One of my father’s colleagues at the school was his friend Mohammad Naeem Khan. He and my father had studied for their bachelors and masters degrees in English together and were both passionate about education. They were also both frustrated as the school was very strict and unimaginative. Neither the students nor the teachers were supposed to have their own opinions, and the owners’ control was so tight they even frowned upon friendship between teachers. My father longed for the freedom that would come with running his own school. He wanted to encourage independent thought and hated the way the school he was at rewarded obedience above open-mindedness and creativity. So when Naeem lost his job after a dispute with the college administration, they decided to start their own school.

Their original plan was to open a school in my father’s village of Shahpur, where there was a desperate need: ‘Like a shop in a community where there are no shops, ’ he said. But when they went there to look for a building, there were banners everywhere advertising a school opening – someone had beaten them to it. So they decided to set up an English-language school in Mingora, thinking that since Swat was a tourist destination there would be a demand for learning in English.

As my father was still teaching, Naeem wandered the streets looking for somewhere to rent. One day he called my father excitedly to say he’d found the ideal place. It was the ground floor of a two-storey building in a well-off area called Landikas with a walled courtyard where students could gather. The previous tenants had also run a school – the Ramada School. The owner had called it that because he had once been to Turkey and seen a Ramada Hotel! But the school had gone bankrupt, which perhaps should have made them think twice. Also the building was on the banks of a river where people threw their rubbish and it smelt foul in hot weather.