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finally to have got through. I had an honest, ordered, respectable and unexciting life to look forward to. I had sown my wild oats and it was time to grow sage.
    Or so I imagined.

    I was still a smoker. In fact, to suit my new role of schoolmaster I had moved from hand-rolled cigarettes to a pipe. My father had smoked pipes throughout my childhood. Sherlock Holmes, veneration of whom had been the direct cause of my expulsion from Uppingham, † was the most celebrated pipe smoker of them all. A pipe was to me a symbol of work, thought, reason, self-control, concentration (‘It is quite a three pipe problem, Watson’), maturity, insight, intellectual strength, manliness and moral integrity. My father and Holmes had all those qualities, and I wanted to reassure myself and those around me that I did too. Another reason for choosing a pipe, I suppose, was that at Cundall Manor, the Yorkshire prep school at which I had been offered a post as an assistant master, I was closer in age to the boys than to the other members of staff and I felt therefore that I required a look that would mark me out as an adult; a briar pipe and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows seemed to answer the case perfectly. The fact that a lanky late-adolescent smoking a pipe looks the worst kind ofpompous and pretentious twazzock did not cross my mind, and those around me were too kind to point it out. The boys called me the Towering Inferno, but, perhaps because the headmaster was also a pipe smoker, the habit itself went unchallenged.
    I still had no need to shave, and the flop of straight hair that to this day I can do nothing about continued to contradict my desire to project maturity. Looking more pantywaist than professorial and more milquetoast than macho, I puffed benignly about the school as happy as I had ever been in all my young life.
    Having said which, the first week had been hell. It had never occurred to me that teaching could be so tiring. My duties, as a valet would say, were extensive: not just teaching and keeping order in the form-room but preparing lessons, correcting and marking written work, giving extra tuition, covering for other masters and being on call for everything and everyone from the morning bell before breakfast to lights-out at night. Since I lived in the school and had no ties of marriage outside it, the headmaster and other senior staff were able to make as much use of me as they wished. I had ostensibly been hired as the replacement for a sweet, gentle old fellow called Noel Kemp-Welch, who had slipped on the ice and fractured his pelvic girdle at the beginning of term. The kernel of my work therefore was to take his Latin, Greek and French lessons, but I very soon found myself standing in for the headmaster and other members of staff giving classes in history, maths, geography and science. On my third day I was told to go and teach biology to the Upper Fifth.
    ‘What are they covering at the moment?’ I asked. My knowledge of the subject was sketchy.
    ‘Human reproduction.’
    I learnt a great deal that morning both about teaching and, as it happens, about human reproduction too.
    ‘So,’ I had said to the class. ‘Tell me what you know …’
    I made it sound as if I was testing them, and nodded importantly as they replied; in fact, of course, I was temporizing wildly. I listened fascinated, repelled and disbelieving as they outlined the details of pipes and glands and flaps and protuberances of which I had heard but with whose forms, features and functions I was entirely unfamiliar. The
vas deferens
, the Fallopian tubes, the epididymis, the clitoris and the frenulum … it was engrossingly gross. I left the science room most impressed by the depth and range of the Upper Fifth’s knowledge.
    When there were no lessons the Cundall Manor timetable was devoted to manly pursuits. Without the slightest familiarity with the rules of either game I found myself running around rugby and soccer fields