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further humiliations. He had tried to get a

job at other, more progressive, schools, only to learn that he was regarded as totally unsuitable

precisely because he had taught at Groxbourne. Forced to stay on, he had been despised by the

boys and was made an object of ridicule in the common-room by Mr Glodstone who always referred to

him as 'our precious little conscientious objector.' Mr Slymne fought back more subtly by raising

the level of geography teaching above that of any other subject and, at the same time, exercising

his sarcasm so exclusively on boys from Glodstone's house that they failed their O-levels while

other boys passed.
    But the main thrust of his revenge was confined to Glodstone himself and over the years had

developed into almost as demented an obsession as Glodstone's lust for adventure. Mr Slymne's was

more methodical. He observed his enemy's habits closely, made notes about his movements, watched

him through binoculars from his room in the Tower, and kept a dossier of boys to whom Glodstone

spoke most frequently. Originally, he had hoped to catch him out fondling a boy Slymne had bought

a camera with a telescopic lens to record the event incontrovertibly but Glodstone's secret sex

life remained obstinately concealed. He even failed to rise to the bait of several gay magazines

which Mr Slymne had ordered in his name. Glodstone had taken them straight to the Headmaster and

had even threatened to call the police in if he received any more. As a result, Mr Slymne and the

entire school had had to sit through an unusually long sermon on the evils of pornography, the

detrimental effects on sportsmen of masturbation, referred to in the sermon as 'beastliness', and

finally the cowardly practice of writing anonymous letters. The sermon ended on the most sinister

note of all. 'If any of this continues, I shall be forced, however unwillingly, to refer these

matters to the police and the long arm of the law!'
    For the first time in his agnostic life, Mr Slymne prayed to God that the sex-shop owner in

Soho to whom he had sent his order wouldn't solicit Mr Glodstone's custom again, and that the

Headmaster's threat wasn't as all-inclusive as it had sounded. It was a view evidently shared by

the boys, whose sex life over the next few days became so restricted that the school laundry was

forced to work overtime.
    But it was thanks to this episode that Mr Slymne first glimpsed Mr Glodstone's true weakness.

'The damned scoundrel who sent that stuff ought to have known I only read decent manly books.

Rider Haggard and Henty. Good old-fashioned adventure yarns with none of your filthy modern muck

like Forever Amber,' Glodstone had boasted in the common-room that evening, 'What I say is that

damned poofters ought to have their balls cut off, what!'
    'Some of them appear to share your opinion, Glodstone,' said the Chaplain, 'I was reading only

the other day of an extraordinary case where a man actually went through some such operation and

turned himself into a woman. One wonders...'
    But Slymne was no longer listening. He put his coffee-cup down and went out with a strange

feeling that he had found the secret of Glodstone's success and his popularity with the boys. The

wretched man was a boy himself, a boy and a bully. For a few extraordinary seconds things

reversed themselves in Mr Slymne's mind; the boys were all adults and the staff were boys, boys

grown larger and louder in their opinions and the authority they wielded but still small, horrid

boys themselves in their innermost being. It was as though they had been stunted in perpetual

adolescence, which explained why they were still at school and hadn't dared the risks and dangers

of the outside world. As he crossed the quad with this remarkable insight, as curious in its

transposition of his previous beliefs as one of the negatives held up to the light in his

darkroom, Mr Slymne felt a sudden