Still—girls. Mulberry girls. There’s something about our sister school that sets the whole of my being on edge. I don’t know if it’s the girls themselves—the rolled-up skirts, the giggling, and the look of superiority—or if it’s the mistresses, most of them dowdier versions of the girls; or the current Headmistress, a bottle blonde of indeterminate age and increasingly predatory temperament, whose hemlines over the past ten years have risen in inverse proportion to her dwindling chances of snaring a man.

But in thirty-four years at St. Oswald’s, I’ve usually managed to avoid dealing with our sister school, linked as it is with St. Oswald’s by our own Foundation, as well as by decades of collaboration in school plays, concerts, and trips abroad.

“Gods preserve us,” I muttered.

Sitting beside me, Robbie Roach gave a lecherous snigger. “I think you’re being ungrateful,” he said. “What I’d give to have a few of those Mulberry girls in my class.”

Robbie teaches History—so badly that Bob Strange ensures he never has a Sixth Form. Instead he runs field trips and Scout Camp, which he enjoys enormously, while maintaining the pretence that this takes up a great deal of his valuable leisure time, and therefore deserves compensation.

Now he gave me a wink and hissed: “Berry fresh, old boy. Berry fresh.”

To hear him you might imagine an elderly roué of the kind featured in one of Eric’s French films. In fact, he is harmless; all talk; unable to control his hair, let alone his classes. The idea that he, of all people, might be capable of seducing a Mulberry girl—or even getting one to hand in her homework on time—was beyond ludicrous.

I addressed the real enemy. “Bursar. May I venture to ask whether all subjects will benefit from this proposed consolidation? Or is Classics the only area in need of—er—curricular corsetry?”

Robbie Roach sniggered again.

The Bursar gave him a sharp look.

“Just the usual,” he said. “And the Languages Department.”

By the usual I guessed he meant Music and Drama, both departments which have had more to do with Mulberry House than most over the past few years. As a result, their members of staff have gone native to an alarming extent, staging productions of musicals with exclamation marks in the title, running yoga classes after School, and getting in touch with their feminine side.

All very well, I suppose, but it’s an open secret that Mulberry House wants a merger, which St. Oswald’s, like a cautious bachelor faced with the threat of matrimony, has so far neatly avoided.

This seemed to me the thin end of the wedge. It’s not that I don’t like girls, of course, but I prefer to like them from afar. I also like kittens and ice cream, but would rather not see them brought into class.