Most of St. Oswald’s staff at that time had doctorates, or at least the kind of MA that comes free from Oxford or Cambridge. Harry had no doctorate, and his degree was from the Open University. And yet he was a natural when it came to teaching; his reading tastes spanned all genres; and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture, which meant that a lesson with Harry Clarke might begin with a Shakespearian sonnet, segue into the lyrics of a song by David Bowie, shift sideways into an Anglo-Saxon riddle, and finish with a reference to Private Eye or the Beano. It was an unusual approach, and one which Mr. Fabricant viewed with enormous suspicion; but St. Oswald’s had a policy of never interfering with a colleague’s methods unless they affected the boys’ results; and given that Harry’s exam results were always well above the average, he was tolerated, if not approved, by his more conservative peers.

Harry’s was room 58, the room directly above mine. The topmost room in the old Bell Tower, it was a small, hexagonal room of even more eccentric design than my own—chilly in winter, oppressive in summer, accessible via a narrow flight of uneven little stone stairs. This was where Harry spent much of his time, and at lunchtimes he would play records and talk to anyone who cared to drop by, including Harrington and his friends, who seemed to prefer his company to mine, or that of their classmates.

Two weeks had passed since my meeting with the Head, and I had obediently (though with some reluctance) excised some of the more robust items of vocabulary from my Latin lessons. But it annoyed me; made me feel like a student teacher on report. And for what? The Harringtons were members of some biblical sect that saw a devil in every bush. I knew the type, and expected the worst. As the boy’s form tutor, by then I’d already collected complaints from Harrington Senior about PE (in which he objected to the communal showers); English (in which he deplored the foul language of Barry Hines’s Kes); Biology (which exposed the boy to the twin evils of human reproduction and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution); French (during which Eric, a film buff, was planning to show Les Diaboliques); and even Geography, possibly the most inoffensive subject known to man, in which (if we were to believe Dr. Harrington Senior) the teacher, Mr. Mooney (a typical geographer, earnest and suited and eminently respectable), had allowed the boys access to a pornographic magazine.

The magazine turned out to be the National Geographic, with a special supplement on African tribes, but by the time this was made clear, Mr. Mooney, a sensitive soul, was a mass of nerves and twitches, afraid for his job and no use at all when it came to teaching 3S.