The Songs We Sang At Trollope's: No 3 in The Cypriot's Treasure Series

By Milton Johanides

Yuri is a big success at his public school, Trollope's Independent, and seems destined for greatness, but when he fails to get into Oxford University he has to adjust his ambitions. Doing work on the side for his gangster uncle seems like harmless fun to begin with but before long he finds himself deep in trouble. The dominant girls in his life compete only with the nagging of his over ambitious mother when it comes to being a permanent irritation, so when he gets the chance to break free and be lead singer in a campus rock band he grabs it with both hands. Set in the liberating seventies when anything seemed possible, The Songs We Sang At Trollopes takes a nostalgic look back to a time of guilty pleasures and inappropriate behaviour, when Greenham Common provided the hope for a better age and lying down in front of bulldozers seemed like a good way to prevent the destruction of the ecosystem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781471727153

Book preview

Prologue

Now I turn to my own role in the astounding tale of my grandfather, Artie Papayiannis. By the time I came into the world, two Great Wars were already behind us, the peace movement was going on and we had no intention of ever having to march to war again. Instead Peace, free love and the perfect pop song was our mantra, but since we were free to live our lives as we pleased, flitting from tree to tree like birds, we somehow lost sight of what it meant to behave well, shocking our grandparents and parents by exercising to extreme the very liberties they fought so hard to preserve.

The seventies and eighties were a time of burgeoning wealth for a lucky few. Money became the measure to be judged by and a politician called Thatcher presided over that social transformation with ruthless cunning. Being Greek, I was proud that the richest man in the world, Onassis, was also Greek, and that most famous glamour-puss, Jackie, the former wife of JFK, became his wife. I mention this because there’s a chance link between our two families I have only recently uncovered: Onassis was born in the Greek quarter of Smyrna on the Turkish mainland in 1906 and was at school there when my grandfather visited in 1922. This was just before the tragedy of the Great Fire which devastated that city and its entire population. They may never have met, but both Artie and Aristotle escaped the destruction, a feat which lent special meaning to every subsequent day of their respective lives. This, and their fondness for beautiful women, they had in common, but where Artie and Aristotle differed was in their financial outlook. Grandfather, in his last days, confessed he had never chosen monetary gain as a route to happiness, in a sneaky way no doubt hoping to cast aspersions on those who did. He was probably thinking scornfully of Uncle Vaz when he said this, our very own Onassis, for Vasili Antoniou was wealthier and more powerful and more capable of causing tragedy than any of us realized and not till the events of this book occurred were my grandfather’s longstanding warnings about that family heeded.

It seems strange to say it now but Vasili once had his eye on my mother, a captivating beauty in her own right, even surpassing Jackie O in looks, and for a while she was caught in his net, and though she ended up marrying my father Petraki, who was one of the good guys, for years she eyed the Antoniou wealth with regret as if ruing the day she turned her back on it. My father spent his life desperately trying to make it up to her.

This story, however, is not about money per se, or war, or how slim a chance it is to be born at all, but about Sin and how hard it is to avoid. How hard to turn away from villainy and immorality when it can be so profitable and find something more edifying and just as satisfying! But I guess that was the point granddad was trying to make, and since I ignored his warnings, Vasili had me on a leash like an obedient dog, knowing exactly which buttons to push, convincing me that staying on the straight and narrow was the real crime. Of course, what I didn’t see was that this was his way of getting back at my father, whom he never forgave for stealing the love of his life, and his love of money paled to insignificance compared to the need he had to destroy Petraki Aristopoulos.

So, I too, like mum, got caught in Vasili’s net, though I don’t know how it happened; perhaps I thought it was the only way to protect dad, even though by doing so I risked losing not only him but all the good things he stood for.

You could say the seventies were a watershed. We could have stayed on the peace-and-love train of the sixties, but chose to make unlimited riches and permanent war our destination. Then again, with people like Vasili around, peace and love were always going to be a long shot.

Euripides Aristopoulos

1.

She screamed, a long, shrill, haunting scream, like a cry from a labour ward; it travelled out into the night, bounced off the back of her house and into orbit around Kenilworth Crescent so that an alert neighbour might have thought I was murdering her.

I froze and waited for something to happen, someone to come running, who knows, even the whoop of a police siren, for after all she had screamed and it was the real thing, not just a hapless whelp or a whiny whinge, but a full-throated exhalation! That was just how Sylvia was.

The echo faded. Nothing happened.

Silence again.

A distant motor, the yelp of a dog, the whistle of a chill wintry breeze, nothing else.

It was April 12th 1978, my birthday, and the seventeenth anniversary of the first manned space flight. It was no coincidence they named me Yuri, not only short for Euripides but in honour of the Russian cosmonaut, and coincidentally while my mother pushed me out in the bedroom upstairs, my brother Niko played Del Shannon on his Bush record player in the living room downstairs; either way, between the space mission and the number one hit Runaway, one thing was certain: I was destined to go far.

But now I was freezing, freezing with the cold and frozen in fear, despite the heat of the moment, having seconds before succeeded in teasing Sylvia out of her pretty pink cap-sleeve top so that her pronounced and thinly-veiled bosom was now shivering before me inside a hammock of white lace, nipples hard and pronounced aimed at me like Soviet missiles. That would have been good without the screaming.

As my back scraped the side of her father´s rotting garden shed I said: Did you have to do that? Did you have to scream?

I pulled away and as she leaned down to put her stilettoes back on, our heads collided.

Ooooo, Sylvia said.

Oh, I replied.

Sometimes, it feels good to scream, she said, as if self-analyzing an ingrained trait, at the same time bending her knee and unintentionally hammering it into my groin.

Ooooooo! I said.

Oh, she replied.

Another dog barked in answer to the earlier dog’s yelp.

Yuri! she wailed again, tragic emotion bursting from her. I can´t! I can´t do it! This is my first time and this is NOT HOW I WANT TO DO IT! I DO love you, but...

The garden seemed like a good idea to begin with, in case her parents came home, but now, with teeth chattering and goose pimples primed by a chilly April wind, our efforts seemed doomed. This was not her first time. We both knew that, but Sylvia had a tendency to exaggerate. She pummelled me hard in the ribs, as if to punish me for her neuroses. Then someone, somewhere, as though in sardonic response, started playing Elvis’s Love Me Tender; it sailed through the air, barely audible, a ghostly trail of sweet baritone vocals.

DO something! she cried, as if she was falling off a cliff and all I had to do was reach out a hand. I tried, but instead of her hands I grabbed her breasts and muttered Oh God!, not because I was particularly religious but because God had made Sylvia’s breasts so irresistible they demanded grasping. Elvis prevailed. Love me tender, love me do, never let me go, for my darling, I love you, and - I - always - will.

My hands stayed a while on her breasts, enjoying the sensation, but she didn’t respond. I asked her what the matter was, what it was stopping her from having a good time, but she just shook her head and produced a fountain of tears. She pushed my hands away and put her top back on.

I pulled my head back to stare at the heavens, trying to imagine the feelings of my Russian namesake that night seventeen years earlier, as he plummeted headlong through limitless space, coasting through black nothingness and as I was looking up the back of my head collided with an iron bar protruding through the fence. My head spun. Whoooaaa, I moaned.

She slapped me back to consciousness. Her sky-blue eyes caught the light from the neighbour’s window and flashed it back at me in hypnotic rays. Another blast of wind whipped itself up and lashed out at us. That was sore! I said, rubbing the back of my head. She examined it, satisfied there was nothing of concern. I think I’m going to need a bandage, I said.

Yuri, I need more time, she said. My injury suddenly didn’t matter. I don´t think I´m ready.

Yeah it´s okay. Can we go inside now? I need to get fixed up. In fact, I could use another drink.

I hope you don´t think I´ve messed you about or nothing. I don´t mean to be a tease. But I don´t want to, you know, rush things.

She was a tease alright! Of all the things I had heard about Sylvia, not rushing things was not one of them. Not being a tease was not another one.

Sure baby. Can we go inside now? I think it´s going to rain.

More water on the way, sure enough, from the skies and from her eyes, an aquatic combo soon pouring down her cheeks, tears and raindrops in a conspiratorial cascade, space glitter glistening in every drop. In my pain, in my disappointment, in that desperate, marvellous, hopeless clinch of teenage love in that wonderful spring of 1978, I stopped and wondered at our weaknesses. It’s only love, I said, involuntarily, for some reason choosing to sound like Elvis. I was a singer. I was in a band. In 1978, this made me special. Everyone wanted to be in a band or star in a movie. I scored one of those. We played sellout concerts at Trollope’s. Sylvia had been in the crowd with some girls from the girls’ school across the road and they were all sure I would make it one day, screaming from their seats.

We popped out of our hole and dashed to the house, where with all her stepfather’s cans of lager gone, we opened another of her mother’s bottles of wine while drying out and she tended my head till it stopped bleeding then put on a seven-inch vinyl by Andy Gibb, centering it on what I noticed was a quality Hitachi turntable, remarking casually on what a great singer Gibb was. I knew I would forever be grateful to Sylvia if only for that, for Andy Gibb, and as I thought about where in the hall of greats Andy Gibb stood, she confessed everything to me. At least, it was a confession of sorts, if stories you make up about yourself can be called confessions. She told me about scary nights lying awake in bed listening for her stepfather’s footsteps outside her bedroom door. He was a monster, she claimed. Her growing years had been a torment, her life an unbearable burden, and she had often thought about stabbing him or plucking out his eyes. She then brightened and began to explain that I was to be her saviour. That was to be my role in the matter, she cried, as if she had just thought of it. She instructed me to make love to her immediately and without reserve, to empty my soul into hers, to take her to the summit of ecstasy, to renew her faith in men specifically and humanity in general. I listened to her tirade with reawakened interest. Sure! I said.

Then we went upstairs and flew at it like novitiates released from their vows and afterwards we lay on our backs and smoked Player’s cigarettes, which I’d stolen from dad, and she, glaring at the ceiling, pronounced with melodrama: I´m going to kill him. You know that don´t you. One day, Yuri, I´m going to kill him.

An empty glass in hand, I nodded, wondering once more about the universe which for reasons beyond imagining had succeeded in bringing together a Greek pop star in the making and a beautiful, passionate, psychotically despairing nympho.

Monolithic; the walk home was monolithic, like a single giant concrete building reaching up into the sky and never ending. Or a rock rising from the sea, the rock of ages, grounded in faith, forever true. I mean by that I felt whole again and without limits, at one with the night, the rain, with time and with humanity, as if we were all chiselled from the same block of stone. The night had been a triumph. I was seventeen and enjoying a snapshot moment of youthful bliss that would never be repeated. Happy seventeenth! I made no attempt to avoid the downpour but became a huge running blob of water. What glory there was in the desolation of a 3am rain-drenched jog with doughty Sylvia and her sub-psycho tendencies still dancing in my head!

All - my - dreams - fulfill...

A police car, suspicious about my running at that time of night, pulled up beside me and I was frisked with polite indifference. I wanted to tell them I was a Trollope’s pupil, using the information like a Masonic handshake. They told me a house had been burgled in the next street and a man mugged half to death. Satisfied I was not the mugger, they demanded I get home before I became the next victim. Soon I was jogging down our crescent of semi-detached mock Tudor homes. Our house, two semis knocked into one, a six-bedroom, Corinthian-columned, hybrid monstrosity concocted by my grandfather, was on the second bend. I noticed the lights were on downstairs, which at this time of night was unusual. Either mum was still up, or we were being burgled. Perhaps the Kenilworth Crescent mugger had made it to our house. I had a fleeting premonition of mum and dad bleeding to death on the Wilton.

I took the driveway gingerly up to the front door over a square of tarmac which twisted around a small garden bedecked with roses and gladioli, lashed by rain, and burrowed through soaking pockets to find the key. Before I reached it, the door opened and she stood there in nightdress and curlers, still graceful at fifty, as tall as me at five-ten and slim, my mother, Olympia, once feted as the most beautiful woman in Cyprus! Just mention of her name set hearts a-flutter. I knew she had been beautiful when dad married her, and even now, in that dour April night of 1978, with her curlers in, I catch a glimpse of that beauty. But there is also desperation, taut anxiety which handicaps her looks, and I know it’s because of me. I want to apologize, to beg forgiveness for breaking her rules, for being drunk, for being out so late, for dating English girls and not getting to know good Greek girls, for the smell of dad’s Player’s on my breath and for all my sins, all the other bad habits I had which marred her happiness.

She grabs me by the collar and shoves me through into the VIP lounge, scene of my birthday feast earlier that evening now completely cleared, at which point the seriousness of the situation becomes apparent; we never enter the VIP lounge when there are no guests. Mum, for God´s sake, what is it? I said, trying to focus.

It´s your father… she stammered.

Dad… what? Dead? Dying…?

Her eyes welled up as she tried to break the news to me. I sensed a disconcerting pattern to this otherwise perfect night, traumatized by the tears of women I love. Bracing myself, my drunkenness in its considerate way keeping me afloat, I said: Mum, tell me, what´s happened?

Your father is upstairs, unconscious. The word unconscious, she said in Greek, anesthetos, but I understood. Still alive at least.

What is it? Is he ill?

No. Not ill. If he was ill, I get a doctor. Drunk!

She spat out the last bit like something nasty in her mouth; her face gone from despair to rage. Like this she frightened me. Even in nightdress and curlers she held out the prospect of hell-fires for those who disobeyed divine code. Is - is - that all?

No, is not all, she said. Pacing up and down on the gold, deep-pile, like a company boss and having worked hard all her life to achieve this good life in England, she now worried that my father was about to lose it all, not by being drunk, this I knew was a side issue, but the other thing, another habit which unchecked could bring down the house. He was with VASILI again tonight, and his crowd of good-for-nothings!

She crossed herself several times.

Taking off my wet jacket I began to walk over to the glass cabinet against the far wall where she kept her prized collection of ceramic ornaments and reached for the vodka on the bottom shelf standing among a number of bottles reserved for special occasions like birthdays. There was an amulet on top of the cabinet, which had been in our family for years, propped up there for as long as I could remember, a miniature icon of the Virgin Mary, resting against the wall, staring at us with calm, placid will. As I pulled out the vodka Mary unceremoniously wobbled on her perch and fell flat. Mum ran over and snatched the bottle from me and, crossing herself again, straightened up the Virgin. I wondered about mum’s weaknesses, once big and destructive, now washed in the waters of holiness.

Forget that, she hissed, snatching the bottle from me, you had enough! The problem is the usual problem, Yuri, but this time it´s ten times worse.

She took my hand and led me to the expensive and rarely used couch, its smooth G-plan lines and bulging Dralon-velvet cushions always a comfort to her. We sat next to each other, my hand in hers. He is getting in too deep with those gangsters…

Mum, they´re not gangsters, they like the occasional poker game, that’s all. They’re businessmen, that’s all.

The people she described were part of our social circle. We met them at weddings and funerals, christenings and Christmas. And birthdays. My grandfather, Artie, used to hang around with Alexi Antoniou, Vasili´s father, from when they were kids. He had worked for him in his restaurants. But they once fell out over a stolen locket worth a fortune, amongst other things, and now pappou kept his distance. Dad, too, once worked for the Antonious.

Mum, has something actually happened tonight, or are you overreacting as normal?

I am not overreacting, Yuri. After you left tonight, your father played and he lost badly.

How much? How much did he lose, mum?

She lowered her eyes in shame. I was expecting a few hundred, no more. I carried out a checklist of purchases I was planning, including a new state of the art Hitachi hi-fi system like Sylvia’s, and, if the funds would stretch, a little runabout on four wheels for my first term at uni.

Four. Thousand. Pounds! she exclaimed tragically, crossing herself again and eyes wide with fear.

That sucked the wind out of my sails a little bit. It was more than I was expecting. But doing quick calculations, I worked out the house was worth at least ten times that, so we were not about to be put out on the street.

What I needed right then was Children of the Grave loud on the headphones, then sleep. Nothing relaxed me quicker than Ozzy Osbourne chanting in high vocals about the afterlife, like an Orthodox priest on speed.

Mum had no more to say. I believe she was reassured by my calm nonchalance. Mum, I´m going up now. I’m tired. We can talk more tomorrow.

I gave her a hug which brought a smile to her face and she nodded, out of words now, just staring into some vague future I was yet to become familiar with, of gloom and devastation.

2.

The last day of school, Friday June 16th 1978, was the best day of my life till then. Not because school had been so bad, but because I thought the years that followed had to be better.

I would leave with good and bad memories of the place, the best of which being the joy with which my acceptance into Trollope´s Independent was first greeted by the family. By that debatable good fortune, I escaped the chance of becoming a layabout at the local comprehensive, which I might have preferred. None of my brothers had preceded me at Trollope´s and went on to enjoy wonderful weekends playing football and making out with girls, while I sang hymns in chapel, conjugated Latin, and endured gruelling hours of rugby. Instead of Forever Blowing Bubbles we sang Floreamus Pueri our school song like Roman centurions.

Hearing that one of the leading educational establishments of the area had agreed to take me, mum decided to celebrate with a party and the VIP lounge was thrown open for business. It was 1972 and I was eleven, and back then our parties were marathons, starting at four in the afternoon and continuing through the night till four the next morning. Mum had to lay out the table six times, twice with our traditional favourite mains, once with a selection of desserts, and three times with tea, coffee and various Greek delectations. Afterwards she went round asking if anyone was still hungry. Then Niko brought his Bush record player down from his bedroom and Ianni produced a collection of old 45s from a chaotic little record shop in Wood Green which imported them from Greece, and chairs were pushed back out of the way for my uncles to begin the dancing, each one a Zorba in his own right, arms up high, knees bending and straightening, feet picking out the intricate patterns of their thoughts and dreams. At times like these, it was as if the old village had arrived on our doorstep. Even at eleven, it was enough to move me. Then the ladies got up and showed us what they could do, linking up in a circle and skipping round, eight steps anticlockwise then four steps clockwise, hands joined. By midnight, all remnants of food were cleared away and the chairs placed back round the table; the men, in shirtsleeves and braces, fat cigars screwed in between clenched teeth, took their places for the big event. From my makeshift bed on the floor, I watched them with intense fascination. My mother’s brothers, Uncle Christo, Uncle Herakli, and big Uncle Dimitri, all aging, hairy-pawed bears, watched as my father shuffled the cards. Only Uncle Tony, the quiet priest, slim and invisible, was absent from the table, sitting alone in a corner, thinking about a book he was reading or writing, or pondering minutiae of Church doctrine.

Come on Petraki mou, one good hand tonight at least. Make it four aces!

Don´t be greedy brother. If you get a set of threes, I’ll light a candle in church on your behalf!

Cut it out you two, Dimitri would butt in, leave poker to the grown-ups who really know how to play, eh Vasili?

Vasili would say nothing for a long time, not till he had won his first hand, then the others would quieten down and let him have his moment, loudly bragging, hollering. The Papayiannises wouldn´t know a good hand if it slapped them on the arse! Everyone laughed at his quips and no one had the guts to confront him when he cheated. More often than not Vasili would bring a couple of pals with him, grim unsmiling Greeks with dark reputations from one of his iffy clubs. They were with him that night. Our mums were shocked but we were secretly amused by their colourful language and outrageous jokes. They had a different type of look about them, not the smooth happy faces we were used to in our family, but hard and scarred, gruff men with rough reputations; on the rare occasion when something amused them, crude or sacrilegious, they would laugh like hyenas. Their presence produced a tension in the room that was palpable.

The women left the men to play and retreated to the kitchen. I was on the floor in the corner on a couple of cushions under a blanket as the game started, top to tail with my brother Mario, who was already twelve and airily twiddling his pungent socked feet in my face. I could see the men through the arches between the two rooms, ours and next door´s, which had been knocked into one to form one big area, hunched round the table in a cloud of smoke. Only my older brothers, Niko and Ianni, then aged sixteen and seventeen, the next generation awaiting their turn at the table, were allowed to sit nearby and watch. There were strict rules in our community about many things, and that was one of them; kids never played poker. I envied Niko, because I knew that in a year or so he would be old enough to sit at the table with the men. That meant everything. It was an honour to become part of that respected camaraderie.

Back then, dad still possessed the vigour of youth, and commanded our respect, in his late forties with broad shoulders and big hands that expertly flicked the glossy cards from player to player. I watched him closely, thick eyebrows black and severe, barely moving as he surveyed the individual prospects landing on the table. Mum complained about his gambling even then and, being a sensitive child, it worried me too. Dad was about the same age as Vasili and as the whiskey went down, the rivalries they had carried with them from the old country reared up. Whenever Vasili lost a round he bellowed and banged the table with boxer’s fists. Pappou, still able to play the odd hand, got confused sometimes and called him Alexi by mistake, the name of Vasili´s father, who was also called Tridactylos, which means Three-Fingers. The rumour was granddad had shot his finger and thumb off once in a bar room brawl, but the truth was it was his uncle who did it. He was happy not to contradict the rumours. He didn’t mind. The image used to keep me awake at nights of disintegrating flesh and bone. They say that was the root of the feud between our families that went back seventy years, and the thing that had turned mum, once confident and proud, into such a scared rabbit.

Once the stakes were raised and cash piled up like harvested fruit in the centre of the table, the laughter turned to recrimination. If Vasili lost and his money was raked away from him he would begin flinging insults at everyone. That particular night a fight broke out between Vasili and one of my uncles. I’d been dozing on the floor when chairs were flung aside and Vasili had Uncle Herakli by the throat. Herakli was the most inoffensive of my uncles (apart from Tony who never played poker anyway) so it was a surprise when I woke to see him being smacked around by Vasili till the poor man´s cheeks were red raw. They were all drunk by then. Big Uncle Dimitri tried to pull him off. The women started screaming and Uncle Dimitri´s wife, Artoulla, grabbed Vasili by both ears from behind till I thought she would yank them off. I noticed Vasili´s roguish pals stand up in alarm and put their hands inside their jackets as though drawing guns. It was like an episode of Bonanza.

In the end, Dimitri grabbed Vasili from behind and carried him out into the garden to cool off. I was relieved to see that Uncle Dimitri was stronger than Uncle Vaz. He was always there to save the day. If it wasn´t for him, who knows what might have happened. What the row was about I never knew, but grandfather, or pappou as we called him, thoughtfully smoothing long white whiskers between finger and thumb and staring glumly into the past, said it was typical of the Antonious.

I stayed awake for hours after that, anxious in case there was more trouble as the heap of notes grew on the table. One thing about those men, they always had money. They could produce rolls of cash from a variety of secret pockets whenever they needed to. They were businessmen. My uncles owned busy enterprises, grocer shops and restaurants, veritable cash cows back then before the big corporations took over, and sometimes I think they came to our parties ready to win or lose a week´s takings, sometimes more. Dad always seemed to have less than them - Petraki was a good worker but no tradesman - and I often wondered what would happen to us if his money ran out; that worry kept me awake till the rumble of their voices, going up and down like a wave, from laughter to abuse and back to laughter again in a harmonious baritone flow, would finally send me off. How many times I drifted off to sleep with that soothing male hum in the background.

I paid particular attention in those days to the cross-play between my father and Vasili. I could see that whatever had gone on in the past was still alive in the present, every gesture, every look full of menace; every hand of poker was a duel to the death. Whoever lost would retreat into a shell of self-pity and frustrated rage, while the other bragged all night. Perhaps the first time I really noticed it, the way they seemed to preen and boast, was at my eighth birthday party, three and a half years before. Pappou had been mischievously egging them on. He often told dad that he was a vlaka - a pussy - for not standing up to the Antonious, so on this occasion, dad went too far. The whiskey had been flowing as usual, always the perfect lighter fuel. When Vasili won his fourth round in a row, dad stood up and banged the table, accusing Vasili of cheating. The others all tried to get him to calm down and eventually he did, but Vasili came off best because he just sat still and said nothing, letting dad do his worst. The next day I heard mum giving dad an earful about his outburst, but he said nothing, just sulked all day and didn’t bother coming home that night. Pappou wisely stayed out of mum´s way too and said nothing.

It was at that party too, my eighth birthday, that I first fell in love with Annoulla, Vasilis’ little goddaughter and the girl everyone wanted me to marry. Annoulla was aged eight and a half, six months older than me. I remember a squishy, nervous feeling in my stomach when she arrived with her parents, Penelope and Costaki. That night she had on the prettiest lemon party dress with frills all over, even round the neck reaching up round her cute, dark little face. I remember the moment we were introduced to each other. She stood staring at me without even a smile and saying nothing but her skin was so smooth and her expression so sweet I was entranced by her. She was only eight and a half, and that was long before Trollope´s, but I really believed she was going to be my wife one day. I didn´t mind.

When I sat the Trollope´s Entrance Exam, it was a perfect spring day. A handful of us were shown round the school afterwards by the tall bean-pole figure of the headmaster who treated us like future heroes of the empire. He stood at the edge of the quad, a square of grass in the middle of the old buildings on which no one was allowed to tread, and extolled the virtues of a Public-School education. My mother, making eyes at the headmaster throughout his speech, never letting go of that natural ability she had to flirt, squeezed my hand with pride. But the first day of term could not have been more terrifying. I cursed my luck when I saw the towering red brick towers, grisly Gothic structures suddenly shrouded in autumn mist. The atmosphere couldn’t have been more intimidating, like some Transylvanian castle. Rows of uniformed boys filed through the big wooden gates at the front in awe of the miserable fate that awaited them. I sobbed into my pillow that night at the horrible loss of my freedom.

The old Victorian classrooms were full of tormented spirits, ghosts breathing down our necks; the walls were a time portal back to Dickensian England where on the other side we emerged wearing short britches and