So here I am again, two days before the official stampede, watering the plants, clearing my desk (well, I aim to), and generally planning next year’s campaign with the cunning and precision of a Marcus Aurelius. Or so I hope my colleagues will think, when they arrive this afternoon for the ritual preterm staff meeting to find me already installed in my room in the Bell Tower, smoking a quiet cigarette and fully conversant with the new term’s class lists, timetable, gossip, and dirt, the stuff on which St. Oswald’s dines like the graveyard kings of old.

I owe much of my insider information to a single source. Jimmy Watt. My secret weapon. Reinstated after last year and promoted to the position of Assistant Porter. No intellectual, but sound, and good with his hands—besides which Jimmy owes me a favor or two, and through him I hear much of what is denied my more elevated colleagues.

“Morning, boss.” His face is round and good-natured, lit now with a brilliant smile. “Good holiday?”

“Yes, thank you, Jimmy.” I try to remember the last time I went on holiday. Unless you count that School trip to France in 1978, when Eric Scoones took the boys on foot to see the Sacré-Coeur by night, blissfully unaware that the famous basilica sits in the middle of the most notorious red-light district in Paris.

I suppose I must have had a holiday—if you can call it that, with its burden of wasps and cricket and bare midriffs and unseasonal rainstorms, with tea in the afternoons and the mantelpiece clock ticking away the long and somnolent summer days. Gods, I think, it’s good to be back. But how long for? A term? A year? What next? What then?

Holidays, I suppose. Leisure activities. Novels. An allotment, perhaps, somewhere up by the Abbey Road estate, where I will grow rhubarb and listen to the wireless. Hobbies. Pub quizzes. Sudoku, whatever that is. All the things I postponed in the name of duty, back in the days when such things were still to be desired. Depressing prospect. A St. Oswald’s Master has no time for frivolities, and it is far, far too late for me to develop a taste for them now.

“Yes, back in the jug for another stint,” I told Jimmy, with a smile so that he would know that I was joking. “You’d almost think I liked it here.”

Jimmy gave his honking laugh. I suppose it must seem strange to him; but then, of course, he’s still young. He has his pastimes—such as they are—and the great white whale of St. Oswald’s has not yet consumed him entirely.

“Any sign of the new New Head?”

“He’s in his office. I’ve seen his car.”

“He didn’t introduce himself? Pop into the Lodge for a cup of tea?”