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was enormous and teeming with huge and very active boys and young men. There were countless buildings in which to get lost, countless traditions to absorb, countless terms to be learned.
    Most public schools are isolated like Ampleforth or, at the least, like Eton or Marlborough, self-contained villages in their own right, attached to towns which need not be visited by pupils from one year’s end to the next. Dulwich is almost unique in that, for all its extensive grounds, it is very much a part of south London life.
    There are many day-boys, like me, who commute from other parts of London and the Home Counties and so must negotiate the Tube and bus systems and the more or less mean streets on their way to and from school.
    There is a very high proportion of pupils on bursaries or scholarships, often from deprived or ethnic minority backgrounds. I hazard that, in the early seventies, there were few state schools outside the major cities withso broad a cross-section of cultural and racial backgrounds represented amongst the pupils.
    We were linked by excellence – or, in my case, proficiency. Our homogeneity was elective, not inherited or enforced. I learned from my Ghanaian and Indian friends and they, I suppose and hope, from me. There was no childish assertion of cultural autonomy as in so many minorities today.
    Dulwich may have been different in these ways from the majority of English public schools at the time, but it was no less exacting – it has always been in the top 2 per cent academically – and it tolerated fools no more gladly than others. ‘ Amo, amas, amat , that’s all you lot are good for,’ physics master ‘Sniff’ Hart told us when we were being more than usually obtuse. ‘To be at Dulwich College, you have to be in the most intelligent 2 per cent in this nation. Well, if you’re the cream of England, God help the milk.’
    A Brixton boy who had won a scholarship to Dulwich and who on his death left a large sum of money so that others might have the same opportunities, Hart never foresaw that the milk and the cream might be homogenised by edict.
    Dulwich also retained the eccentricity of many English public schools. After my first ever assembly, at which I regarded the gowned, moustachioed masters with the trepidation with which the limping faun no doubt regards carrion crows, I set off for my first class. It happened to be PE.
    PE was the province of Regimental Sergeant Major T. E. Day, familiarly known to all as ‘Ted’. Ted wore a pencil moustache which looked like two printed ticks upside down and a baggy, polo-necked blue tracksuit in which his puffed-out chest showed to impressive effect. He also carried on a lanyard an impressive bunch of keys with which he threatened to cosh us.
    Off-duty, however, he was transformed.
    He lived in Dorking. Every morning, he dressed in a dark suit, a spotless white shirt, a regimental tie and highly polished brogues. A bowler hat covered thin hair which gleamed like wet dolphin skin. He marched to the station, flourishing his umbrella like a swagger-stick, boarded a train to Victoria, hailed a taxi out to Dulwich and, once arrived, hung his Dorking personality on two hangers and donned the track suit.
    Every evening, he went through the same process in reverse. We conjectured, of course, as to his other correct uniforms – the striped Victorian bathing-suit for the bath, the mess tunic and black tie for bangers and mash in the kitchen, colour-coded French letters for Mrs Ted…
    On that first day, Ted took us for a run around playing-fields, along bright pavements and back around the muddy fields again. I had never been a runner and was one of the youngest in today’s field. Although I started amongst the leaders, I soon dropped back and was forced to study the asterisks of other boys’ arses as they drew further and further away. I finished in the last five, with only fat boys for company in humiliation.
    We were not only humiliated. We were also