The Fry Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

Norfolk I concentrated on academic work, achieved A grades and won a scholarship to read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
    Now that I had the good news of my acceptance, Ifaced the problem of what to do with the months leading up to the first term. Unlike today’s intrepid, elephant-hair-braceleted student adventurers and gap-year eco-warriors who hike the Inca trail, work with lepers in Bangladesh and dive and ski and surf and hang-glide and Facebook their way around the world having sex and wearing baggy shorts, I chose the already hideously old-fashioned challenge of teaching in a private school. I always believed that I was born to teach, and the world of the English prep school was one whose codes and manners I thoroughly understood. All the more reason for a stylish person to avoid such a place and seek new worlds and fresh challenges, one might suppose, but the systole and diastole of my disowning and belonging, rejecting and needing, escaping and returning was well established. I resist and scorn the England that bore me with the same degree of intensity with which I embrace and revere it. Perhaps too I felt that I owed it to myself to put right the failures of my own schooling by helping with the schooling of others. There was also the example of two of my literary heroes, Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden, who had each trodden this path. Waugh had even got material for his first novel out of the experience. Perhaps I would too.
    I had added my name to the roll of would-be schoolmasters, a roll that resided somewhere in a copperplate hand amongst the roll-top desks, deckled ledgers and Eastlight boxfiles in the cosy, womblike offices of the scholastic agency Gabbitas-Thring, in Sackville Street, Piccadilly. Just two days after registering, a thin, piping voice called me up in Norfolk.
    ‘We have a vacancy at a very nice prepper in North Yorkshire. Cundall Manor. Latin, Greek, French and alittle light rugger and soccer refereeing. As well as the usual duties, of course. Does that appeal?’
    ‘Gosh. That’s great. Do I have to go up for an interview?’
    ‘Well now, the happy fact is that Mr Valentine, the father of Cundall’s headmaster Jeremy Valentine, lives not far from you in Norfolk. He will see you.’
    Mr Valentine was kind and cardiganned and very interested in my views on cricket. He poured me a generous schooner of amontillado and conceded that, while this young Botham chap could certainly swing the ball, his line and length were surely too erratic to trouble any technically correct batsman. Of Latin and Greek there was no discussion. Nor, thankfully, of rugger or soccer. I was commended on my choice of college.
    ‘Queens’ used to have a pretty decent Cuppers side in my day. Oliver Popplewell kept wicket. First class.’
    I forbore to mention that this same Oliver Popplewell, a friend of the family and now a distinguished QC, had just a few months earlier stood up in his wig and gown and spoken on my behalf at a criminal hearing in Swindon. † It didn’t seem like the right moment.
    Valentine Senior stood up and shook my hand.
    ‘I expect they’ll want you as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘You can catch the fast train to York at Peterborough.’
    ‘So I’ve … you’re …’
    ‘Heavens yes. Just the sort of chap Jeremy will be delighted to have on the staff.’
    I caught the train and arrived at Cundall a teacher and ‘just the sort of chap’.
    Was I now so very different a figure from the thieving, deceitful little shit who had been such a torment to hisfamily for the past ten years? Was all the fury, dishonesty and desire gone? All passion spent, all greed sated? I certainly didn’t believe that I was likely to steal again. I had grown up enough to know how to focus and work and take responsibility for myself. All the adult voices that had shouted in my ear (Think, Stephen. Use your common sense. Work. Concentrate. Consider other people. Think. Think, think,
think!
) seemed