"Ben Jeapes - Pages Out Of Order" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeapes Ben)

I was; the only real difference was the lack of Thomas Melton about the
place. All the other characters were there, with different names. And now
I stood on the touchlines at matches and cheered my new school on against
my old.
The sixth form, lower and upper, passed mostly in a blur. The world moved
into 1982 with not a war cloud to be seen; those who had heard of them at
all thought that the Falkland Islands were off Scotland.
The Argie scum invaded, and we raged at the swine who invaded our
sovereign territory and applauded the sending of the task force. It was a
military-oriented school with a lot of officers' sons, so a lot of fathers
were sent down to the South Atlantic. Some were killed.
The world moved on. The upper sixth dawned and the end of my school days
was in sight. Margaret Thatcher won her second election victory in 1983,
cruising on the Falklands factor. I was old enough to vote and gave mine
to the fledgling Social Democrats. Three million unemployed were beginning
to wear, even on my far-right conscience.
Back at the old place, Tom of course became a prefect. Not so for me --
one thing I had carried with me to my new school was my determination not
to be tied down by responsibility. The independence that I prided myself
on manifested itself for the first time in an outright refusal to take on
obligations.
"A" levels loomed; we sat our prediction exams in the Easter term. On the
strength of my predicted two As and a B, I was encouraged to try for
Cambridge. Tom set his sights lower; in those days you still had to stay
on for an extra term to take the Oxbridge exam and Tom, in one of his
letters, said he had no intention of staying incarcerated for a minute
more than necessary.
Tom rung me the day my actual results came through and was politely
sympathetic about my disastrous three Cs. I didn't know what had gone
wrong with me in the exam room. He had two Cs and a B. Reluctantly I
turned to the shortlist which I had drawn up in the unlikely event of not
making it to Cambridge, and we ended up at the same Midlands redbrick,
back together again. I had forgotten how much of my life had depended
simply on his presence about the place. It was good to have it once more.
Tom, to my surprise, eschewed maths -- his strongest point -- completely.
Instead he did politics. Politics! He looked almost apologetic.
"It's a change of direction," he admitted, "but so's going to university,
in my family. I thought of doing sociology, but I'd be disinherited."

Freshers' year, Winter term, 1983
University life was wonderful. I relished the new environment and gladly
sloughed off all the old snobberies, the old prejudices, the old attitudes
that had been ingrained in me by school. From being a despicable snob I
became an equally despicable inverted snob. I could flatten my vowels and
drop my aitches with the best of them. I experimented with growing long
hair and a moustache ("What will you do when you grow up, Will?" Tom said)
but chickened out and reverted to normal the day before my parents came to
visit.
Tom fell into the whole thing like a fish returning to water. He didn't
change because he didn't need to. Tom Melton at almost nineteen was just