Free Swan River by David Reynolds

which Richard immediately identified as lapwings rose from the ground and circled the field languidly before landing at a safe distance. Dennis lay staring at the sky and we lay down beside him, with me in the middle.
    We talked about girls and kissing, and I wondered fleetingly whether my grandmother Sis had kissed boys when she was twelve, and decided that she almost certainly hadn’t; there was no mention of such things in her diaries until she met the doctor in 1888 when she was twenty-one.
    Dennis lit a Woodbine, and we passed it between us. There was a discussion about inhaling which none of us knew how to do. Dennis managed to blow some smoke through his nose and then had a coughing fit. The smell of the smoke blended with the scent of dry grass as the air grew cooler.
    When the cigarette was finished, we walked to the end of the field and forced ourselves backwards through a gap in the hawthorn hedge to the field beyond. A group of Friesian cows stared with large eyes as we passed them on our way back to the towpath.
    * * * * *
    In November I took the entrance exam. There were papers in several subjects and the process went on over three days. I sat in the school’s staff dining room at a polished pine table. One other boy, Nick, a friend but not a close one, was taking the exam and sat opposite me; he was nice but dim and was trying to get into an even posher school than I was, Eton. An elderly man with a rounded back and jutting chin – he had been the school’s music master for about fifty years and had retired several years before – sat at the head of the table reading a book through wire-rimmed spectacles with his nose wrinkled and his teeth bared. He had a pocket watch on the table in front of him, told us when to start and when to stop, and beamed genially at us from time to time.
    Some way into the first exam, which was Latin, I found that Nick was staring at me and sucking hard on his Parker pen. He glanced at the old man who was absorbed in his book, took his pen out of his mouth, and almost imperceptibly shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows. We had been instructed to write on both sides of the paper. I sat back in my soft-seated dining-room chair, held my paper up perpendicular to the table and read through what I had written. Meanwhile Nick bent over his paper and squinted upwards to read what I had written on the other side.
    In this manner, over a period of three days, I consigned Nick to Eton. He was profuse in his thanks and gave me a two-pound slab of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate.
    More significantly, I passed with high marks myself. My mother hugged me round the shoulders and kissed my cheek. My father slapped my back and said, ‘Well done, Sunny Jim.’ My shoulders and hands tingled as he handed me two shillings.
    Soon my parents received a letter from the housemaster saying how pleased he was with my exam results, that I would be in a class with scholarship boys, even though I had not taken scholarship papers, and that he looked forward to seeing me the following May. He enclosed several sheets of paper containing lists: required clothing and sporting equipment; dates and times of terms, half-terms and old boys’ weekend; daily and weekly routines, which included chapel every morning at 8.50 except Sundays when mattins would last an hour starting at 10 o’clock; advice about money – he suggested my parents provide me with £3 per term, which he would look after – and something called ‘tuck’, which meant food; rules – I would be allowed to leave the school grounds only with written permission from a prefect and only on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons and on Sundays – parents might visit to take me out every third Sunday after mattins.
    The tingling sense of dread reappeared in my shoulders, arms and hands, and moved on into my stomach. But I managed to make it go away. May was still six months away. I