On his first day teaching at the school, a doddery German master mistook Peter for a sixth former, telling him he was supposed to be at the theatre for an assembly. It took Peter a moment to summon enough confidence to say that he was, in fact, the new English master.

Second weekend, Peter was told to collect some of the sixth formers from a ball at another local school. He wasn’t asked if he had other plans. Driving back, the boys in the minibus talked about their competition over who could kiss the ugliest girl. Peter seethed at how they talked about these women. They also passed a small bottle of whiskey back and forth, barely bothering to conceal it. He could bust them but knew he shouldn’t, that it would make him unpopular with the boys; and with the other teachers. He kept his eyes on the road and ignored the conversation, hating himself as a coward.

Two, three, ten years into his time at the school, and some nights he hears noises in the corridor outside his study. He no longer gets up to look, knowing that when he does, the upper cloister will be empty. He hears the noises less these days. In time, maybe, he won’t hear them at all. Something scratching at his door.

When Peter arrived at the school, he felt sorry for the staff who’d been there for years but the time passed without him realising. Other masters came straight from university but they rarely stuck around for more than a couple of years. He used to sit with these younger teachers at lunch, but now they treat him as part of the establishment. He no longer passes for one of them.

He remembers driving the dual carriageway that second weekend of his career. He remembers the callousness of those boys. He sometimes wonders if he would have been better off driving the minibus off the road and killing them all.

Background

I’ve not published a lot about my school. There’s a novel on a hard drive somewhere, a very good one, but I never tried that hard to sell it. It’s a shame in some ways, as there are some incredible stories to be told. In an interview on his resignation, one of the headmasters claimed that the school was cursed. I’ve uncovered bits of the secret history that only a few people have put together, but I’m sure there is much more. The idea of a curse seems all too plausible.

I don’t have any energy to spend on that place right now. There’s software and other stories to be written. But I had a dream last Thursday, where I picked up the novel again and tried to sell it. So, it’s obviously still there as a possibility.

Recommendations

Code is Just was originally published as a Twitter thread in September 2021. It’s a story of the 80s about Shahid Kamal Ahmad struggling against diabetes and racism to succeed as a bedroom coder.

The book is divided into episodes and seasons rather than chapters and parts. Its origin as microblog posts gives it energy. The writing is immediate and compelling, driving you through the story and the setbacks. Code is Just was intended to capture the stories of some of these early coding pioneers, but it’s also a portrait of the grimness and vicious, casual racism of Thatcher’s Britain.

Code is Just is a great read, but it’s also a brilliant use of the Internet for storytelling. I don’t think a book produced any other way would have been as vivid as this. It’s a shame we don’t have more examples of this sort of literature.