn’t done their homework: victims of bullies rarely turn to teachers for help — that’s ratting. Don’t worry, they said, he’s really very happy.

But he clearly wasn’t. The following term he returned home for a break withdrawn, silent and edgily sensitive. He burst into tears. “It’s happening again,” he told us. What, we wanted to know. The hitting. And the name-calling. What bullies, we said. We approached the school again. We were as surprised by the allegations as the school was — our son is not the stuff of bullied victim: he is of average size; he is funny; he is clever (but not too clever); he doesn’t wear glasses or stammer; he suffers from no learning disability. He makes friends easily.

It was suggested that our son would benefit by moving dorms, which he did, and the head invited me to spend a few days at school — which I did, watching like a hawk. I thought I was satisfied . . . because I wanted to be? I saw no sign of the things my son had told me about.

But I continued to fret, which tested my husband’s patience: “We’ve jumped every time he has made a complaint. Maybe we’ve given him an excuse for every little incident. Perhaps we’re turning him into a victim.”

As a man who had suffered at the hands of bullies, my husband knew the pain — but he also knew he had coped alone; he never told. A father would rather his son has a bloodied nose and jubilant swagger because he has dealt with his persecutors by himself. How hard it must be for a man to perceive in his son the antithesis of the male stereotype: running, hiding, telling, crying. Stand up to them, my boy. Don’t be a wimp.

“We coped with bullies,” my husband’s peers told me, “and look at us, we’re fine. It’s part of life. Good character-building stuff.”

The school continued to assure me that all was well and my husband saw no need to disbelieve them. I must be wrong to worry so much, I thought. Yet intuition told me otherwise. And when, by the start of the next school year, his withdrawn and tearful demeanour was being thinly veiled in letters home, I approached the school for a third time. My decorum and nerves were beginning to fray. The school was adamant that it had not seen anything, except for slipping grades. It was not happy to bandy the word “bullying” about. Nor was my husband. He was determined that if our son became more involved in sport, the issue would resolve itself.

Just over a year after the first sign of trouble I returned my son to school after a weekend out. He broke down, clutching me, begging me not to leave him. “Mum, I don’t think I can do this any more,” whispered my big boy of ten. He seems upset, remarked a member of staff.

I struggled with the picture of our parting for less than a week, then approached the school again. It was clear that their sympathy was on the wane. They had no evidence of the accusations I was, by now, making bluntly. So I snapped: I decided to remove my son for a while.

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