One Good Turn Read Free Page A

When he left this cold-showers and cross-country-running environment (“We make men out of boys”) , Martin had gone to a mediocre university where he had taken an equally mediocre degree in religious studies because it was the only subject he had good exam grades in—thanks to the relentless, compulsory promotion of Bible studies as a way of filling up the dangerous, empty hours available to adolescent boys at a boarding school.
    University was followed by a postgraduate diploma in teacher training to give himself time to think about what he “really” wanted to do. He had certainly never intended actually to become a teacher, certainly not a religious studies teacher, but somehow or other he found that at the age of twenty-two he had already gone full circle in his life and was teaching in a small fee-paying boarding school in the Lake District, full of boys who had failed the entrance exams of the better public schools and whose sole interests in life seemed to be rugby and masturbation.
    Although he thought of himself as someone who had been born middle-aged, he was only four years older than the oldest boys, and it seemed ridiculous that he should be educating them in anything, but particularly in religion. Of course, the boys he taught didn’t regard him as a young man, he was an “old fart” for whom they had no care at all. They were cruel, callous boys who were likely as not going to grow up into cruel, callous men. As far as Martin could see, they were being trained up to fill the Tory back benches in the House of Commons, and he saw it as his duty to try to introduce them to the concept of morality before it was too late, although unfortunately for most of them it already was. Martin himself was an atheist but hadn’t completely ruled out the possibility that one day he might experience a conversion—a sudden lifting of the veil, an opening of his heart—although he thought it more likely that he was damned to be forever on the road to Damascus, the road most traveled.
    Except for where the syllabus dictated, Martin had tended to ignore Christianity as much as possible and to concentrate instead on ethics, comparative religion, philosophy, and social studies (anything except Christianity, in fact). It was his remit to “promote understanding and spirituality,” he claimed if challenged by a rugby-playing, Anglican, Fascista parent. He spent a lot of time teaching the boys the tenets of Buddhism because he had discovered, through trial and error, that it was the most effective way of messing with their minds.
    He thought, I’ll just do this for a bit, and then perhaps go traveling or take another qualification or get a more interesting job and a new life will start , but instead the old life had carried on and he had felt it spinning out into nothing, the threads wearing thin, and sensed that if he didn’t do something he would stay there forever, growing older than the boys all the time until he retired and died, having spent most of his life in a boarding school. He knew he would have to do something proactive, he was not a person to whom things simply happened . His life had been lived in some kind of neutral gear, he had never broken a limb, never been stung by a bee, never been close to love or death. He had never strived for greatness, and his reward had been a small life.
    Forty approached, he was on an express train hurtling toward death—he had always found refuge in rather febrile metaphors— when he joined a creative writing class, being run as some kind of rural-outreach educational program. The class met in a village hall and was run by a woman named Dorothy who drove from Kendal and whose qualifications to teach the class were unclear. A couple of stories published in a northern arts magazine, readings and workshops (work in progress) , and an unsuccessful play performed at the Edinburgh Fringe about the women in Milton’s life (Milton’s Women) . The very mention of “Edinburgh”