A great many parents attend and we'd be doing ourselves no good in their eyes if we allow ourselves to lose it. I am therefore overriding your ban, Mr Slymne. You will find some less time-consuming means of imposing your will on the boys. I don't care how you do it, but please bear in mind that Groxbourne is a games-playing school first and foremost.'
'But surely, Headmaster, the purpose of education is to '
'Build character and moral fibre. You'll find our purpose set out in the Founder's Address.'
From that moment of defeat, Mr Slymne had suffered 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
