him little hints about
translation and composition which he did not choose to waste on the
ruck. Martin was less inky and more intelligent than the average new
boy who was placed in the Lower Fifth. Moreover, his fear of his
master was obvious, and there was no more effective method of
flattering Vickers than to fear him and to let your fear be seen.

Yet it was a relief, even to Martin, to escape from the tension of the
Terror's classroom to the turbulent relaxation that prevailed in the
dark chamber where Barmy Walters taught mathematics. Old Barmy
suffered from acute poverty and incipient senile decay. He had once
been a brilliant undergraduate at Cambridge and then a wrangler, a man
with a future: he now lived in a red-brick villa with a chattering wife
and two gaunt, unwedded daughters. For nearly forty years it had been
his function to instruct the classical side in mathematics: he had
never been a strong man, never fitted for his work. And so in spite of
all his brilliance as a mathematician he had missed promotion, seen his
chance of a house go by, and eventually lost grip. To retire was
financially impossible (Elfrey was too poor a school to have a pension
fund), and he stuck to his work grimly, sitting beneath his blackboard
with an overcoat under his dusty gown, wheezing and grumbling and
looking for his glasses. Plainly he could be ragged: and ragged he was
without mercy or cessation. A couple of hours with the Terror had a
vicious effect on the tempers of his victims, and Barmy Walters found
in the Lower Fifth, coming straight from Vickers, torturers of a
fiendish devilry.

To begin with, there was the distribution of the instrument-boxes
before geometry. The boxes stood in great piles at the end of the room
and it was the duty of the bottom boy to deal them round. It was also
part of the established order of things that the bottom boy dropped the
two and twenty boxes with a series of slow and deafening crashes. At
the end he would say: "Oh, sir, I'm so sorry."

And Barmy would answer: "Um, ah. Really, really, you boys will shatter
my nerves. How many times have I told you to be careful? Um, ah!"

Then there would be a rush to recover the boxes, a long, clattering
rush with much jostling and swearing and spilling of ink, some of which
would find its way to Barmy's glass of water. When peace had been
restored people would begin to ask questions, to demand elaborate
demonstrations on the b