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than I do.'
    Mr Dorran looked at his tired shoes, as if he might find there an instant companion for his piteous feeling.
    'Good afternoon, Father. I have a group of musical illiterates awaiting instruction in the finer points of Johann Sebastian Bach.' And with that he was off down the corridor with his rick of broken strings.
    My contact lenses slipped during the school service. The smoke from the burning incense stung my eyes and the lenses were lost for a second in the sudden dampness, making me see the congregation for a moment like rows of creatures under water. The children stood in their lines of blazers and uttered the prayers as if they were chanting the seven times table, which they were, without the satisfactions of either pattern or precision. I had to ask Mrs McCourt to be my assistant at the Kissing of the Cross when it became clear that every other pupil was chewing gum. She stood with a look of great piety before the cross, holding a paper towel, stopping the offenders as they knelt down and relieving them sorrowfully of their once sugary fragments. Each halted pupil behaved as if it were an added ritual, giving up the contents of their innermost selves. 'Behold the wood of the cross,' I said, 'on which Christ died.'
    Children tend to like the Crucifixion, not the veneration of the cross so much as the driving in of the nails and so on. It appeals rather directly to their obsession with cruel and horrible images. Good Friday was a version of
Nightmare on Elm Street
to most of them. They liked the spectacle of Christ being scourged with metal-tipped whips; they admired the nails being hammered into His hands and the sponge of vinegar going up and the spear being driven into His side as the dark clouds rolled above and the constant mother wept at the base of the cross. You could see it in the children's eyes. They found it amazing, the drama of brutality, the soreness, the cracked limbs, and they were never so silent as when Christ's agony was given to them in vivid pictures.
    After the service, when the pupils and teachers had poured out of the hall in a wave of sudden laughter, eye rolling and phone start-up jingles, I went to the second floor to talk to a group of fourth-year students doing an after-school project on world religions. I stopped in one of the empty corridors, the tiles on the floor shining up, appearing almost to speak of historical scuffing and departed concerns. The more robust teachers called it the Social Sciences corridor: it began at the stairwell with Classical Studies, a room presided over by Mr Muir, a young Catullus fan with a marked disaffection for all events that had shown the bad taste to occur after the year 300 AD. The next room along was Modern Studies, a non-subject much preferred by shirkers, encouraged by a nice woman called Susan who admired China. There was a run of English classes piled with tatty copies of
Lord of the Flies,
a number of geography rooms decked with charts about soil erosion, and singing out, close to the end of the long corridor, was Mr Platter's Art class, a room festooned with terrifying teenage approximations of the work of Joan Miró.
    That day, Good Friday, I stopped in the corridor to look at the walls. They presented such a contrast with the oils of former abbots at my old school, those prints and architectural drawings framed and hung so handsomely next to the big hall. In contrast, the walls of this Catholic comprehensive were replete with old photographs of the working poor, sepia-toned, white-lighted, each figure a smoky spectre from the plates of Adamson, Annan or David Octavius Hill. From the Classical Studies rooms to History, 'Unloading jute, Dundee Docks' and 'The forge at Sumerlee Ironworks, Coatbridge'. Dotted between them were photographs of cobblers (tie-wearing, waistcoat-snug, side partings, young) sitting in rows at the Loch Street Co-op in Aberdeen and 'Girls in the dyeing room at Templeton's Carpet Works, 1910'. From English to