ABSTRACT
The local authority built this school in East Anglia – it’s not one named in my acknowledgements – in the 1930s. The classroom in which I’m standing, and in which I’ve been teaching for the past hour has, typically for that decade, glass panels above adult waist level on a wall that runs parallel to a corridor – the kind of corridor you could bowl fast medium pace down, or serve an ace – and the ball would creep the last few feet. A long corridor. A corridor that invites a normal child, who hasn’t got, at the moment, a cricket ball or a tennis ball and racket, to run like hell down it, though he (it is probably he) will get into trouble if he does.
