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while he glanced through what they had written, then spend a few minutes at the end of the period passing comments.
    But the moment his eye fell on Harold’s essay he felt beside himself.
    ‘Harold!’ he barked. ‘Stand up!’
    ‘Yes, sir?’ – in the meek but defiant tone he and his brother seemed to have been coached in by their mother. (She was a leading light in the Weyharrow Society, as might have been expected.)
    ‘Would you tell me what in heaven’s name you meant by writing this from the point of view of Montcalm’s soldiers? And, what is more,
in French?’
    Someone at the back of the room giggled. Goaded beyond endurance, Victor roared, ‘You’re making mock of me, you little devil!’
    Alarm crossed Harold’s face. ‘Sir!’ he protested. ‘That’s what you told us to do! Yesterday! I remember clearly!’
    Brandishing the blackboard eraser, Victor stamped down to confront Harold, shaking with fury, wanting to beat him about the head until he moaned and blubbered.
    ‘I did nothing of the kind!’ he shouted. ‘Ask the rest of the class!’
    Uncertainty supplanting his alarm, Harold said, ‘But, sir, I’m absolutely sure you told us yesterday …’
    ‘Did I?’ Victor rounded on the other pupils. ‘Well?’
    Two or three voices confirmed that he had not.
    ‘I hadn’t even thought of your assignment before this morning!’ Victor bellowed, bethinking himself too late of therisk that such an admission might further undermine his precarious authority. ‘For telling lies, and most of all for playing the smartass bastard, you’re going to see the Head! Come with me! The rest of you, carry on reading!’
    Dropping the eraser, snatching up Harold’s essay, he marched the boy out of the room.
    The meeting with the Head, of course, was a disaster. Brushing aside the question of lying to a teacher, he pronounced himself favourably impressed by what he termed Harold’s initiative and enterprise … but not by Victor, whose ears he made burn privately during morning break.
    At which juncture Harold’s younger brother Paul was standing alone, very puzzled and increasingly angry, in one of the music-rooms, deserted at this time of morning. He was absolutely certain that he’d made a date last night with Eunice Hoddie, from his class, whom he’d long lusted after. They were to meet here and snatch an hour of bliss.
    Well, fifteen minutes, anyway.
    Shortly before the bell rang to mark the end of break, he lost his temper and marched back into the corridor. Spotting Eunice chatting with a group of friends, he rushed over to corner her.
    ‘What do you mean by standing me up?’ he shouted.
    She was his age but, like most girls in comparison with boys, far more sophisticated. She tilted back her head, crowned with a punk-dyed crest of spiky hair, and seized the chance of sweet revenge for all the times in the past when Paul and his brother had disdained the company of their ‘inferior’ fellow-pupils.
    ‘Stand you up?’ she said, with a wink at her companions. ‘If you mean what I
think
you mean, I’m not sure I’d want to try. After all, you don’t look like you could!’
    The bell sounded, and she and the other girls swept awayamid a gale of laughter. Paul was left white-faced and shaking.
    Eunice had promised to meet him in the music-room! She had! She HAD!
    But … when?
    By lunch time, naturally, the joke was all around the school. The Ellerford boys being regarded as ‘snooty’, it became embroidered as it passed from mouth to mouth. During the afternoon it underwent still further transformations and elaborations.
    Meantime, back in Weyharrow, sundry other events had come to light which those involved would have paid an arm or a leg to conceal. The village being, however, like all such small communities, a factory for gossip, they were public currency within hours, although nobody would ever have admitted passing on their private knowledge … save maybe to close friends, who had pledged