Free Wrote For Luck by D.J. Taylor Page A

specific application to himself he should not look foolish. ‘Hear very good things about your extra studies classes GCSE boys,’ the new headmaster said unexpectedly, but with just enough of a glint in his eye to let Crowther know what was going on.
    ‘Oh yes,’ Crowther heard himself saying. He would admit nothing. Answer only direct questions. That was the way. ‘I mean…’ the new headmaster said. Another thing about thenew headmaster was his habit of not finishing sentences, of allowing these streams of words to dry up on the river-bed leaving only inference to re-hydrate them.
    ‘What exactly..?’ he said again, and Crowther found himself explaining, in rather incriminating detail, about the classes, which encouraged, and occasionally compelled, rather wooden boys to read and discuss moderately abstruse contemporary poems. The new headmaster was already nodding his head. ‘Poetry…’ he said vaguely.
    Crowther wondered what he meant by this. That he approved of it? Feared its corrosive influence? Outside it had begun to rain and there was a fine drizzle blowing over the Nelson statue and the spindly trees. It turned out that the new headmaster was advocating caution, if not variety. ‘A topical discussion, perhaps.’
    Crowther knew all about topical discussions. ‘The wider context,’ the new headmaster ventured. It turned out that a parent, one Crowther particularly disliked, had written to disparage poetry and press for basic economic theory. ‘A very interesting suggestion,’ he heard himself saying. It was always a mistake to listen to parents.
    The rain was coming down quite hard now, and a few boys, briefcases lofted above their heads, scuttled furtively between the chapel and the music centre. ‘Valuing the work put in,’ he heard the new headmaster say. There was something else going on here, he thought, an undercurrent of trouble he could have done without, a way in which, however subtly and respectfully, the values on which he had fashioned his existence were being called into question. Someone in thecommon room the other day had said that the new headmaster, known to be in favour of co-education and new universities, was also keen on early retirement. ‘Look forward to hearing…’ the new headmaster finished up. What did he look forward to? Crowther didn’t know.
    The secretary laboured grimly into the room, looking more than ever like some text-book illustration of Darwinian theory, and he went back along the passage and out onto the tarmac of the playground, where the morning’s detritus included three oranges, an empty aspirin packet and a dog-eared copy of
Les Fleurs du Mal
.
     
    It was not, in the end, the new headmaster’s fault, he thought to himself, driving home down a road along which lorries ferrying rubble from the site of the new shopping mall alternately surged and concertina’d. The new shopping mall, he knew, would merely displace the city’s commercial heart: a dozen new premises opening up half-a-mile from a dozen others ceasing to trade. But it was what people wanted. Teeny-weeny little world, he thought. A painter – was it Edward Burra? – had said that about a war-time Rye threatened by bombs: the same principle applied. No, the new headmaster was as much a victim as himself, not an
ubermensch
, but a minion sent to do that titan’s bidding. But this understanding did not make him any more sympathetic to the new headmaster: if anything, it made him crosser.
    Parking the car in its square of luxuriantly unweeded gravel, he found himself wondering exactly what the values were that he feared were being called into question. No one, after all,was asking him to suspend his powers of judgment. Or were they? He knew that it was nonsense to pretend that basic economic theory was more valuable to a teenager than the poems of Geoffrey Hill. Or was it? He had a nasty feeling that he was being got at for believing in things whose superiority he could not absolutely