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over and over in later life, as though it were my fault. ‘He really doesn’t like you, does he?’ ‘No, Mum, he doesn’t.’ ‘What did you do to him?’
    My father was continuing to visit for at least four weeks a year, unloading whole frozen New Zealand lambs and small plastic pots of papaya, lychees and pineapple which he had acquired as some sort of kickback for his huge shipboard purchases. While in the UK, he traded frequently with a chain-smoking woman called Grace who lived in the Dorchester, dealing in fruit and vegetables from Covent Garden. She wore black sequinned numbers cut low across the powdered bosom, and croaked out suspiciously hearty laughter at all Dad’s jokes. He also brought crackerballs, little exploding fireworks from Hong Kong which made me briefly popular at school. Occasionally one of my family would wind up the clockwork ballerina who danced inside a bottle of gold glitter-filled Bols gin, placed on the sideboard to remind us of the donor’s existence. But Dad was actually on one of his rare visits home, and quite as surprised as my mother, when the headmaster called them in to the school. Naturally, they wereapprehensive. Instead Mr Phillips asked them whether they realised that they had an unusually clever son. One day, he said, I might gain a scholarship to a public school. Since they themselves, one out of indifference, the other out of nervousness, had never dared to detect any particular aptitude in me, they were taken aback. They had rather tended to credit my grandmother’s view that I was soft in the head. Meanwhile, my sister was sent off to Bexhill Grammar, where the syllabus included compulsory home economics, i.e. cooking. Margaret was dispatched there in spite of my mother’s misgivings that the local school might have an unfortunate effect on her accent. In their view, Margaret could only reasonably aspire to be a secretary, or, at a pinch, a teacher. It was part of the ethos of Bexhill that you might get away with having one clever child, but to claim to have two would have been classed as showing off. Margaret would go on to collect a postgraduate science degree from London University and make her life as a patent lawyer. But for now, the far more important priority, to a certain amount of resentment from the daughter, was to smooth the passage of the son.
    I cannot say I felt any crushing pressure of expectation. I was that lucky kind of boy who enjoys learning. I particularly enjoyed being taught by John G____, a charismatic musician who had recently come out of the army in Egypt in his early twenties. He had spent his National Service playing in a military band. He had an unusual approach to his job, often beginning French lessons by reading out that day’s editorial from the Daily Telegraph on the grounds that it was a model of how we might one day wish to write English. My best friend was a boy of my own age, Keith Lamdin, who was to provide the first of my many friendships with the kind of cheerful, capable people who find life easy – among my favourite companions at alltimes. Mr G____ was assumed by the whole class to be in love with Keith. We took it for granted. The signs were unmistakeable. He returned Keith’s homework with tousled, blushing violence, often throwing the deep-hued book through the air in his direction while telling him he was lazy and a disgrace, but in such a way that the whole class knew it was an act.
    Many of the teachers at all my schools had chosen their profession for a reason. They wanted to pass the whole day in the company of young boys. While most of the prep-school masters, untrained and washed up from the war, wished us no harm, there was nevertheless in the very intensity of psychological game-playing between boys and masters the possibility that their sexual gaskets would one day blow. One popular teacher at Harewood did indeed find the pressure intolerable, stepping dramatically