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silence each day. Some small boy was put on lookout in the corridor while inside the classroom, on the dusty wooden floor, one of the new boys was laid out, his trousers pulled down and his forked nakedness exposed to the screams and derisive laughter of forty or fifty older pupils. You could choose to fight back or not. The purpose for each newcomer was not simply to humiliate you, not simply to introduce you to the idea of visceral male force, but also to classify you into one of two teams, in which you remained for the rest of your days at the school. A foreskin or the absence of it marked you out as a Cavalier or as a Roundhead. At that time I did not even know there had been a civil war in England, let alone what its political intricacies might have been, so the terms meant nothing to me. Nor had I thought to begin the unhappy business of dividing my peers into friends and enemies. That came later. A couple of weeks after my own initiation rite – my trousers and underpants had been round my knees, my thighs scratched from the nails in the floor – an older boy called Hugh Bishop gravely informed me that in life it was better to be a Cavalier. They were carefree and happy-go-lucky, whereas Roundheads were dour and humourless. But at Harewood, Hugh said, it was better to be a Roundhead. They were more powerful, and larger in numbers.
    Even this slight migration from chaotic Pendragon to regimented Harewood – from outside to inside, as it were – broughtout in me, no doubt inevitably, a repellent consciousness of class status. Meeting my friend Michael Richford on the Downs one evening on my way home from Harewood, I remarked that my father had recently bought a Vauxhall Cresta, a car whose chrome bumpers and giant tailfins were the justifiable envy of all. On his rare visits home Dad was taking us motoring on Sunday afternoons for teas with meringues, sandwiches and éclairs down what Mum called ‘leafy lanes’ to far-flung Sussex villages. That was the kind of life we lived. Whereas, I said, everyone knew that the Richfords did not have a car because they could not afford one.
    I went home like an animal that has swallowed another, sated by this rodomontade but expecting no consequences. At seven the Richfords rang. I was in my dressing gown when they appeared at the door in person at eight. Mr and Mrs Richford came into our living room and sat down – a full entry not lightly undertaken in Newlands Avenue. They wanted to make clear in person, they said, that their decision not to have a car was a choice. It was most definitely not, they said, because of any economic problem, but simply, they said, a question of how they preferred to live. The idea that they did not have enough money to buy a car was pure slander. In the circumstances, it was impossible, they said, that Michael and I could continue to be friends. I had, they insisted, unintentionally revealed my true feelings towards the whole Richford family. From now on, they said, no Hare or Richford was ever to speak to one another.
    Unpleasant incidents like these were, in a sense, red days in Bexhill’s calendar. They were the moments at which the gears of class crashed and the engine jerked to a halt. The unspoken finally became spoken. There were such feuds and long, unreasoning silences all over town. I say this not to excuse myloathsome behaviour. Nothing could do that. Among other things, I was a nasty little boy. But it was also odd to live in an atmosphere where nobody really could speak about anything very much. My uncle Alan, who as a young man and shining rugby player had been Aunt Peggy’s perfect Glasgow University groom, turned up around this same time in Newlands Avenue with two Paris prostitutes whom he had just smuggled across the Channel in the boot of his car. He had fallen from being a prosperous doctor to recently being struck off the medical register for supplying drugs to whores. Between Dover and Bexhill