Gentlemen & Players (16 page)

8

St Oswald’s Grammar School for BoysThursday, 14th October

It was a small incident. A minor irritant, that’s all. No damage was done. And yet—There was a time when I would have caught those boys, whatever it took, and dragged them back by the ears. Not now, of course. Sunnybankers know their rights. Even so, it’s the first time in many years that my authority has been so deliberately challenged. They scent weakness. All boys do. And it was a mistake to run like that, in the dark, after what Bevans told me. It looked rushed, undignified. A student teacher’s mistake. I should have crept out into Dog Lane and caught them as they climbed over the fence. They were only boys—thirteen or fourteen, judging by their voices. Since when did Roy Straitley allow a few boys to defy him?

I brooded on that for longer than it deserved. Perhaps that was why I slept so badly; perhaps the sherry, or perhaps I was still troubled by my conversation with Bishop. In any case I awoke un-refreshed; washed, dressed, made toast, and drank a mug of tea as I waited for the postman. Sure enough, at seven-thirty, the letter box clattered, and sure enough, there was the typed sheet on St. Oswald’s notepaper, signed
E. Gray, Headmaster, B.A. (Hons)
, and
Dr. B. D. Pooley, Chairman of Govs
, the duplicate of which (it said) would be inserted into my personal record for a period of 12 (twelve) months, after which time it would be removed from file, on condition that no further complaint(s) had been lodged and at the discretion of the governing body, blah, blah, blah-dy bloody blah.

On a normal day, it would not have concerned me. Fatigue, however, made me vulnerable, and it was without enthusiasm—and a knee that still ached from the evening’s misadventure—that I set off on foot to St. Oswald’s. Without quite knowing why, I made a short detour into Dog Lane, perhaps to check for signs of last night’s intruders.

It was then that I saw it. I could hardly have missed it; a swastika, sketched onto the side of the fence in red marker pen, with the word HITLER below it in exuberant letters. It was recent, then; almost certainly the work of last night’s Sunnybankers—if, indeed, they
were
Sunnybankers. But I had not forgotten the caricature tacked up onto the form notice board; the cartoon of myself as a fat little mortar-boarded Nazi, and my conviction at the time that Knight was behind it.

Could Knight have found out where I lived? It wouldn’t be hard; my phone number is in the school handbook, and dozens of boys must have seen me walking home. All the same I couldn’t believe that Knight—Knight, of all people—would dare to do something like this.

Teaching’s a game of bluff, of course; but it would take a better player than Knight to check me. No, it had to be a coincidence, I thought; some marker-happy Sunnybank Parker slouching home to his fish-and-chips, who saw my nice clean fence and hated its unblemished surface.

At the weekend, I’ll sand and repaint it with wipe-clean gloss. It needed doing anyway, and as any teacher knows, one piece of graffiti invites another. But I couldn’t help feeling, as I walked to St. Oswald’s, that all the unpleasantness of the past few weeks—Fallowgate, the
Examiner
campaign, last night’s intrusion, Anderton-Pullitt’s ridiculous peanut, even the Headmaster’s prim little letter of this morning—were somehow—obscurely, irrationally,
deliberately
—related.

Schools, like ships, are riddled with superstitions, and St. Oswald’s more than most. The ghosts, perhaps; or the rituals and traditions that keep the old wheels creaking away. But this term has given us nothing but bad luck right from the beginning. There’s a Jonah on board. If only I knew who it was.

When I entered
the Common Room this morning, I found it suspiciously quiet. Word of my warning must have got around, because conversations fell silent throughout the day every time I entered a room, and there was a certain gleam in Sourgrape’s eye that boded ill for someone.

The Nations avoided me; Grachvogel looked furtive; Scoones was at his most aloof; and even Pearman seemed most unlike his cheery self. Kitty too looked especially preoccupied—she barely acknowledged my greeting as I came in, and it bothered me rather; Kitty and I have always been chums, and I hoped nothing had happened to change that. I didn’t think it had—after all, the little upsets of the past week hadn’t touched
her
—but there was definitely something in her face as she looked up and saw me. I sat beside her with my tea (the vanished Jubilee mug having been replaced by a plain brown one from home), but she seemed engrossed in her pile of books and hardly said a word.

Lunch was a mournful affair of vegetables—thanks to the vindictive Bevans—followed by a sugarless cup of tea. I took the cup with me to room fifty-nine, though most of the boys were outside, except for Anderton-Pullitt, happily engrossed in his airplane book, and Waters, Pink, and Lemon, who were quietly playing cards in one corner.

I had been marking for about ten minutes when I looked up and saw the rabbit Meek, standing beside the desk with a pink slip in his hand and a look of mingled hate and deference in his pale, bearded face.

“I got this slip this morning, sir,” he said, holding out the piece of paper. He has never forgiven me for my intervention in his lesson, or for the fact that I witnessed his humiliation in front of the boys. As a result he addresses me as “sir,” like a pupil, and his tone is flat and colorless, like Knight’s.

“What is it?”

“Assessment form, sir.”

“Oh, gods. I’d forgotten.” Of course, the staff appraisals are upon us; heaven forbid that we should fail to complete all the necessary paperwork before December’s official inspection. I supposed I had one too; the New Head has always been a great fan of internal appraisal—as introduced by Bob Strange, who also wants more in-service training, yearly management courses, and performance-related pay. Can’t see it myself—your results are only as good as the boys you teach, after all—but it keeps Bob out of the classroom, which is the essential.

The general principle of appraisal is simple; each junior member of staff is individually observed and appraised in the classroom by a senior master; each Head of Section by a Head of Year; each Head of Year by a Deputy, that is, Pat Bishop or Bob Strange. The Second and Third Masters are assessed by the Head himself (though in Strange’s case, he spends so little time in the classroom that you wonder why he bothers). The Head, being a geographer, does hardly any teaching at all but spends much of his time on courses, lecturing teams of PGCE students on racial sensitivity or drug awareness.

“It says you’ll be observing my lesson this afternoon,” said Meek. He didn’t look too pleased about it. “Third-form computer studies.”

“Thank you, Mr. Meek.” I wondered which joker had decided to put me in charge of computer studies. As if I didn’t know. And with Meek, of all people. Oh well, I thought. Bang goes my free period.

There are some
days in a teaching career where everything goes wrong. I should know; I’ve seen a few—days where the only sensible thing to do is to go home and go back to bed. Today was one of them; an absurd parade of mishaps and annoyances, of litter and lost books and minor scuffles and unwelcome administrative tasks and extra duties and louche comments in the corridors.

A run-in with Eric Scoones over some misbehavior of Sutcliff’s; my register (still missing and causing trouble with Marlene); wind (never welcome); a leak in the boys’ toilets and the subsequent flooding of part of the Middle Corridor; Knight (unaccountably smug); Dr. Devine (equally so); a number of annoying room changes due to the leak and e-mailed (ye gods!) to all staff workstations, with the result that I arrived late to my morning cover period—English, for the absent Roach.

There are many advantages to being a senior master. One is that having established a reputation as a disciplinarian, it is rarely necessary to enforce it. Word gets round—
Don’t mess with Straitley
—and a quiet life for all ensues. Today was different. Oh, it happens occasionally; and if it had happened on any other day I might not have reacted as I did then. But it was a large group, a lower third—thirty-five boys, and not a single Latinist among them. They knew me only by reputation—and I don’t suppose the recent article in our local press had helped much.

I was ten minutes late, and the class was already noisy. No work had been set, and as I walked in, expecting the boys to stand in silence, they simply glanced in my direction and went right on doing precisely what they’d been doing before. Games of cards; conversations; a rowdy discussion at the back with chairs kicked over and a powerful stench of chewing gum in the air.

It shouldn’t have angered me. A good teacher knows that there is fake anger and real anger—the fake is fair game, part of the good teacher’s armory of bluff; but the real must be hidden at all costs, lest the boys—those master manipulators—understand that they have scored a point.

But I was tired. The day had started badly, the boys didn’t know me, and I was still angry over the incident in my back garden the night before. Those high young voices—
like fuck he can, he’s too old!
—had sounded too familiar, too plausible to be easily dismissed. One boy looked up at me and turned to his desk mate, sniggering. I thought I heard the phrase—
nuts to you, sir!
—amidst a clap of ugly laughter.

And so I fell—like a novice, like a student teacher—for the oldest trick in the book. I lost my temper.

“Gentlemen, silence.” It usually works. This time it didn’t; I could see a group of boys at the back laughing openly at the battered gown I had omitted to remove following my midmorning break duty.
Nuts to you, sir
, I heard (or thought), and it seemed to me that if anything, the volume increased.

“I said silence!”
I roared—an impressive sound in usual circumstances, but I’d forgotten Bevans and his advice to take it easy, and the invisible finger prodded me midroar in the sternum. The boys at the back sniggered, and irrationally I wondered if any of them had been there last night—
think you can take me, you fat bastard?

Well, in such a situation there are inevitably casualties. In this case, eight in lunchtime detention, which
was
perhaps a trifle excessive, but a teacher’s discipline is his own, after all, and there was no reason for Strange to intervene. He did, however; walking past the room at just the wrong time, he happened to hear my voice and looked through the glass at precisely the moment that I turned one of the sniggering boys around by the sleeve of his blazer.

“Mr.
Straitley
!” Of course nowadays, no one touches a pupil.

Silence fell; the boy’s sleeve was torn at the armpit. “You saw him, sir. He hit me.”

They knew he hadn’t. Even Strange knew, though his face was impassive. The invisible finger gave another push. The boy—Pooley, his name was—held up his torn blazer for inspection. “That was brand-new!”

It wasn’t; anyone could see that. The fabric was shiny with age; the sleeve itself a little short. Last year’s blazer, due for replacement. But I’d gone too far; I could see it now. “Perhaps you can tell Mr. Strange all about it,” I suggested, turning back to the now-silent class.

The Third Master gave me a reptilian look.

“Oh, and when you’ve finished with Mr. Pooley, do please send him back,” I said. “I need to arrange his detention.”

There was nothing for Strange to do then but to leave, taking Pooley with him. I don’t suppose he enjoyed being dismissed by a colleague—but then, he shouldn’t have interfered, should he? Still, I had a feeling he would not let the matter go. It was too good an opportunity—and, as I recalled (though a little late), young Pooley was the eldest son of Dr. B. D. Pooley, Chairman of Governors, whose name I had most recently encountered on a formal written warning.

Well after that
I was so rattled that I went to the wrong room for Meek’s appraisal and arrived twenty minutes into the lesson. Everyone turned round to look at me, Meek excepted; his pallid face wooden with disapproval.

I sat down at the back; someone had set out a chair for me, with the pink appraisal form on it. I scanned the sheet. It was the usual box-ticking format: planning, delivery, stimulus, enthusiasm, class control. Marks out of five, plus a space for a comment, like a hotel questionnaire.

I wondered what sort of an opinion I was supposed to have; still, the class was quiet, barring a couple of nudgers at the back; Meek’s voice was reedy and penetrating; the computer screens behaved themselves, creating the migraine-inducing patterns that apparently constituted the object of the exercise. All in all, satisfactory enough, I supposed; smiled encouragingly at the hapless Meek; left early in the hope of a quick cup of tea before the start of the next period; and stuck the pink slip into the Third Master’s pigeonhole.

As I did, I noticed something lying on the floor at my feet. It was a little notebook, pocket-sized, bound in red. Opening it briefly I saw it half-filled with spindly writing; on the flyleaf I read the name C. KEANE.

Ah, Keane. I looked around the Common Room, but the new English teacher was not there. And so I pocketed the notebook, meaning to give it back to Keane later. Rather a mistake, or so it turned out. Still, you know what they say about listening at doors.

Every teacher keeps
them. Notes on boys; notes of lists and duties; notes of grudges small and large. You can tell almost as much about a colleague by his notebook as by his mug—Grachvogel’s is a neat and color-coded plea for order; Kitty’s a no-nonsense pocket diary; Devine’s an impressive black tome with little inside. Scoones uses the same green accounts books he has been using since 1961; the Nations have charity planners from Christian Aid; Pearman a stack of odd papers, Post-it notes, and used envelopes.

Now, having opened the thing, I couldn’t resist a glance at young Keane’s notebook; and by the time I realized that I shouldn’t be reading it, I was hooked, lined, and sinkered.