The Head Brother was a fierce and imposing man. He patrolled the corridors, fixing miscreants in his baleful glare, keeping at bay the anarchy he knew to be seething beneath the surface.
It was a small, silvery packet with the word Durex printed on it. It was doubly unbelievable. It was impossible for such an object to exist among us, and utterly beyond credibility that someone had the gall to throw it at the Head Brother. Since no one answered, he turned on the boy who was indeed by far the most likely candidate, the class messer: “It was you, wasn’t it?”
And so it would turn out to be when eventually a sort of Battle Royale broke out in the school yard and the hierarchies of “toughest boy” in the class were up for grabs once more. Who was the arbiter of such things? That would be the unanimously accepted First Toughest Boy. His name was Dodo, nicknamed inexplicably after an extinct bird, who regularly looked across his puny classmates with disdain and rejigged the hierarchy once more.
There was a little kitchen area in our common room, where we made hot drinks. Milk was delivered to the fridge once a day, but we had usually run out by evening. So when we discovered that Madame Clemence’s breakfast tray preparations for the priest included filling a jug with milk the evening before, we helped ourselves. To make sure the milk level did not fall, we cunningly topped up the jug with water and carefully replaced the crochet-edged doily that sat atop it.
We owned up, trying very hard to look repentant. We were ordered to apologise in person to Madame Clemence. I was one of the group selected to carry out this task. At the end of our grovelling, I asked her: “How did you know?”