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starting cord.
    'Anyway, Gloddie's don't if that's what you're worried about,' continued Peregrine, oblivious

of his father's suffering. 'And when Matron thought I'd been shafted, I told her '
    Mr Clyde-Browne wrenched the lawnmower into life again and drowned the rest of the

explanation. It was only later in the garage, and after he'd warned his son that if he raised his

voice above a whisper, he'd live to regret it, that Peregrine finally established his innocence.

He did so in language that appalled his father.
    'Where the hell did you learn the term "brown-hatter"?' he demanded.
    'I don't know. Everyone uses it about Slymne's.'
    'I don't use it,' said Mr Clyde-Browne. 'And what's slime got to do with it. No, don't tell

me, I can guess.'
    'Slymne's a shit,' said Peregrine. Mr Clyde-Browne turned the statement over in his mind and

found it grammatically puzzling and distinctly crude.
    'I should have thought it was bound to be,' he said finally, 'though why you have to reverse

the order of things and use the indefinite article into the bargain, beats me.'
    Peregrine looked bewildered. 'Well, all the other chaps think Slimey's wet and he's sucking up

to the Head. He wears a bow tie.'
    'Who does?'
    'Mr Slymne.'
    'Mr Slymne? Who the hell is Mr Slymne?'
    'He's the geography master and there's always been a feud between his house and Gloddie's ever

since anyone can remember.'
    'I see,' said Mr Clyde-Browne vaguely. 'Anyway, I don't want you to use foul language in front

of your mother. I'm not paying good money to send you to a school like Groxbourne for the

privilege of having you come home swearing like a trooper.'
    But at least Mr Clyde-Browne was satisfied that Mr Glodstone's extraordinary enthusiasm for

his son was not obviously based on sex, though what cause it had he couldn't imagine. Peregrine

appeared to be as obtuse as ever and as unlikely to fulfil the Clyde-Brownes' hopes. But he

seemed to be happy and rudely healthy. Even his mother was impressed by his eagerness to go back

to school at the end of the holidays, and began to revise her earlier opinion of Groxbourne.
    'Things must have changed with the new headmaster,' she said, and by the same process which

saw no bad in her acquaintances because she knew them, she now conferred some distinction on

Groxbourne because Peregrine went there. Even Mr Clyde-Browne was relatively satisfied. As he had

predicted, Peregrine stayed on in the summer holidays and allowed his parents to have an

unencumbered holiday by going on Major Fetherington's Fieldcraft and Survival Course in Wales.

And at the end of each term, Peregrine's report suggested that he was doing very well. Only in

Geography was he found to be wanting, and Peregrine blamed that on Mr Slymne. 'He's got it in for

everyone in Gloddie's,' he told his father, 'you can ask anyone.'
    'I don't need to. If you will insist on calling the wretched man Slimey, you deserve what you

get. Anyway, I can't see how you can be doing so well in class and fail O-levels at the same

time.'
    'Gloddie says O-levels don't matter. It's what you do afterwards.'
    'Then Mr Glodstone's notion of reality must be sadly wanting,' said Mr Clyde-Browne. 'Without

qualifications you won't do anything afterwards.'
    'Oh, I don't know,' said Peregrine, 'I'm in the First Eleven and the First Fifteen and Gloddie

says if you're good at sports '
    'To hell with what Mr Glodstone says,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, and dropped the subject.
    His feelings for Glodstone were but a faint echo of those held by Mr Slymne. He loathed

Glodstone. Ever since he had first come to Groxbourne some fifteen years before, Slymne had

loathed him. It was a natural loathing. Mr Slymne had, in his youth, been a sensitive man and to

be christened 'Slimey' in his first week at the school by a one-eyed buffoon with a monocle who

professed openly that a beaten boy was a better boy had, to put it mildly, rankled. Mr Slymne's

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