And now here he was, seven years later, making accusations of a kind that no one wanted to believe, but few dared question too aggressively. Guilt by association can kill a Master’s career as fast as in a court of law, and some—Eric Scoones, for example—had been quick to take precautions. The rest of the School went into shock: a shock that manifested itself at first through contempt and laughter.

We shouldn’t have laughed. Young Spikely was totally in earnest. Harry was removed from School, pending investigation. We were all instructed, on pain of dismissal, to have no contact at all with him. A telephone hotline was set up by the police, encouraging pupils to speak up about their experiences at School, and St. Oswald’s was swamped by the press, demanding to know more details about a case that promised everything a tabloid reader could hope for.

The Malbry Examiner, which for historical and social reasons has always hated St. Oswald’s, made much of the accusations. It was Harry’s and St. Oswald’s bad luck that Malbry was still reeling from a previous case, a drama enacted a few years before, in which a little local girl had died in tragic circumstances. Of course, the Emily White affair was barely connected with the School, but even a loose connection was enough for the Examiner to deploy its most poisonous language.

School for Scandal! the headline read. St. Oswald’s Grammar School’s Secret Homosexual Curriculum!

Harry, besieged by journalists, battened down the hatches, but his home was vandalized, and as the case gathered momentum, he had to move to a hostel for his own protection. I fared rather better. In spite of my friendship with Harry; in spite of the fact that the Chaplain revealed that I had denied that Harry was gay; in spite of the fact that Nutter had been in my form, and that people (including the editor of the Examiner) found it hard to imagine how a member of St. Oswald’s staff could have worked alongside a predator and not had the slightest suspicion of what was really going on.

At best, I suppose, it made me naive. At worst, it made me a suspect. And yet, beyond a few predictable poison-pen letters and graffiti on the wall by my house, I managed to escape virtually unscathed from the dreadful business—more so, perhaps, than I deserved.