Different Class Read online

  And St Oswald’s is a maze. There’s the Bell Tower, of course. That’s where my form-room is. I’ll be running up and down stairs all day. Then there’s the Upper Corridor that runs across the top floor. Below that, there’s the Middle Corridor that connects it with the ground floor, and finally the Lower Corridor at the far end of the building. On either end, there’s a flight of stairs.

  This is where it gets complicated. According to St Oswald’s rules, Lower and Middle School boys can only go up North Stair, and down South Stair. This is to Ease Congestion, says Dr Shakeshafte. Out of bounds to Lower and Middle School boys are: the Upper School Common Room, the Sixth Form Common Room, the Staff Common Room (of course), the Quiet Room, the Chapel (outside of services), the boiler room, the Porter’s Lodge and pretty much all form-rooms unless a master is present. (That’s what we call them here. Masters. Does that make us all dogs?)

  Then there are the other rules I am somehow expected to know. Line up outside your classroom. Stand up when a master comes in. Always say Sir when you’re talking to a master. Say Sir to prefects, too, and make sure you do what they tell you. Don’t take your blazer off unless the Head announces Shirt Sleeve Order in Assembly. Don’t eat in the corridors. Always keep your shirt tucked in. Don’t bring your own books into the library. Always keep to the left-hand side. Already I’ve been shouted at a hundred times. New Boy, don’t do that! New Boy, walk on the left! How hard is it to remember a name? Maybe I’ll change mine to New Boy.

  I sometimes try to tell myself that I’ll only be here for five years, max. That will make me eighteen. I’ll be practically old by then. Sometimes I already feel old. If the average life is seventy years, then I have fifty-six years left. Fifty-six more years. That’s all. And five of them will be wasted here. That leaves me with just fifty-one. Fifty-one years of existence. It makes me shiver all over to think that people will be alive when I’m dead. People who haven’t been born yet; people who’ve never heard of me. Kids who are younger than I am now, with more of their lives ahead of them.

  I know I shouldn’t think about that. It doesn’t help My Condition. But it’s like scratching a midge-bite. It hurts a bit, but it feels good, too. Besides, I know how to deal with that now. I’m in control of it, Mousey.

  My new form is 3S. There are two other New Boys there. You can tell by their blazers. Everyone else’s blazer is worn shiny at the elbows. The rest of the uniform may be new, but blazers are expensive. Parents like to make them last, at least until the fourth year, when you have to go from a plain blazer to one with a blue trim. Only a New Boy’s parents would buy a blazer for just one year. And only a New Boy’s parents would buy him a briefcase so shiny and new that it actually creaked when he opened it. That shine; that creak. Those are the signs of a New Boy.

  Anyway, those two New Boys. Nothing special, either of them. One of them is a golden retriever, well fed and well bred. The other’s a nicely clipped poodle, not big enough to be scrappy, but one that might give you a bite on the leg if it thought you weren’t looking. No one has said much to me up to now. The New Boys are trying to play it cool. Or maybe no one’s interested. Unless you want to join a team, a Seventh Term Boy is surplus. My House Master, Mr Fabricant, came into the form-room the other day at lunch break, trying to sign me up for the School Orchestra, but I told him I couldn’t spare the time.

  He gave me a kind of sad-doggy look. ‘Well, that’s disappointing,’ he said. ‘I would have thought you’d be happy to join. Make friends; contribute to the House.’

  (That’s right, we’re in Houses. Mine is Parkinson House, which means that I get to wear a red tie if I earn a hundred House Points. I doubt I will. Still, Mr Fabricant doesn’t know that. To him, I’m an unknown quantity, all bright and new and shiny.)

  I gave him my brightest New Boy smile. ‘I’m awfully sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I’m waiting to see how much work I have to do before I catch up with the other boys. I hope it won’t be too much. But until I know for sure, I can’t afford to take on any extra commitments.’

  Mr Fabricant looked happier. ‘Oh, well, I suppose that’s all right. It’s nice to see you taking it so seriously. Maybe once you’ve settled in—’

  ‘I’ll be sure to tell you, sir.’

  I noticed Goldie and Poodle watching me as they ate their lunch.

  ‘What did you get?’ said Poodle.

  I always get the same thing. Same sandwich, same piece of fruit, same kind of snack at Break. No sweets, no crisps, no cake, nothing my mum would think common. Like I’m going to be judged, somehow. As if a healthier diet could cure me of My Condition.

  ‘We could share, if you like,’ I said.

  So we pooled our resources. Three sandwiches – one ham in a bap; one cheese and pickle on brown; one peanut butter on Mother’s Pride – two bags of salt and vinegar crisps; half a pork pie; two Mr Kipling’s Bakewell Tarts; a quarter of Yorkshire Mixture; a Blue Riband bar; a Wagon Wheel; some sweet cigarettes; some Lucozade and a satsuma. Goldie’s mother always gives him money to buy whatever he likes. Poodle is hyperactive, and isn’t supposed to eat chocolate. (Of course, he took the Wagon Wheel. I pretended not to care.)

  After that, we talked a bit. I learnt that both of them go to our Church. Neither have brothers or sisters. We don’t have much in common, except for those brand-new blazers, but I can’t afford to be choosy. If I’m to fit in here, I’ll need some friends of the kind my father would approve.

  After a bit, Poodle spoke up. ‘We don’t have to stay here at lunchtimes,’ he said. ‘We can go to Mr Clarke’s room. He plays records and everything. He’s way cooler than Straitley.’

  Mr Clarke is Poodle’s English master. He has a fifth-form, and his room is just above Mr Straitley’s. Mr Straitley’s classroom is a lot like Mr Straitley; messy and covered in chalk dust. There are wooden desks with inkwells, and a squeaky old blackboard. But Mr Clarke’s room is a little glass room built a bit like a greenhouse, with plastic desks, big windows, and posters on the ceiling and walls.

  Mr Clarke isn’t my teacher, worse luck. He teaches the other group. Mr Fabricant teaches ours, and although I haven’t been here long, I can already tell that he’s no fun at all. Mr Fabricant is a goat, all grey-haired and straggly. But Mr Clarke is actually cool. He has a record player in his room, and a bubblegum machine. He doesn’t mind if boys come in, even boys from another class.

  ‘Come on,’ said Poodle. ‘Check it out.’

  We followed him up to Mr Clarke’s room. It was almost empty. Later I found that the fifth-form had their own Common Room downstairs. Mr Clarke was at his desk, going through a box of LPs, but he looked up as we came in.

  ‘Ah, you’re just in time,’ he said, pulling an album out of the box. The name of the album was Animals. It was by a band called Pink Floyd.

  I don’t know much about music, you know, except for the kind my parents like. Elgar and Mozart and stuff like that. I’m not allowed to watch Top of the Pops, or listen to music on Radio 1. I sometimes do, though, when Dad’s not there, so I know at least some of the hits. But I couldn’t tell you what was so special about this music of Mr Clarke’s, except that it was – special, I mean – like fingers playing on my spine. I didn’t even recognize any of the instrumental sounds. I thought perhaps there was something in there that might have been a guitar, or a voice, or a synth, or some kind of animal in pain.

  And all the song titles were named after animals; ‘Pigs’; ‘Sheep’; ‘Dogs’. That one was my favourite. ‘Dogs’. I felt like someone had opened up a dirty window in my mind.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, when it finished.

  Mr Clarke looked up and smiled. His eyes are like yours, Mousey.

  ‘Come on up. Feel free to browse.’

  There are two full boxes by his desk, one of singles, one albums. Boys are allowed to look at them, as long as Mr Clarke’s in the room, which seems to be pretty much all the time. Some of the artists I recognized; The Carpenters; Roberta Flack; Elton
John; The Beatles. But there were lots of others I’d never even heard of.

  ‘I want to hear them all, sir!’

  He laughed. ‘That’s what I like to hear. But not so much of the Sir, all right?’ He laughed again at the look on my face. ‘You can call me Harry,’ he said. ‘At least when we’re both off-duty.’

  Well, that came as a surprise, you can guess. I’ve never called a teacher by their Christian name before. Not even Miss McDonald. It’s something that you just don’t do. But then, Mr Clarke – no, Harry – isn’t a regular teacher. He sees things differently. He’s smart. And I can tell he likes me.

  Pigs. Dogs. Animals.

  It’s funny, you know. I always thought I was the only one who saw other people as animals. Turns out someone else does, too. Mr Clarke gets it. What kind of animal is Mr Clarke? A mythical beast of some kind; a unicorn, or a dragon. I mean, I know he’s kind of old, but there’s something in his eyes. Something different, Mousey.

  After school, my dad asked if I’d made any friends yet. I told him yes. He asked me their names.

  I said: ‘Harry.’

  ‘And what does Harry’s dad do?’

  I told him I didn’t know. (It was true.)

  He said: ‘You’ve got to know these things. A man’s friends say as much about him as his clothes, his job, his class.’ (Dad’s very big on class.)

  ‘I’ll ask him,’ I said.

  ‘You do that,’ said Dad.

  3

  September 7th, 2005

  Now I try to be fair. Really I do. I treat all my boys the same, you know; but unless you’re Bob Strange, who despises all boys equally, or Eric Scoones, who has no form, and thus makes such small distinction between them that he scarcely ever remembers their names, you’re bound to feel more or less affection for one individual or another.

  My Brodie Boys, for instance – Allen-Jones, Sutcliff, Tayler and McNair – in spite of their propensity to wreak mayhem at every turn, hold a special place in my heart. I’ve always had rather a soft spot for the jokers and the subversives. But every decade or so, there’s one – a smart alec; a troublemaker – a boy whose face keeps popping up in all the wrong circumstances and who, years later, can still pop up in a Master’s dreams when one’s dream-self, clad only in a mortar board and a pair of yellow swimming trunks, attempts to teach a subject about which he knows nothing at all to a disruptive class in which that one boy, grinning like an ape, plays the role of ringleader.

  The truth is that no Master, however venerable, is ever entirely without insecurities, and there are boys – not so many of them in my case, no more than six in a whole career – who are capable of sniffing out those insecurities, of using them, of twisting them, of single-handedly making a good class into a bad class, a bad class into the stuff of dread.

  Johnny Harrington was one of them. That pale-faced, bland, insufferable boy, with his impeccable uniform and his air of barely concealed contempt. How I hated him, then and now – and as he came towards me, with a smile that might almost have been sincere, I felt the past rush in on me like a cloud of mustard gas.

  ‘Why, it’s Mr Straitley!’ he said. ‘Good Lord, you haven’t changed a bit. How long has it been? Twenty-four years? Don’t say you don’t remember me?’

  I drew the flap of my gown across the tea-stained crotch of my trousers. Not quite trusting myself to speak, I gave the man a curt nod.

  The smile broadened still further. ‘Of course. We’ll catch up later,’ he said. ‘Maybe after the meeting.’

  Of all the boys I’ve watched grow up, moving from larva to chrysalis, and then to dubious butterfly, in time taking wing as accountants, bankers, journalists, researchers, soldiers – God help them, sometimes even teachers, which, according to Eric Scoones, rank even higher on the perversion scale than Clive Punnet, who ate his wife – none have surprised me as utterly as little Johnny Harrington.

  The arrogant, sullen little boy has been reborn as a smiling, smooth-voiced politician, whose lack of essential warmth is now all too ably camouflaged beneath a veneer of surface shine. But people rarely change at heart, except in the growing sophistication of their various disguises, and it doesn’t take much for me now to see beneath the surface.

  Still, I have to admit that Harrington had made an impressive entrance. His opening speech to the Common Room was a kind of masterpiece; rousing; funny; articulate and shot through with that self-deprecating charm that only the most dangerous of politicians can manage. He spoke of his affection for St Oswald’s; of his sadness to see the dear old place so run-down and neglected; of his hope that together we would raise the phoenix from the ashes.

  ‘We have to think of St Oswald’s,’ he said. ‘But not through a veil of nostalgia. There’s a joke we used to tell, back when I was still a boy. How many St Oswald’s Masters does it take to change a lightbulb?’

  He gave the Common Room a smile as bright as a toothpaste commercial.

  ‘The answer, of course, was: CHANGE??’

  The audience laughed obediently. The New Head laughed with them. I noticed that, as he delivered the punchline, Harrington altered his posture a little, adopted a voice to match the stance, and for a moment, I was convinced that the little rat was mimicking me—

  But Harrington had already moved on. Humour had suddenly given way to a politician’s earnestness. The middle section of his speech now had a yearning quality; a dewy, romantic quality, peppered with every cliché in the orator’s manual.

  ‘Change,’ he repeated. ‘Change can be hard. But, like the lightbulb, change can also be illuminating. The Bursar, the Third Master and I have worked hard with my team and the Governors to put into place a number of necessary changes. Some are financial – the Bursar will explain them in greater detail later, but I’m sure you must know that St Oswald’s has been living beyond its means for years. Others are domestic, and may prove the greatest challenge. But I have every confidence in the staff of St Oswald’s. We have a strong tradition of battling against adversity.’

  And then he looked right at me and said: ‘My Latin Master taught me that, along with so many other things. Ad astra per aspera. The rocky road will lead to the stars. The road to recovery may be rough. But I hope we can get there together.’

  And in the applause that followed that speech, perfect in its cynicism, I wasn’t sure which I hated most: the fact that, for some reason, the man was trying to woo me, or that he was doing it in the language of Caesar.

  Harrington beamed at his audience. I raised my teacup in tribute. The Senate – I mean the Common Room – gave him a standing ovation. Devine’s expressionless features were almost animated. Even Eric said: ‘Hear hear!’– a fact that depresses me more than it should – and Bob Strange looked like a schoolboy cricketer who has been allowed to carry his hero’s bat.

  Ye gods. Can’t they see him? His fakery? But Julius Caesar had his charm – so, too, had Caligula. And so I prepared myself for the worst – for the Bursar’s financial plan and that list of domestic changes – with a sinking, rebellious heart, as Johnny Harrington – now reborn as Dr Harrington, MBE – watched me with a tiny smile, almost like a challenge.

  ‘And now for a look at the future,’ he said, turning towards the Bursar. ‘In his presentation, the Bursar will outline the changes that will make us more competitive, better equipped to deal with the world of business and innovation.’

  Innovation. That explained the viewing screen and the laptop computer on the desk. The Bursar is much addicted to something he calls PowerPoint, a kind of electronic crib-sheet for idiots. I settled in for a little nap. As an Old Centurion of St Oswald’s, there are a number of unnecessary innovations to which I will not submit. PowerPoint is one of them, as is e-mail, in spite of Bob Strange’s persistence in ‘copying me in’ to the minutes of meetings I do not attend, or summoning me to his office by electronic messenger, as if just opening the door and calling down the corridor (or even scribbling a note to pop into my pigeon-hole) were hencef
orth completely impossible.

  Fortunately, Danielle, Bob’s secretary, is rather more amenable, and for the price of a few kind words and a box of chocolates at Christmas had arranged to print out my e-mails this term and deliver them to my pigeon-hole. This was why I had been surprised to find my pigeon-hole empty this morning, even though the beginning of term is always a morass of paperwork.

  The Bursar’s PowerPoint soon explained the mystery. Apparently, St Oswald’s is to become a paper-free office environment, run entirely online. This, according to the Bursar – a sharp-nosed Scotsman with a reputation as a wit – will make for a greener St Oswald’s as well as a more efficient delivery system, and will make the old wooden pigeon-holes (which have been in use since 1904) redundant.

  According to Harrington, their removal will create more space in the Quiet Room, which needs to be refurbished and supplied with staff workstations – here the Bursar paused in his speech to show us a series of diagrams to illustrate the new desks and the cubicles, each one supplied with a computer, in which we are to sit like battery hens, efficient and productive. For members of staff requiring extra training in what he calls ‘developing technology’, there will be an after-hours surgery with Mr Beard, the (beardless) Head of IT, to which we are all invited to bring our ideas and suggestions.

  I, for one, shall not do so. I’m far too old a dog to learn that kind of new trickery. If necessary, I shall remain at my desk in room 59 during my free time, with a bag of Liquorice Allsorts and only the mice for company.

  However, there was more to come from the Bursar’s budget. Most of it I’d heard before – consolidating of resources; sale of School assets; streamlining of departments; maximizing efficiency – all Bursar-speak for less money and less space for some department or other. I’m used to fighting my corner, and the prospect of doing so again was, if anything, invigorating.