Public School

Having come back from the summer holiday, I explore a day in my life at school.

So it’s the start of the school term. The first Thursday back. A drizzly South-West London Thursday, as per usual. As soon as I’m off to university, my parents say they are going to leave and go live in their other home in Florida, simply to escape the faintly suicidal nature of grey English weather. Thursdays, in general, are always the worst day. It’s not Friday so there’s no cause for celebration, yet it’s far enough into the week that I have stayed up too late every night  (despite making a mental note that I would try and go to bed by 11pm for the umpteenth time).

Needless to say, I’m shattered. Double History has just started and I lean back in my chair and yawn, taking off my suit jacket, waiting for my history teacher to march in. Oh, I left my bag over at the other side of the school because I was close to the classroom and couldn’t be bothered to go back and get it. For my teacher, however, I mentally concoct a long painful story about how it got attacked by a flock of rabid pigeons at the train station while yawning. Nine o’ clock on the dot. He comes marching in. That’s the other thing I forgot to mention- for some reason, unknown to the hundreds of pupils taught by this teacher over the years, he’s always in a terrible mood on Thursdays.

We are chatting amongst ourselves in the fairly small class of twelve, but stop and look in a puzzled manner amongst ourselves as he just stands there in the door-way, completely still.

“F**k.” He moans.

That just about sums up our beloved teacher.

I look over at him and ask in my usual manner:  “did you miss me over summer, sir?”

He squints through his glasses towards me and sighs. “No! In fact, during my whole summer, I didn’t spend a single moment of time thinking about you. Literally, I had more thoughts about mud than I did you. Genuinely, no-one cares about you in any sense whatsoever.”

I smirk back at him, appreciating the back and forth. Our relationship has been this way since the previous year when I insulted him accidentally when I stated that ‘The North is just a bit of a s**t-hole”, to find out moments later that he had originally come from the North of England. Since that point, our conversations degraded into me calling him a ‘northern monkey’, and him calling me a ‘posh twat’. Both names hold a surprising amount of truth, in all honesty. Secretly we appreciate each other enormously, but that mutual respect is shown through, well, disrespect.

Anyway, at the moment we’re studying Arabic History- in particular, the Arabic Conquests of huge swathes of North Africa, Iraq, Syria and Iran during the 7^th and 8^th Centuries. By chance, we are reading aloud some notes and other materials that he had compiled, rich in long Arabic words. Being the prat that I am, I revel in hacking and gagging through the words in as terrible an Arabic accent as one will have ever heard, adding in an occasionally “Allahu Akbar” to add a light dusting of mild racism, or ‘ethnic banter’ as we so call it. What open-minded and politically correct young gentlemen we are.

Another boy in the class turns to him and starts bringing up the monophysite-diophysite byzantine religious conflict in the 7^th century, asking the teacher about it. So great is the pretentiousness of us public school boys, we know what that means. Our teacher, who’s other great love is cricket, throws a soft cricket ball at his head with surprising speed. Whack.

“Ouch! That actually hurt sir! I’m going to report you for molesting my forehead with a cricket ball!” He says in jest.

“Oh stop being such a p***y!” Our teacher replies, clearly frustrated due to fact that we’re compounding his Thursday mood with even more annoyance.

Anyway, he soon gets bored with teaching us, and having sat down in his comfy chair in the corner of his classroom, gulping coffee, he starts to recount to us how he would smuggle his home brewed alcohol into his school. I quickly remember that my parents pay over twenty thousand pounds a year to send me to this school, and we’re hearing our teacher wistfully talking about smuggling terrible beer into school to sell to his friends. But then I remember that we’re pretty much all going to get into Oxbridge anyway because we go to one of the top schools in the world, and I lazily lean back on my chair again and phase out, thinking about when I’m going to ask out a certain girl I like, and what a good first date would be.

However, this enjoyable fantasy kept being interrupted by the beer smuggling tale, as well as comments from my teacher that would definitely get him fired on so many different grounds if we didn’t enjoy them and him thoroughly. Just like that, the double was over. An hour had disappeared from the sands of time. An hour utterly wasted, but equally so well spent. Totally inappropriate comments from us and the teacher, learning that ‘Fahisha’ means w***e in Arabic, and a nice lazy lesson. Money well spent if you ask me. Time for break, which means going to the coffee shop that literally rents a space in our sixth form building on the school campus, and asking my barista babe Silvia to make me up my signature coffee- a Nicaraguan double espresso with a splash of water, shaken and blended with ice in one of those cocktail mixers. Delicious. I get so disappointed when I go to a Starbucks or Costa and ask for that drink and get a non-Nicaraguan coffee bean double espresso with some scrawny ice cube dropped into it. I walk over to some of my friends and we chat about the weekend. One of them is having a large party and is inviting all four-hundred people from the two years of sixth form in our school and any plus-ones that they want to bring to his enormous house on Richmond Hill. I moan at him because I can’t go to it, before helping him go through his Facebook messages from all the desperate girls who want in.

“Hey! I’ll bring all my hot and loose friends if you let me come! I go to Westminster by the way.” Said one. At least she didn’t go to a second rate public school like Harrow. As a rule of thumb, the holy trinity of public schools (Excluding us) being Eton, Westminster, and St. Pauls are always good fun at parties.

“I mean, she does say she’s bringing hot friends”, I argue on the girls behalf (as I vaguely know her), and, to compound my argument I state that she has ultra-rich friends who live on Hyde Park corner.

“Fine” he reluctantly agrees, “but you better get me in on some of that”.

Having gone through the list, we decide about arrangements. His mum is away in Singapore on business, as she is the top partner and runs the corporate department at one of the London Magic Circle Law Firms. His dad was in New York, being the Finance Director at one of the large investment banks.

“I mean, it looks like bouncers will be a couple of grand”, he says, “Shall I put it on my card or their Amex?”

“Might as well get the air-miles”, I reply.

I shake my Rolex Submariner from under my Massimo Dutti suit arm and scan the time. Eleven fifteen. Time for Latin.

Author's Note

My first narrative- I am experimenting with first person narration in the present. Would it be better narrated in the past tense with greater description? Comments and reviews about the writing style very welcome- In fact, if you scan through this, I insist you leave a review! Thanks. ~ PublicSchoolBoy