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illustrious London gin company. A bachelor and a bon viveur, he was no stranger to what he called the “sample room.” As a result, our sideboard was invariably groaning with stolen gin of various genres and vintages. On Friday nights he would ride over to our house on his motor scooter with a bottle of gin strapped insouciantly to the passenger seat.
    Gin and bleach aside, it was a shock to me that Betty could not quite grasp the overwhelmingly complimentary thrust of my essay.
    Betty Doonan examined her reflection in her compact mirror. She was checking on the status of the complex, much-admiredhairdo into which she funneled so much creativity. With a sigh of resignation, she took the bottle of peroxide out from under the sink.
    “I can’t imagine what Mrs. McCann must think of me,” she said as she began to touch up her roots.
    *  *  *
    Mrs. McCann was not really concerned with the likes of Betty Doonan. Nor were any of our teachers. More’s the pity. They could have learned a thing or two from Betty Doonan. Betty was fun. Betty looked great. Betty smelled great. Betty made the world a more glamorous and amusing place. Betty was life-enhancing, and Betty judged everything and everybody on the basis of whether or not they too were life-enhancing.
    Our teachers would never have qualified. They were not life-enhancing. They were life-corroding and life-disemboweling. While my home life was all gin and bleach and fun, school was the exact opposite.
    To describe our teachers as “dour” would be inaccurate. They were completely and utterly Stalinist. Every school day was more of a gulag fest than the last.
    There was nothing pedestrian about the way these gals enhanced our lives. They were extremely creative. Whether tying us to chairs with our own skipping ropes or subduing us with terrifying gusts of flatulence and halitosis, our tormentors were full of surprises. And, lucky me, I arrived just as an entire generation of these angry women were ambling into the menopause.
    Our day started with morning assembly, which was staged and choreographed with totalitarian flair. Punctually andwordlessly, we filed into the gymnasium in our green and gray uniforms accompanied by Miss Stoddard on the piano.
    What cheery, uplifting selections did she favor to start the day? “All Things Bright and Beautiful”? “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of My Garden”? Much too prissy. With amazing libidinal passion and skill, Miss Stoddard pounded her way through “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Edvard Grieg’s ominous, throbbing anthem conjured the hellish kingdom of the Norwegian trolls and their dark and horrible leader, the Mountain King. With her relentless pounding, Miss Stoddard gave our morning gatherings a distinct feeling of impending folkloric genocide. She had brought us together only to eradicate us. We would never have thought of staging any kind of uprising. We were just a bunch of worthless little trolls, and we knew it.
    Once assembled, we scabby-kneed trolls were called upon to sing gruesome, unlife-enhancing Anglican hymns about choosing “the steep and rugged pathway” and not wanting to linger “by still waters.” There was no mention of gin or bleach. The message was simple: the more grim life is, the more character-building will be its effect, especially upon wretched little trolls.
    After a couple more hymns, we would repair to our various classrooms. These were designated as either A or B. It was a simple enough system: at the beginning of each year, the smart trolls were sent to A classes and stupid trolls went to B classes. Smart trolls were being groomed to attend the local grammar school, the gateway to a life of middle-class contentment. B troll boys like me were headed for the secondarymodern school and thence to a grim, fiery apprenticeship in sheet-metal welding, which was very troll-like, if you think about it.
    Girl trolls fared better. They could look forward to, among other options, a