28.4 Poor Mr Jones

The division between holidays and school days has become almost non-existent now: on Monday I did twice the amount of work that I have done in the past two days. Our place of work is pitiful – ten or twelve tables with chairs in various stages of dilapidation. On one side of the “library” is a row of eight or ten booths, offering for the few, a chance to work in privacy. Ignoring the fact that only two have lights, the petty-mindedness of Thompson has prevented us using them – a fifth form wrote on one of them. Our “library” is a corridor through which masters may legally and pupils illegally, pass through – the dual code of rules principle.

Poor Mr Jones does his best with the rapidly deteriorating open library, but who can blame his failure in a school that puts bureaucracy and rugby balls before books: Recently a woman was hire to....supervise the dinner queue! My god, when will this system end? When will we be able to go to a school of which we are proud and take part in decision making? When will small minded bastards like Thompson, Latheron [teacher] and Dibb [teacher] be stopped?