Curtain Call at the Lantern

Pryce sighed and pulled a file from a drawer that had not been opened in a long time. Edwin Fenn. Scholarship, Dockside Primary, entered September 1978. The boy had arrived with a dockland accent and been marked down for it on his first day.

"They cut his hair, took his home clothes, drilled the vowels out of him," said Pryce, without apparent irony. "He was taken from himself, if you like. Mortified." You could hear the borrowed sociology in his mouth. He was enjoying the word. "By the end of the first year, he was a different boy. He'd been assigned to the deportment classes, and then, after hours, to private tuition."

"From whom?"

"Miss Crane. As she then was. Later Doctor." He turned a page. "I must say the results were extraordinary. He rehearsed the role of a gentleman for years before he'd ever have the chance to be one. That's what makes them so convincing: they've practised."

In 1981 the name on the file changed. A deed poll, a kind patron, a stroke of a pen. Fenn had become Fairweather. Nobody at St Aldhelm's had ever asked why.