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It wasn’t a popular move. While my husband supported a temporary reprieve, the school voiced its concerns at the wisdom of my actions — a mother manipulated by a son who simply couldn’t adjust to life in a boarding school (although he had been at the school for much longer than the problem).

He was thin and pale when I collected him, with dark circles under his eyes. There was no glee at being brought home mid-term, just silent, choked relief. He barely ate, and when he did he was sick. “Don’t worry, Mum,” he tried to reassure me, “it’s just the bad stuff coming out.” He played quietly and woodenly, his pale face clouded with anguish and confusion. He couldn’t sleep. He lay on a mattress in our bedroom at night, fighting fatigue, feverish with worry.

What are you afraid of, I asked. Why can’t you sleep? “Because I’m scared of what will happen tomorrow,” he told me, biting his lip, trying to hold back the tears. “It’s all my fault, you see Mum. This wouldn’t have happened if I weren’t so weak.”

Why can’t you tell me about it, I asked. “Because it hurts too much,” he told me, as we tramped for miles across fields, out in the open, where there was nobody but him and me and the sky. Let’s play a game, I suggested. Let’s pretend you’re a prefect at school and there’s this boy — we’ll call him James. He’s younger than you. He’s being bullied and has nobody to talk to but you, because you’re a really cool prefect. What would James have told you?

The floodgates opened. James had been hit, kicked, called names. He had scaled high walls and climbed trees to prove he wasn’t a sissy, and when he fell he had cried quietly, fretting over a wound he was too afraid to take to the school nurse. His head had been slammed in a locker door and he had almost fainted with the pain. An older boy called the matron. I tripped, said James. He had been threatened: “Don’t tell.” He had been excluded from games of football because he wasn’t good enough, they said. He had spent every night worrying about how to escape his tormentors the next day. “What does ‘turn the other cheek’ mean, Mum?”

In desperation I took him to see a child psychologist, against my husband’s wishes. “Leave him alone now,” he told me, impatient and upset. “Stop all the talking, you’re making it worse.” But the maelstrom in our son’s young mind frightened me. The psychologist pronounced my son eloquent and rational — and referred me to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to illustrate that without a sense of belonging, without his self-esteem and with his overwhelming fear of school, he would not attain knowledge.

What was meant to be a brief absence from school for a “rest” turned into 12 weeks. Our little boy became ill with an infection that went toxic. Ah, said school, that was the problem all along — he wasn’t well. No, argued my doctor, while stress alone does not put children into hospital, it can undermine them to such a degree that an infection might.

My drastic action in taking him out of school, his illness, and hours of research gave me the strength to make a scene. Shamefully belatedly. I kicked myself afterwards for waiting so long, for letting my middle-class manners get the better of me. For believing that anybody knew my son better than me. And the school reacted — finally, positively, loudly, publicly. It implemented a new, improved anti-bullying policy. Zero tolerance, it said.

My husband applauded the action and thought the school deserved another chance.But I had lost faith, and so, most importantly, had our son. He didn’t believe anybody enough to trust that he need fear no more. We knew that when we tried to take him back — the education experts we spoke to warned us that not to do so would teach our son to fall at hurdles. But the closer we got to school, the greater the feeling of betrayal: his pain at the prospect of returning was transparent, and terrifying.

A year on, our son is settled in a new school. It is not the type that would previously have been our first choice — it is more tree-hugging hippy than Old Boy Network, something with which we were neither familiar nor comfortable, but our son is thriving. The scars on his soul are still tender, but they are not so deep. I love my new school, Mum, he says.

My husband sees the change in him and wonders why we didn’t make the move earlier, though he still can’t reconcile himself to the fact that this was about bullying rather than a question of sport.

We were lucky — our son was brave enough, eloquent enough, to voice his fears about his world. So many children don’t, or can’t.

You did the right thing, said a father to me recently, a man on the board of governors at a school. We would not, he went on to say, tolerate such harassment ourselves, so why should our children? I feel no bitterness towards his old school — bullying is insidious by nature; slipping the safety net of school life, it goes easily unseen. I am just relieved that a year-long nightmare is over, and that, despite fearing we had failed our son, he still apparently believes in us. And, even better, he has begun to believe in himself.

Is your child being bullied?

E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk

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