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

off and we were still sorting out who would be the leaders of the year,
who the followers of the leaders and who would be more or less
independent. This last group had two sub-categories -- acceptable and
unacceptable. I knew from experience that my big ears would exclude me
from the first group unless I showed a lot more bravado than I had in me;
the best course was to lie low and hope no one noticed me. I therefore
found myself in the second group, kidding myself that this was in fact
acceptable independence. Tom, because no one else would dare take him,
found himself squarely in the third, independence quite unacceptable.
I didn't have the heart for the prolonged persecution campaign that the
far end of the dormitory had set themselves on (several voices had already
broken up that end, which gave them a head start in the maturity stakes).
Preventative alliances were forming in the squeaky-voiced camp and I
decided to do my bit. Tom was curled up in his bed, nose buried in a book.
"Hi," I said. No answer. "Thomas?"
("Tha-maas!" came a cry from the far end, in the tone used by the woman in
Tom and Jerry when the cat has just wrecked the house again.)
He glared back at me.
"Tom," he said, and turned back to his book.
"Oh, sorry." Tom, eh? I had always been William, even to my friends. Time
to grow up. "I'm Will," I said.
"Oh."
I resented this treatment: maybe no one else had seen the teddy bear he
had almost taken out of his trunk, but I had and I hadn't said a word.
"Good book?" I asked. He held it up -- The Spy Who Loved Me. "Oh, right!
Is it as good as the film?" The latest epic to feature Ol' Eyebrows had
come out the previous year.
("Want a cigarette?" someone called. "If anyone offers you a cigarette, go
straight to the housemaster," someone else answered, falsetto.)
"It's far better," he said loftily. "It's a proper love story. It doesn't
have any submarines or undersea bases."
"Not even a Lotus?" I asked hopefully.
"'Fraid not."
("Hey, Melton! You queer?" "That's it! He's bent!" "Move your bed away
from him, Sutton!")
"Is there any ... you know?" I said, even more hopefully.
"There is a bit, actually," he admitted, with a bashful grin. He showed me
a couple of choice passages, of which between us we understood about half,
and we chatted a bit more about James Bond. By the time the prefect came
in to turn the lights out at 10 o'clock we were 0.1 of the way towards
being friends.

Winter, 1978. Another generation of schoolboys navigated its way by
instinct through the tricky passages of adolescence; selfish, arrogant
prigs without a care in the world beyond proving our maturity. A boy's
worth was judged by his prowess in sport and his body's testosterone
count. You sank or swam, which meant you grew up fast. There was no point
in running to Mummy because Mummy wasn't there and Matron, lovely lady
that she was, wasn't quite the same. Outside our artificial, unreal
environment the country suffered the Winter of Discontent. Margaret