And when he learned the awful truth, it provoked a horrified intake of breath. It was far worse than he could have imagined.

Benjamin had forgotten his swimming trunks.

King William's had an outdoor swimming pool, tucked away behind the chapel, adjacent to the main rugby fields. It came into use halfway through the spring term, after which Benjamin's form would have two swimming periods a week, on Monday and Thursday mornings, directly after break. Benjamin dreaded these periods at the best of times. He was not a good swimmer, he did not like exposing his body to the other boys, and he disliked, intensely, Mr. Warren, the PE master, a laconic sadist popularly known as "Rosa" on account of his passing resemblance to the mannish villainess in From Russia with Love.

It was not just his penchant for driving the boys to the point of exhaustion that made Mr. Warren universally feared. Where his swimming periods were concerned, there was also one notorious rule, responsible over the years for any amount of humiliation and psychological damage. This rule was perfectly simple, and admitted of no exceptions: if a boy forgot to bring his swimming trunks, he had to swim in the nude.

It's true that there existed some schools, at this time (and perhaps still), where all boys were required to swim naked as a matter of course, either in the mistaken belief that it was character-building or simply in order to gratify the none-too private enthusiasms of the sports teacher. But that, in a way, would have been different. It might at least have created a kind of beleaguered camaraderie, a redeeming sense of everyone-in-the-same-boat. The awful thing about the King William's arrangement was its malign, inexorable divisiveness. Any unlucky pupil caught in this situation would not only have to run a gauntlet of sniggers and pointing fingers on the day itself, but from then onwards could look forward to weeks, terms, even years of relentlessly single-minded taunts about his deficiencies in the genital area, whether he had them or not. This was the sort of treatment more likely to destroy character than to build it, and there were one or two cases (shy, defensive Pettigrew of the fourth form; taciturn but sexually obsessed Walker of the remove) where this already seemed to have happened.

Of course, there were the occasional showmen—freaks and exhibitionists, for the most part—who could cope; who even revelled, out of some perverse bravado, in the attention they might generate. Chapman, for instance, had forgotten his trunks so often that most people were now convinced he did it on purpose. But it goes without saying that he was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of lead piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper. And it was Chapman, in fact, who one memorable morning had brought embarrassment upon the school by combining two misdemeanours: forgetting his trunks, and talking during a swimming lesson. For a second offence the culprit was traditionally punished by being made to stand on the top diving board for five minutes; which Chapman duly did, only for Mr. Warren to realize, after a minute and a half, that the naked felon was clearly visible from the Bristol Road to anyone travelling on the top deck of a 61, 62 or 63 bus. The sight of that legendary instrument, glimpsed suddenly and without warning on a routine shopping trip to central Birmingham, must have impressed itself deeply on the passengers' consciousness. During the course of that day the Chief Master had received four complaints, and one request for Chapman's telephone number.

But Benjamin was no Chapman. For the whole of his school career he had been dreading that this might happen. That morning his father, summoned to deal with an ineffectual foreman at the Castle Bromwich plant, had offered to drop the children at school on his way. How eagerly, with what thoughtless delight had Benjamin leaped at the chance of a lift, an escape from the bus, an extra ten minutes in bed! But the treat had been his undoing. Somehow, through some catastrophic oversight, he had left his kit bag on the back seat of the car. He could see it now, picture it, lying redundant against the upholstery in some distant car park, unnoticed by his father; unreachable. The towel, the freshly laundered rugby shirt, the scuffed plimsolls, and the all-important swimming trunks: those few square inches of terylene which alone had the power to shield him from disaster. All gone. There was nothing that could save him now.