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British Trials
piled on the floor by his side.
    He had been the least regarded, the most exploited of the teachers at her father’s suburban prep school, Danesford, where he had been employed to teach English and history throughout the school, but was required to undertake almost any job at the headmaster’s whim. He was a neat, delicately boned little man, snub-nosed, with small bright eyes behind the pebble glasses and a fringe of ginger hair. Inevitably he was nicknamed the Frog by the boys. He could have been a good teacher, given the chance, but the small barbarians could smell out a natural victim in their juvenile jungle, and the Frog’s life was a patiently borne hell of noisy insurrection and calculated cruelty.
    If a friend or acquaintance asked Venetia about her childhood — and few did — she had an answer ready, always in the same words, always spoken with a tone of casual acceptance which somehow still managed to prohibit further curiosity.
    “My father kept a boys’ prep school. Not exactly the Dragon or Summerfields. One of those cheaper places which parents send their children to when they want them out of the way. I don’t know who disliked it most, the pupils, the staff or I. But I suppose being brought up with a hundred small boys wasn’t a bad preparation for a criminal lawyer. Actually, my father taught rather well. The pupils could have done worse.”
    She herself could hardly have done worse. The school, the pretentious red-brick residence of a nineteenth-century local worthy and former mayor, had originally been built some two miles outside the pleasant Berkshire town which had then been little more than a village. By the time Clarence Aldridge bought the school in 1963, using a legacy from his father, the village had grown into a small town, though still with an individual character and a sense of identity. Ten years later it had become a dormitory suburb, spreading over the green fields in a creeping cancer of red brick and concrete, executive estates, small shopping precincts, office buildings and blocks of flats. The fields between Danesford and the town had been bought by the local council for housing, but when the money ran out with only part of the estate developed, the ground remaining had been left vacant, a junk-strewn wilderness of scrub and broken trees, the playground and the rubbish tip of the surrounding estate. She would cycle through it on her way to the high school, a journey she came to dread but invariably took because the alternative route was twice as long and by way of the main road, and her father had forbidden her to use it. Once she had disobeyed him and had been seen by one of his friends as his car sped past. Her father’s anger had been dreadful, painful and long-lasting. The weekday journey across the scrubland, over the railway bridge which divided it from the town, and through the housing estate was an ordeal. Daily she ran the gauntlet of taunts and shouted obscenities, provoked by the sight of her school uniform. Daily she tried to judge the roads which were most clear, on the watch for the larger, more frightening boys, accelerating or slowing down to miss the waiting mob, despising herself and hating her tormentors.
    The high school was a refuge from more than the estate. She was happy there, or as happy as she was capable of being. But her life was so separate from her life at Danesford as her parents’ only child that all her schooldays she had the sensation of living in two worlds. One she would prepare for when she put on the dark-green uniform and knotted her school tie, and would physically take possession of when she dismounted and wheeled her bicycle through the school gates. The other would receive her back each late afternoon, a world composed of boys’ voices, feet ringing on boards, the slamming of desktops, the smell of cooking, drying clothes and young inadequately washed bodies and, overlaying all, the scent of anxiety, incipient failure