I turned to the door. I would have left too; and the Head must have known I’d call his bluff because he put down the torpedo, stood up, and faced me with the look that had reduced so many boys to pulp and earned him the nickname of SS—or “Shitter” Shakeshafte.

I was not a boy, however, and I was not unmanned. The Head was a bully of the old school, and the only way to deal with bullies is to face them down. It wasn’t easy. There was something vaguely pachydermic about the Old Head; a distribution of his not inconsiderable weight that was more rhino than man. His eyes were small, in great, bloodshot orbs. Even the sound he made as he got to his feet—a kind of inarticulate oof!—put me irresistibly in mind of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, which Eric Scoones’s French Sixth-Form class happened to be studying that year.

“Please, Headmaster,” I said. “Don’t bother to get up on my account.”

He oofed again, and damned my impertinence. “Suppose you think it’s funny, eh? Bloody comedian. Well, we’ve had a complaint. Here.” And he flung a piece of paper in my direction, which I caught, and found to be a letter on notepaper headed Dr. R. Harrington, MA (Oxon).

It wasn’t the first time I’d had a complaint. Of course I get more of them nowadays, because boys know their rights (or think they do), and behavior that would have earned them a reprimand, detention, or even the cane in those days has now been identified as a sign of learning difficulty, hyperactivity, dyslexia, or Attention Deficit Disorder (which we, in the unsympathetic old days, used to call Not Paying Attention), all of which conditions deserve sensitive treatment rather than a kick in the pants.

Personally I found the old treatment quite effective (and so did the boys), but the same faction that has since outlawed the term blackboard and spawned such linguistic monsters as chairperson, differently abled, and academically challenged obviously thinks otherwise. Nowadays I get a complaint almost every time I give a boy a detention, but I mostly tend to ignore them—as, in fact, do the boys themselves. In the old days, though, a complaint was a serious matter, and I racked my brains to understand what I might have done to upset Dr. Harrington, MA.

“Who is this Harrington, anyway?” demanded the Head.

I filled him in on the boy’s history, at least the little I knew of it. Then I read the letter, and the mist began to clear. I can’t remember the wording, of course, but certain phrases have stayed in my mind. Lack of moral guidance was one; and so was vocabulary unsuitable to the classroom, and repeated use of foul and obscene language.