A short way uphill in 1964, David is plunged into a sudden understanding of England’s antiquity and strangeness when he first attends the Grammar School in Billing Road as a short-trousered first-year in his navy blazer and compulsory cap. Already starting to develop a keen dress-sense, he knows that this isn’t a good look for him, particularly the short trousers. This last intuition is confirmed when he discovers that the Head of First Years, Mr. Duncan Oldman, is an unrestrained boy-fondler who’s apparently allowed to call eleven-year-olds out to stand beside his desk where he can run his pudgy fingers over their bare thighs, or at least he can do this with the ones whose parents have decided they’re not ready for long trousers. Mr. Oldman is an archetypal creepy child molester from a Charles Addams cartoon with his plump mollusc body tapering to dainty little hands and feet, his porcine nose and ears and darting, beady eyes; the web of burst blood vessels in his cheeks which lends him a perpetual choirboy blush. The word out in the playground is that on at least two separate occasions Mr. Oldman has invited first year pupils to his nearby home for after-class tuition, where he tries to touch them up and kiss them. In the two known instances where this gets back to the boy’s parents and they formally complain, the new headmaster begs them to consider the good reputation of the school, they settle out of court and Dunky Oldman is allowed to carry on as Head of First Years with impunity, his underage seraglio in easy reach around him like an R.I.-teaching Emperor Tiberius. The new headmaster, Mr. Ormerod, has recently replaced the previous incumbent Mr. Strichley after Mr. Strichley took an overdose of sleeping pills and then went out and drove his car at speed into a rock wall. Mr. Ormerod, by contrast, has been previously employed as deputy headmaster at one of the posher public schools and doesn’t see his new job as headmaster of a grammar school as a promotion. After all, though the eleven-plus does quite a reasonable job of making sure that only a bare minimum of boys from less exclusive backgrounds can attend the school, there’s still the risk that Mr. Ormerod might run into a member of the working classes or, in David’s case, one of the Hottentots. Indeed, a few years after David has moved on from the establishment in the mid-1970s the grammar schools are all turned into comprehensives, liable to take in the same riff-raff as an ordinary secondary school. According to the rumour David hears, for Mr. Ormerod it’s a demotion, an indignity too far and one day he goes into work a little earlier than usual so that he can follow the example of his predecessor, hanging himself in a stairwell near the art room. From what David understands, the next headmaster after Ormerod avoids having to kill himself by getting fired for stealing three pounds forty pence in change from the school’s drinks machine, but back when David is just starting at the school all this is in the future and the former public school enforcer is in charge. A tall man with a defect of the inner ear that makes him hold his head on one side like a vulture with a snapped neck, Ormerod attempts to recreate his new school in the fashion of his old one. Given the pretensions that the Grammar School already has, the institution doesn’t need a great deal of persuading. Many of the staff still have black gowns and there are even a few of the older teachers wearing mortar boards, perhaps the last such in the town to dress like this outside the pages of
The Beano. The headmaster’s office has red and green traffic lights installed outside the door to inform visitors that they should either wait or enter, thus excusing Mr. Ormerod from having to say anything as common as “come in”. Inside his office a glass-fronted case contains a range of canes designed to inflict various degrees of punishment; thick ones that bruise; thin ones that cut. When Ormerod decrees that henceforth boys using the open air school pool must swim without recourse to swimming trunks after the custom at his prior establishment there’s not a squeak of protest from the staff and Mr. Oldman more than likely writes the head a letter of congratulation. This, then, is the world that all the new arrivals at the school find themselves overwhelmed by, but at least the white ones have each other for support. David has nobody. His classmates want no more to do with him than did the children at St. George’s, and the teachers seem to see him as an opportunity for minstrel show amusement. For a while David hopes selfishly that in a year or two his brother Andrew can pass his eleven-plus so that at least there’ll be the two of them to look out for each other in this bigoted asylum, but that isn’t going to be what happens. Andrew, well aware and justifiably resentful of their father’s favouritism, realises that however hard he tries he’ll never win his dad’s approval and so takes a more relaxed approach to schoolwork, fails to clear the bar on the eleven-plus and opts for the diminished expectations of a secondary school where at least there are other black kids. Meanwhile, David is discovering that though he may be a class-topper at St. George’s, in amongst these prep-school educated boys he doesn’t stand a chance. After that first year everybody takes exams to see which stream they’re suited to for the remainder of their school career and David ends up in the ‘C’ stream with the divs and trainee sociopaths. The masters and the other kids are on his back at school, his disappointed father’s on his back at home, so David spends most of his spare time at the Baxter Building, or Avengers Mansion, or in some alternative Fortress of Solitude. One bright and fresh Saturday morning David’s down at Sid’s stall in the market square. The latest Marvel comics are just in and David’s trying to work out how many he can comfortably afford, whether to leave the Strange Tales or Fantasy Masterpieces for another day, when he becomes aware that Sid’s stall has another customer and that they’re staring at him. Turning slowly, David finds himself confronted for the first time by the dark-ringed eyes of Alma Warren, who has just turned twelve and isn’t wearing any makeup. She’s holding a copy of some comic that he’s never heard of, something called Forbidden Worlds from one of the small companies he doesn’t bother with. They both smirk condescendingly at one another’s woeful taste and overhead the pigeons flutter restlessly from ledge to ledge, weaving threads of trajectory across the square’s stone loom.