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sometimes do, and this alone was enough to crowd the old men's moderation into silence.
    'Go on,' said the blue top. 'Fuck right off. We don't want you here.'
    I felt so mortified I almost laughed, just as one might when a mood of contentment gives way to sudden embarrassment. No one had ever spoken to me like that before: a priest gets used to being respected and sometimes pitied, but never in my life had anyone made me feel so vulnerable and so disliked. Something in the man's face had seemed to represent ancient grievances, and his hard eyes and his balled-up fists had spoken of some vast and unknowable capacity for rage. I swear it was new to me in that narrow street, and I walked back to the chapel feeling hurt and disjointed and confused, thinking perhaps I knew less about other people and less about Dalgarnock than I ought to know.
    The Church of St John Ogilvie stands at the top of a lane opposite an abandoned railway station. They built the chapel in the 1930s to appease Irish labourers who had come to work at the local iron foundry, and their own schools followed soon after. During those first months in the town, I suppose it shocked me how lazy the Catholics were, especially given the efforts of their industrious ancestors, but then, in such matters, the tribal element will often eclipse the spiritual. It turned out that Dalgarnock's small community of Catholics—much like their opposites—were enslaved to the denominational impulse: few of them regularly attended Mass, none sent their boys into the priesthood, yet they loudly swelled with sectarian pride. Northern Ireland was just across the water, and what Dalgarnock had was a briny dilution of Ireland's famous troubles, without the interest in votes, assemblies or breakable guns. Hidden in the trees across from my church, smothered in part-time grievances, there stood a windowless hut painted royal blue, in which the band of the Dalgarnock Orange Order chose to rehearse each Sunday morning.

    I blamed Mrs Poole's soup for the heartburn. I felt an empty, dyspeptic scorch as I drove to the school, like a rising argument at the centre of my chest, and I found there were no Rennies in the glove compartment. Then I thought maybe it was the white wine, a nightmare for heartburn, though you couldn't fault the freshness of a good and well-made Alsace, the taste of Easter and crushed flowers.
    The headmaster at St Andrew's, Mr McCallum, was a God-fearing alcoholic of the old stamp. The pupils called him Fuck-Face. He drank in his office and seemed to live in fear of the changing times, also in dread of the nuns who taught geography and French. Generally speaking, he would display the defensive meekness of the professional drunk, but now and then his disorder would express itself in a wonderful display of bad temper. But McCallum was kind, asking me if I'd like, as a historian, to give the occasional lesson, an offer I found obscurely flattering. I never taught the curriculum, of course, the curriculum being useful only for the halfhearted cultivation of barely obedient idiots, so I took the chance to talk about Pugin and William Byrd to the senior students. They seemed to enjoy it well enough, so long as you let them drink their fizzy drinks throughout the lesson and didn't give them homework.
    One got the impression the staff believed very strongly that education was a matter of bitter entrenchment as opposed to any sort of managed revelation, and they seemed in cahoots with the children when it came to the sorry victory of rights over responsibilities. Stupid children are always aware of their rights, and so are stupid teachers: they share a belief in the supreme relevance of what they think themselves and wield these opinions like home-made weapons in the war against self-improvement. The staffroom at St Andrew's was worse than the playground, the domain of idle bullies, a place of pecking orders, where the ignorant and the disappointed daily stalked the carpet