I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment I declared war against St. Oswald’s. It wouldn’t have me? Then I would have it. I would take it, and no one, nothing—not even my father—would stop me. The line had been drawn. Another boundary to be crossed, a more sophisticated bluff this time, secure in its ancient arrogance, unaware that therein lay the germ of its destruction. Another line, daring me to cross it.
Like murder.
KING
1
St. Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys
Monday, 6th September, Michaelmas Term
That’s ninety-nine by my reckoning, smelling of wood and old chalk dust and disinfectant and the incomprehensibly biscuity, hamsterish smell of boys. Ninety-nine terms strung across the years like dusty paper lanterns. Thirty-three years. It’s like a prison sentence. Reminds me of the old joke about the pensioner convicted of murder.
“Thirty years, Your Honor,” he protests. “It’s too much! I’ll never manage it!” And the judge says: “Well, just do as many as you can. . . .”
Come to think of it, that’s not funny. I’ll be sixty-five in November.
Not that it matters. There’s no compulsory retirement at St. Oswald’s. We follow our own rules. We always have. One more term, and I’ll have scored my Century. One for the Honors Board at last. I can see it now; in Gothic script: Roy Hubert Straitley (B.A.) Old Centurion of the School.
I have to laugh. I never imagined I’d end up here. I finished a ten-year stretch at St. Oswald’s in 1954, and the last thing I expected then was to find myself there again—a Master, of all things—keeping order, doling out lines and detentions. But to my surprise I found that those years had given me a sort of natural insight into the teaching business. By now there isn’t a trick I don’t know. After all, I’ve played most of them myself; man, boy, and somewhere in between. And here I am again, back at St. Oswald’s for another term. You’d think I couldn’t keep away.
I light a Gauloise; my one concession to the influence of the Modern Languages. Technically, of course, it’s not allowed; but today, in the privacy of my own form room, no one’s likely to pay very much attention. Today is traditionally free of boys and reserved for administrative matters; the counting of textbooks; allocation of stationery; last-minute revisions to the timetable; collection of form and set lists; induction of new staff; departmental meetings.
I am, of course, a department in myself. Once Head of Classics, in charge of a thriving section of respectful menials, now relegated to a dusty corner of the new Languages section, like a rather dull first edition no one quite dares to throw away.
All my rats have abandoned ship—apart from the boys, that is. I still teach a full timetable, to the bafflement of Mr. Strange—the Third Master, who considers Latin irrelevant—and to the covert embarrassment of the New Head. Still, the boys continue to opt for my irrelevant subject, and their results remain on the whole rather good. I like to think it’s my personal charisma that does it.
Not that I’m not very fond of my colleagues in Modern Languages, though I do have more in common with the subversive Gauls than with the humorless Teutons. There’s Pearman, the Head of French—round, cheery, occasionally brilliant, but hopelessly disorganized—and Kitty Teague, who sometimes shares her lunchtime biscuits with me over a cup of tea, and Eric Scoones, a sprightly half-Centurion (also an Old Boy) of sixty-two who, when the mood takes him, has an uncanny recollection for some of the more extreme exploits of my distant youth.
Then there’s Isabelle Tapi, decorative but rather useless in a leggy, Gallic sort of way, the subject of a good deal of admiring graffiti from the locker-room fantasy set. All in all a rather jolly department, whose members tolerate my eccentricities with commendable patience and good humor, and who seldom interfere with my unconventional methods.
The Germans are less congenial on the whole; Geoff and Penny (“League of”) Nations, a mixed double-act with designs on my form room; Gerry Grachvogel, a well-meaning ass with a predilection for flash cards, and finally, Dr. “Sourgrape” Devine, Head of the Department and a staunch believer in the further expansion of the Great Empire, who sees me as a subversive and a pupil poacher, has no interest in Classics, and who doubtless thinks carpe diem means “fish of the day.”
He has a habit of passing my room with feigned briskness whilst peering suspiciously through the glass, as if to check for signs of immoral conduct, and I know that today of all days it will only be a matter of time before I behold his joyless countenance looking in on me.
Ah. What did I tell you?
Right on cue.
“Morning, Devine!”
I suppressed the urge to salute, whilst concealing my half-smoked Gauloise under the desk, and gave him my broadest smile through the glass door. I noticed he was carrying a large cardboard box piled high with books and papers. He looked at me with what I later knew to be ill-concealed smugness, then moved on down the corridor with the air of one who has important matters to attend to.
Curiously, I got up and looked down the corridor after him, just in time to see Gerry Grachvogel and the League of Nations disappearing furtively in his wake, all carrying similar cartons.
Puzzled, I sat down at my old desk and surveyed my modest empire.
Room fifty-nine, my territory for the last thirty years. Oft disputed but never surrendered. Now only the Germans continue to try. It’s a large room, nice in its way, I suppose, though its elevated position in the Bell Tower gives me more stairs to climb than I would have chosen, and it lies about half a mile as the crow flies from my small office on the Upper Corridor.
You’ll have noticed that as over time dogs and their owners come to resemble each other, so it is with teachers and classrooms. Mine fits me like my old tweed jacket, and smells almost the same—a comforting compound of books, chalk, and illicit cigarettes. A large and venerable blackboard dominates the room—Dr. Devine’s endeavors to introduce the term “chalkboard” having, I’m happy to report, met with no success whatever. The desks are ancient and battle scarred, and I have resisted all attempts to have them replaced by the ubiquitous plastic tables.
If I get bored, I can always read the graffiti. A flattering amount of it concerns me. My current favorite is Hic magister podex est, written—by some boy or other—oh, more years ago than I like to remember. When I was a boy no one would have dared to refer to a Master as a podex. Disgraceful. And yet for some reason it never fails to make me smile.
My own desk is no less disgraceful; a huge time-blackened affair with fathomless drawers and multiple inscriptions. It sits on an elevated podium—originally built to allow a shorter Classics Master access to the blackboard—and from this quarterdeck I can look down benevolently upon my minions and work on the Times crossword without being noticed.
There are mice living behind the lockers. I know this because on Friday afternoons they troop out and sniff around under the radiator pipes while the boys do their weekly vocabulary test. I don’t complain; I rather like the mice. The Old Head once tried poison, but only once; the stench of dead mouse is far more noxious than anything living could ever hope to generate, and it endured for weeks until finally John Snyde, who was Head Porter at the time, had to be called in to tear out the skirting boards and remove the pungent dead.