“You’re a clever boy,” I told him after Registration. “I hear you’re thinking of Oxbridge.”

He was going through his locker. In those days we still kept them in the form rooms, and you could tell a lot about a boy from the way he kept his locker: whether it was tidy or shambolic; what pictures or stickers embellished it; whether his books were carefully backed or left to curl at the edges.

Johnny’s locker was monastic. Books neatly backed with brown paper; all arranged in order of size. One pencil box of plain wood; one ruler, unadorned; a Blue Riband bar. No litter—not even a pencil shaving. Nothing to indicate the boy’s personality at all—not a poster, a sticker, or a drawing in sight.

“Sir,” said Harrington in his colourless voice. Hard to tell if he meant yes or no.

“You’re certainly able,” I went on cheerily. “Joint first in Latin, eh—ninety percent—and sixth from the top in the whole form. You might even have been first if it hadn’t been for that English test.”

I thought his face darkened a little. There had been nothing but trouble so far with the English Literature syllabus—Kes had given way to Ted Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, and finally to Chaucer, none of which had been judged suitable by the Harrington parents. As a result, the boy’s assessment had placed him seventeenth in a middle set of twenty-one, and the report from his teacher—Mr. Fabricant, a veteran Tweed Jacket with no time to waste on what he referred to as “the sensitive brigade”—stated quite clearly that Johnny was lucky to have scraped seventeenth, and that if he didn’t get his act together—and that meant actually reading the books and thinking about what they meant—then he’d be looking at no better than a pass in the end-of-term exams.

“I take it you’re not keen on English Literature.”

“Sir,” said Harrington, closing his locker.

“It’s a pity,” I said cheerily, “as all of the best universities tend to take the view that a man who doesn’t understand literature is generally ill-equipped to understand anything else either.”

Harrington said nothing, but his eyes narrowed.

“Literature broadens the mind,” I said. “And it seems to me that yours may be in need of a little broadening.”

He gaped at me, unused to such a direct approach.