Different Class (7 page)

Harry was older than Eric or I, but looked and sounded younger. A lanky, vaguely awkward man, with hair slightly longer than the regulation length and a voice that commanded attention without his ever raising it. He’d entered the teaching profession some years before, via the state sector, and was thus unencumbered by the kind of rigid academic thinking that characterized St Oswald’s. As a result, he was popular with the boys – not in the style of those colleagues who never set any homework, and thereby believe that this gives them an understanding with the boys, but because he made every boy in his care feel like an individual. He was less popular with the staff. Perhaps because he made no effort to fit in, preferring to stay with his form rather than socialize in the Common Room; or because he encouraged the boys to call him by his Christian name; or because of his humble background and lack of qualifications.

Most of St Oswald’s staff at that time had doctorates, or at least the kind of MA that comes free from Oxford or Cambridge. Harry had no doctorate, and his degree was from the Open University. And yet he was a natural when it came to teaching; his reading tastes spanned all genres; and he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of popular culture, which meant that a lesson with Harry Clarke might begin with a Shakespearian sonnet, segue into the lyrics of a song by David Bowie, shift sideways into an Anglo-Saxon riddle, and finish with a reference to
Private Eye
or the
Beano
. It was an unusual approach, and one which Mr Fabricant viewed with enormous suspicion; but St Oswald’s had a policy of never interfering with a colleague’s methods unless they affected the boys’ results; and given that Harry’s exam results were always well above the average, he was tolerated, if not approved, by his more conservative peers.

Harry’s was room 58, the room directly above mine. The topmost room in the old Bell Tower, it was a small, hexagonal room of even more eccentric design than my own – chilly in winter, oppressive in summer, accessible via a narrow flight of uneven little stone stairs. This was where Harry spent much of his time, and at lunchtimes he would play records and talk to anyone who cared to drop by, including Harrington and his friends, who seemed to prefer his company to mine, or that of their classmates.

Two weeks had passed since my meeting with the Head, and I had obediently (though with some reluctance) excised some of the more robust items of vocabulary from my Latin lessons. But it annoyed me; made me feel like a student teacher on report. And for what? The Harringtons were members of some biblical sect that saw a devil in every bush. I knew the type, and expected the worst. As the boy’s form-tutor, by then I’d already collected complaints from Harrington Senior about PE (in which he objected to the communal showers); English (in which he deplored the foul language of Barry Hines’s
Kes
); Biology (which exposed the boy to the twin evils of Human Reproduction and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution); French (during which Eric, a film buff, was planning to show
Les Diaboliques
); and even Geography, possibly the most inoffensive subject known to man, in which (if we were to believe Dr Harrington Senior) the teacher, Mr Mooney (a typical geographer, earnest and suited and eminently respectable), had allowed the boys access to a pornographic magazine.

The magazine turned out to be the
National Geographic
, with a special supplement on African tribes, but by the time this was made clear, Mr Mooney, a sensitive soul, was a mass of nerves and twitches, afraid for his job and no use at all when it came to teaching 3S.

‘Boy’s an attention-seeker,’ said Eric Scoones at lunchtime in the Common Room. He was a Young Gun in those days, with his eye on the Head of Middle School job, and a waistline as yet unaffected by his fondness for a nice Fleurie. ‘Roy, you’ve got an SLF.’

SLF – or
Special Little Friend –
was our term for a boy who develops a particular taste for the company of one of his Masters. Games and English teachers are the worst for attracting schoolboy crushes, although almost anyone will do. Eric and I had both had our share of youthful admirers, and even Dr Shakeshafte – no oil painting, no hero of the rugby pitch and definitely not what you’d call either charismatic or approachable – had a few fervent supporters, no doubt drawn to the seat of power.

I tried to explain to the Common Room that Harrington was not one of these, and that his disruptive influence was more than a plea for attention. ‘No, it’s something else,’ I said. ‘Something more –
unsettling
.’

No one disagreed with that, except for Dr Burke (the School Chaplain), and Mr Speight, the Head of RE, who was rumoured to speak in tongues and worship Satan at weekends. Admittedly, these less-than-likely allegations were all made by boys to whom he had given punishments – Mr Speight was a stickler, and his various disciplinary methods included such things as detention; running laps at lunchtime; copying pages out of the Bible; litter patrol; the cane and what he liked to call ‘idiot-jumps’ – in which the culprit would stand on a chair, performing star-jumps whilst shouting
I am an idiot!
until he either fell off the chair or collapsed from lack of breath. It was on this last, primarily, that Mr Speight had built his fiendish reputation, which, coupled with a flair for sarcasm and a keen suspicion of anything that might possibly qualify as occult, had earned him the nickname ‘Satan’.

‘The boy has principles,’ said Speight. ‘Perhaps
that’s
what you’re noticing.’

I shook my head and poured tea from the urn. Mr Speight disapproved of me, and never missed an occasion to make his feelings known. It didn’t surprise me to find him in the pro-Harrington corner.

The Chaplain looked up from his
Sporting Life
. ‘Boy’s sound enough,’ he said. ‘Swam for the House on Sports Day. Won us fifteen House Points, too.’

I gave an inward sigh. The Chaplain, though an excellent man, had rather a blind spot where sports were concerned. Many a miscreant had been reprieved because he played in the rugby team, or had earned House Points for Parkinson. (The House system at St Oswald’s is based on archaic rivalries going back three hundred years, with Parkinson House being traditionally known for rugby and RE. This makes the Chaplain partisan, although even now, twenty-four years later, he remains unaware of this.)

With so little support from the Common Room, I finally asked Harry’s advice. My trust in my own instincts was rather less secure in those days, and Harry, four years my senior, was one of the best form-masters I’d known. As Harrington, Nutter and Spikely seemed to spend so much of their time with him, I hoped he might give me some idea of how to address my problem.

I found him, as always, in his room, listening to music. He took off the record as I came in and listened attentively to my tale.

‘Johnny Harrington,’ he said. ‘Decent kid, if a little quiet. I think he’s finding it hard to adjust.’

‘Hard to adjust? It seems to me he’s finding it all too easy. Coasting his way through his lessons, complaining about all and sundry—’

Harry said: ‘I heard about that. But Harrington’s parents are great friends with Mr Speight and the Chaplain. All of them go to the same church. Of course they discuss St Oswald’s. And Harrington’s parents go through his things. They probably found his Latin notes.’

‘You think the boy
didn’t
report me?’

Harry shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But in your place, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. I know he’s not one of your Brodie Boys—’

‘My what?’

‘Roy, don’t deny it,’ he said. ‘Each of us has his favourites. You have a soft spot for rebels and clowns. You like to encourage subversion. The Chaplain favours the sporting ones. Eric, the polite, respectful ones.’ He saw my expression and smiled. ‘It’s OK. You can’t like
all
the boys equally. But what we can always do is make sure that we’re not being unfair.’

For a while I said nothing. Harry had a point, of course: but it rather disturbed me to think that my feelings were so easy to read.

‘What would
you
do?’ I said at last.

‘In your place? I’d have a word with him.’

I thought about what Harry had said. Nowadays I am aware of my tendency to favour some boys above others. More often than not, I try to compensate for my partiality. Of course I was much younger then, less inclined to scrutinize my motives. All I knew was that I’d disliked Johnny Harrington from the start. Was Harry right, I asked myself?
Had
I allowed my prejudice to interfere with my judgement?

It was two weeks before the half-term break. Progress tests had just finished – soon to be followed by School exams – and as I’d expected, young Harrington had scored highly in most subjects, coming joint first in Latin and taking sixth place in the form overall – an excellent start for a New Boy, though I’d seen his face as I read out the results, and I knew he’d hoped for better still.

‘You’re a clever boy,’ I told him after Registration. ‘I hear you’re thinking of Oxbridge.’

He was going through his locker. In those days we still kept them in the form-rooms, and you could tell a lot about a boy from the way he kept his locker; whether it was tidy or shambolic; what pictures or stickers embellished it; whether his books were carefully backed or left to curl at the edges.

Johnny’s locker was monastic. Books neatly backed with brown paper; all arranged in order of size. One pencil box of plain wood; one ruler, unadorned; a Blue Riband bar. No litter – not even a pencil shaving. Nothing to indicate the boy’s personality at all – not a poster, a sticker or a drawing in sight.

‘Sir,’ said Harrington in his colourless voice. Hard to tell if he meant yes or no.

‘You’re certainly able,’ I went on cheerily. ‘Joint first in Latin, eh – ninety per cent – and sixth from the top in the whole form. You might even have been first if it hadn’t been for that English test.’

I thought his face darkened a little. There had been nothing but trouble so far with the English Literature syllabus –
Kes
had given way to Ted Hughes, D. H. Lawrence and finally to Chaucer, none of which had been judged suitable by the Harrington parents. As a result the boy’s assessment had placed him seventeenth in a middle set of twenty-one, and the report from his teacher – Mr Fabricant, a veteran Tweed Jacket with no time to waste on what he referred to as ‘the sensitive brigade’ – stated quite clearly that Johnny was lucky to have scraped seventeenth, and that if he didn’t get his act together – and that meant actually
reading
the books and thinking about what they meant – then he’d be looking at no better than a pass in the end-of-term exams.

‘I take it you’re not keen on English Literature.’

‘Sir,’ said Harrington, closing his locker.

‘It’s a pity,’ I said cheerily, ‘as all of the
best
universities tend to take the view that a man who doesn’t understand literature is generally ill-equipped to understand anything else, either.’

Harrington said nothing, but his eyes narrowed.

‘Literature broadens the mind,’ I said. ‘And it seems to me that yours may be in need of a little broadening.’

He gaped at me, unused to such a direct approach.

I smiled reassuringly and went on. ‘You’ll find that School and life have a lot in common,’ I said. ‘If you like, School is life with training wheels, a safe environment in which to learn, not just the subjects on the curriculum, but the way to deal with people and ideas you have never met before. Now the ostrich, we’re told, when faced with a new idea, simply sticks its head in the sand. This may work for the ostrich—’ I looked at my watch and rose from my chair. ‘But on the whole,’ I said, ‘you don’t see many of those applying to university.’

Now Harrington was a clever boy. His face, bland as it was, nevertheless told me that he’d understood perfectly what I was trying to say. A slight flush marbled his cheek; his spine seemed straighter than ever, and his inevitable
Sir!
– when it finally came – was as cold and expressionless as a pebble.

‘What I’m trying to say – as a teacher and, I hope, a friend’ – it wasn’t true, but I wanted to take some of the sting from my words – ‘is that School isn’t the place to impose one’s ideas. It’s a privileged environment in which you will be exposed to many, many
new
ideas – some of which will reflect your own, others not. You may reject them – but only when you have studied them. And remember, a man with his head in the sand has only one other orifice left with which to communicate with the rest of the world.’

With any other boy, that might have raised a smile. Not Harrington, though. He simply nodded as if marking me for later extermination, picked up his satchel and exited the room, leaving me to fear that, instead of making a connection with the boy, I might instead have made an enemy for life.

5

Michaelmas Term, 1981

Dear Mousey,

I don’t like Mr Straitley. He doesn’t like me either. He teaches Latin like it’s a joke that only he can understand. Well, I’ll give him
merda
. (See what I did there?
Merda. Murder.
And everyone keeps telling me I have no sense of humour.)