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the time it was over,

Mr Clyde-Browne had made up his mind. Whatever else Groxbourne might fail to provide, it would

guarantee Peregrine's entry into the Army. He returned to the Headmaster's study well

content.
    'Right, well I think we'll put him in Mr Glodstone's house,' said the Headmaster, as Mr

Clyde-Browne took out his cheque-book 'Marvellous with boys, Glodstone. And as for fees...'
    'I'll pay in advance for three years.'
    The Headmaster looked at him quizzically. 'You wouldn't rather wait and see if he finds our

atmosphere suits him?'
    But Mr Clyde-Browne was adamant. Having got Peregrine into what approximated to a Public

School, he had no intention of having him expelled. 'I've added a thousand pounds for the Chapel

Restoration Fund,' he said, 'I noticed you're making an appeal.'
    And having written out a cheque for ten thousand pounds, he left in an ebullient mood. He had

been particularly heartened to learn that the Overactive Underachiever's Course extended into the

summer holidays when Major Fetherington took the group to North Wales for 'a spot of

mountaineering and cross-country compass marching'.
    'It will give us a chance to get away on our own,' Mr Clyde-Browne thought happily as he drove

South. But this was not the argument he used to persuade his wife, who had learned from a friend

that Groxbourne was the last school she'd send her son to.
    'Elspeth says it's a brutal place and the boys are nearly all farmers sons and the teaching is

appalling.'
    'It's either Groxbourne or the local Comprehensive.'
    'But there must be other schools...'
    'There are. A great many, but they won't take Peregrine. Now if you want your son to mix with

a lot of teenage tarts at the Comprehensive, you've merely to say the word.'
    Mrs Clyde-Browne didn't. It was one of her most ingrained beliefs that only the working class

sent their children to Comprehensives and Peregrine must never be allowed to pick up their

deplorable habits.
    'It seems such a shame we can't afford a private tutor,' she whined, but Mr Clyde-Browne was

not to be deflected.
    'The boy has got to learn to stand on his own feet and face up to the realities of life. He

won't do that by staying at home and being mollycoddled by you and some down-at-heel unemployable

posing as a private tutor.' A remark which said as much for his own view of the world's awful

reality as it did for his apparent conviction that Peregrine had spent the first fifteen years of

his life standing on other people's two feet or perched on one of his own.
    'Well, I like that,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne with some spirit.
    'And I don't,' continued her husband, working himself up into a defensive fury. 'If it hadn't

been for your insistence on bringing him up like a china doll, he wouldn't be the idiot he is

now. But no, it had to be "Peregrine do this and Peregrine do that" and "Don't get your clothes

dirty, Peregrine." Come to think of it, it's a wonder the boy has half a mind to call his

own.'
    In this he was being unfair. Peregrine's peculiarities owed as much of their bias to his

father as to his mother. Mr Clyde-Browne's career as a solicitor with court experience disposed

him to divide the world up into the entirely innocent and the wholly guilty, with no states of

uncertainty in between. Peregrine had imbibed his rigid ideas of good and bad from his father and

had had them reinforced by his mother. Mrs Clyde-Browne's social pretensions and her refusal to

think the worst of anyone in their circle of acquaintances, all of whom must be nice because the

Clyde-Brownes knew them, had limited the range of the entirely good to Virginia Water and the

entirely bad to everywhere else. Television had done nothing to broaden his outlook. His parents

had so severely censored his viewing to programmes that showed cowboys and policeman in the best

light, while Redskins and suspects were shown in the worst, that Peregrine had been spared any