 |
| Benjamin Ross, former pupil at St.Pauls School, Colet Court, pictured at nine years of age |
This happens every week, to every class. Why it's so important that each pair of trunks be so rigorously identified with its owner is something we are never told.
And it isn't just the eccentric action of one strange man but an institutional practice. The school has specifically insisted that each boy's name be sewn into the front of his trunks.
I recall my mother proudly doing as instructed while we considered the strangeness of this protocol - one of those mysterious rites of public school culture that one didn't question if one wanted the privilege of sending one's son to a place of grand tradition. Could the reason, which seemed so obscure then, really be so blindingly, pathetically obvious now?
Our teacher, one year, is a charismatic man. He is also a sadist of whom we are in perpetual terror. I return to his classroom from a music lesson one day to discover him in a frenzy of rage, provoked by some unspecified act of insolence from a boy in our class - our hero, the best at sports and the best-looking. Our teacher drags him bodily across the desk, ripping the buttons from his shirt, beating him - with a fierce backhand - so badly across the face that he draws blood.
Then he places our sobbing classmate across his lap and, in a bizarre display of sympathy, begins to stroke his head and back while offering a detached third-person narrative - 'This is where the boy weeps, this is where the master feels regret' - which, looking back on it, I can only describe as pornographic, post-coital even. (more...)
No comments:
Post a Comment