Different Class Read Online Free PDF

same, you know; but unless you’re Bob Strange, who despises all boys equally, or Eric Scoones, who has no form, and thus makes such small distinction between them that he scarcely ever remembers their names, you’re bound to feel more or less affection for one individual or another.
    My Brodie Boys, for instance – Allen-Jones, Sutcliff, Tayler and McNair – in spite of their propensity to wreak mayhem at every turn, hold a special place in my heart. I’ve always had rather a soft spot for the jokers and the subversives. But every decade or so, there’s one – a smart alec; a troublemaker – a boy whose face keeps popping up in all the wrong circumstances and who, years later, can still pop up in a Master’s dreams when one’s dream-self, clad only in a mortar board and a pair of yellow swimming trunks, attempts to teach a subject about which he knows nothing at all to a disruptive class in which that one boy, grinning like an ape, plays the role of ringleader.
    The truth is that no Master, however venerable, is ever entirely without insecurities, and there are boys – not so many of them in my case, no more than six in a whole career – who are capable of sniffing out those insecurities, of using them, of twisting them, of single-handedly making a good class into a bad class, a bad class into the stuff of dread.
    Johnny Harrington was one of them. That pale-faced, bland, insufferable boy, with his impeccable uniform and his air of barely concealed contempt. How I hated him, then and now – and as he came towards me, with a smile that might almost have been sincere, I felt the past rush in on me like a cloud of mustard gas.
    ‘Why, it’s Mr Straitley!’ he said. ‘Good Lord, you haven’t changed a bit. How long has it been? Twenty-four years? Don’t say you don’t remember me?’
    I drew the flap of my gown across the tea-stained crotch of my trousers. Not quite trusting myself to speak, I gave the man a curt nod.
    The smile broadened still further. ‘Of course. We’ll catch up later,’ he said. ‘Maybe after the meeting.’
    Of all the boys I’ve watched grow up, moving from larva to chrysalis, and then to dubious butterfly, in time taking wing as accountants, bankers, journalists, researchers, soldiers – God help them, sometimes even teachers , which, according to Eric Scoones, rank even higher on the perversion scale than Clive Punnet, who ate his wife – none have surprised me as utterly as little Johnny Harrington.
    The arrogant, sullen little boy has been reborn as a smiling, smooth-voiced politician, whose lack of essential warmth is now all too ably camouflaged beneath a veneer of surface shine. But people rarely change at heart, except in the growing sophistication of their various disguises, and it doesn’t take much for me now to see beneath the surface.
    Still, I have to admit that Harrington had made an impressive entrance. His opening speech to the Common Room was a kind of masterpiece; rousing; funny; articulate and shot through with that self-deprecating charm that only the most dangerous of politicians can manage. He spoke of his affection for St Oswald’s; of his sadness to see the dear old place so run-down and neglected; of his hope that together we would raise the phoenix from the ashes.
    ‘We have to think of St Oswald’s,’ he said. ‘But not through a veil of nostalgia. There’s a joke we used to tell, back when I was still a boy. How many St Oswald’s Masters does it take to change a lightbulb? ’
    He gave the Common Room a smile as bright as a toothpaste commercial.
    ‘The answer, of course, was: CHANGE?? ’
    The audience laughed obediently. The New Head laughed with them. I noticed that, as he delivered the punchline, Harrington altered his posture a little, adopted a voice to match the stance, and for a moment, I was convinced that the little rat was mimicking me —
    But Harrington had already moved on. Humour had suddenly given way to a politician’s