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.
Of course I already knew the man was a writer. He has that look; the slight complacency of the casual observer, content to enjoy the view because he knows he won’t be staying long. What I hadn’t guessed was how much he’d already seen; the tiffs, the rivalries, the little secrets of the Common Room dynamic. There were pages of it; closely written in handwriting so small that it was scarcely legible; character studies, sketches, overheard remarks, gossip, history, news.
I scanned the pages, straining my eyes to decipher the minuscule script. Fallowgate was mentioned; and Peanuts, and Favorites. There was a little of our school history—I saw the names Snyde, Pinchbeck, and Mitchell alongside a folded newspaper cutting of that sad old tale. Next to that, a photocopied snippet from a St. Oswald’s official school photograph, a color snapshot of another school’s Sports Day—boys and girls sitting cross-legged on the grass—and a bad portrait of John Snyde, looking criminal, as most men do when seen from the front page of a newspaper.
Several more pages, I saw, were given over to cartoons, caricatures for the most part. Here was the Head, rigid and glacial, the Don Quixote to Bishop’s Sancho. There was Bob Strange, a hybrid half-human wired into his computer terminal. My own Anderton-Pullitt was there in goggles and flying helmet; Knight’s schoolboy crush on a new teacher was mercilessly exposed; Miss Dare portrayed as a bespectacled, bestockinged schoolmarm with Scoones as her growling rottweiler. Even I was included, hunchbacked and black-robed, swinging from the Bell Tower with Kitty, a plumpish Esmerelda, under my arm.