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things, or so it seemed to me, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. I should explain, I suppose, that I am the schoolmaster of Cartersfield. All right, I know, go and talk to the barmaid if you’d rather. Well, when I say the schoolmaster I don’t mean that at all, really, you see there’s a very good little Grammar School in Cartersfield, only it’s very small, and I am only one of seven masters and four mistresses. None the less, my opinion of my colleagues being what it is, I am, in my own eyes at any rate, the schoolmaster here, though the headmaster, who considers himself an almost unbearably fair man, would tell you I’m just a member of his staff. Anyhow, what I’m getting at is this—Harry was brighter than average, not brilliant, no, but decidedly brighter than average, and I, being a sort of damn-fool enthusiast, and pleased with his progress in mathematics, which is what I teach, encouraged him, with the doubtful assistance of his father, to try for a scholarship to Reading University. Now you may say, if you’re a snob, that Reading University is not the sort of university that you’d want your child to go to, and if you are that sort of snob then to you I say, go to hell. Reading is near by, I went there myself, and it is an excellent university. Furthermore Harry had about as much chance of getting to Oxford or Cambridge as I have of being the first man on the moon, someone who is, as it happens, a man I should very much like to be. And from this you will gather why I hold a low opinion of my colleagues—Cartersfield Grammar School has had exactly one pupil at a university in the last ten years. He was sent down from UniversityCollege, London, for getting a girl with child. (As though that was any reason to deprive him of further education: quite the contrary, in my opinion, but that’s the sort of thing we’re up against.)
    Where was I? Oh yes, Harry Mengel. Well, though the headmaster, turning somersaults to be fair to everyone, was against me, and the rest of the staff was against me, doing its damnedest to be unfair to everyone, I was for me, Harry was for me, and between us we taught him enough to get in, if the examiners hadn’t had some prejudice against the school, and possibly against me and Harry as well. I’m prejudiced against the school myself, but I still think Harry was good enough for a scholarship, and if Reading University has the nerve to ask me for money to help them build new buildings again I shall write and tell them exactly what they can do with their new buildings and offer them Cartersfield Grammar School into the bargain. Well, I was exceedingly angry about all this, and Harry was very disappointed, of course, the poor boy, and between us we had a good cry. I hate to see talent chucked away like that. Things are bad enough in this country without wasting perfectly good men like Harry Mengel. But that was that, and I think old Mengel was rather relieved in a way, and Harry went into the store like a good son, and his father got fatter and fatter, though Harry no longer measured him for other people’s bets, and I went on teaching the kids the difference betweenand parallel lines never meeting, and they still didn’t understand, the dolts.
    Now I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a town like Cartersfield, right out, as I’ve said, of the mainstream of life, but let me try and explain what living there meant to a boy like Harry. As I told you, he was bright, not brilliant, but quite intelligent enough to realize that life of a different and much more exciting variety might very well be going on somewhere else, such as London, or Reading University. After a while he began to brood, just as many young men do, I suppose, about the unfairness of having been born in a place which was dying just as he was beginning to live. Becausewhile he was swotting away for Reading night after night, the by-pass was being built, and by the time he’d been told he wasn’t good enough the