Gentlemen & Players Read Free

strung across the years like dusty paper lanterns. Thirty-three years. It’s like a prison sentence. Reminds me of the old joke about the pensioner convicted of murder.
    “Thirty years, Your Honor,” he protests. “It’s too much! I’ll never manage it!” And the judge says: “Well, just do as many as you can….”
    Come to think of it, that’s not funny. I’ll be sixty-five in November.

    Not that it matters. There’s no compulsory retirement at St. Oswald’s. We follow our own rules. We always have. One more term, and I’ll have scored my Century. One for the Honors Board at last. I can see it now; in Gothic script: Roy Hubert Straitley (B.A.) Old Centurion of the School.
    I have to laugh. I never imagined I’d end up here. I finished a ten-year stretch at St. Oswald’s in 1954, and the last thing I expected then was to find myself there again—a Master, of all things—keeping order, doling out lines and detentions. But to my surprise I found that those years had given me a sort of natural insight into the teaching business. By now there isn’t a trick I don’t know. After all, I’ve played most of them myself; man, boy, and somewhere in between. And here I am again, back at St. Oswald’s for another term. You’d think I couldn’t keep away.
    I light a Gauloise; my one concession to the influence of the Modern Languages. Technically, of course, it’s not allowed; but today, in the privacy of my own form room, no one’s likely to pay very much attention. Today is traditionally free of boys and reserved for administrative matters; the counting of textbooks; allocation of stationery; last-minute revisions to the timetable; collection of form and set lists; induction of new staff; departmental meetings.
    I am, of course, a department in myself. Once Head of Classics, in charge of a thriving section of respectful menials, now relegated to a dusty corner of the new Languages section, like a rather dull first edition no one quite dares to throw away.
    All my rats have abandoned ship—apart from the boys, that is. I still teach a full timetable, to the bafflement of Mr. Strange—the Third Master, who considers Latin irrelevant—and to the covert embarrassment of the New Head. Still, the boys continue to opt for my irrelevant subject, and their results remain on the whole rather good. I like to think it’s my personal charisma that does it.
    Not that I’m not very fond of my colleagues in Modern Languages, though I do have more in common with the subversive Gauls than with the humorless Teutons. There’s Pearman, the Head of French—round, cheery, occasionally brilliant, but hopelessly disorganized—and Kitty Teague, who sometimes shares her lunchtime biscuits with me over a cup of tea, and Eric Scoones, a sprightly half-Centurion (also an Old Boy) of sixty-two who, when the mood takes him, has an uncanny recollection for some of the more extreme exploits of my distant youth.
    Then there’s Isabelle Tapi, decorative but rather useless in a leggy, Gallic sort of way, the subject of a good deal of admiring graffiti from the locker-room fantasy set. All in all a rather jolly department, whose members tolerate my eccentricities with commendable patience and good humor, and who seldom interfere with my unconventional methods.
    The Germans are less congenial on the whole; Geoff and Penny (“League of”) Nations, a mixed double-act with designs on my form room; Gerry Grachvogel, a well-meaning ass with a predilection for flash cards, and finally, Dr. “Sourgrape” Devine, Head of the Department and a staunch believer in the further expansion of the Great Empire, who sees me as a subversive and a pupil poacher, has no interest in Classics, and who doubtless thinks carpe diem means “fish of the day.”
    He has a habit of passing my room with feigned briskness whilst peering suspiciously through the glass, as if to check for signs of immoral conduct, and I know that today of all days it will only be a