“But I don’t use foul and obscene language,” I protested. It was true; I’d never even sworn at a boy, and God knows I’d had reason to once or twice.

“Well, that’s not what the boy says,” oofed the Head. “In fact, the bloody boy has made a list of all the unsuitable words you’ve been teaching them, and passed it on to his bloody parents, who, if you’d bothered to read his bloody file, are both of them bloody Bible-bashers who think that Mary Whitehouse is a dangerous bloody liberal—”

“Nicely put, Headmaster,” I proffered, admiring his alliteration.

At this, HM did everything but lower his head and charge. He handed me the list on a sheet of vocabulary paper, neatly copied out in Harrington’s spiky handwriting.

Merda, merda, merdam—

“Ah. Yes. I see. But how anyone could take offense at that—”

“Obviously, someone did,” snapped the Head.

“The boy’s just a podex with merda for brains—”

“What?”

“Merely a figure of speech, Headmaster.”

“And precisely the kind of thing— I mean, what kind of an idiot—”

I could see HM was getting dangerously overwrought. “Headmaster,” I said. “The subject is Latin. The words are in the dictionary. They appear on the syllabus—” (Well, maybe not podex, I told myself. Or even merda.) “And all of this—” Once more I broke off to brandish the vocabulary page. “All this is simply an aggravated case of what my colleagues in the French Department call honi soit qui mal y pense.”

“Oof,” said Shakeshafte, but I could see that the red mist was clearing. “Well, I don’t want to hear any more of it. I’ll thank you to stick to mensa in the future. This is Classics, not comedy.”

I acknowledged that it was. Forty-four years a Master, and I don’t think old Shakeshafte had ever smiled, let alone made a joke. He didn’t like me; and yet I knew he would stand by me—Shakeshafte was old school through and through, and I knew that whatever reprimand he might give to a colleague in private, in public he would back them to the hilt.

All the same, I resented it. I’d thought young Harrington a good pupil, and yet here he was, noting down my throwaway comments and reporting on me like a School Inspector, encouraging his parents to take umbrage—