Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 26

My friend Keith and I were both going to Ealing Art School and on the last day of term we took a bottle of petrol and a box of matches to school and on the green in front of the school, we made a small pile of our jackets, caps and ties, anointed them with petrol and set them on fire.

Some smaller boys cheered. Some sixth-formers said they weren’t surprised and suggested we should probably kill ourselves there and then, because how could our lives go anywhere but downhill.

And then, to crown off a perfect day, a teacher came running out of the school with a fire-extinguisher and shouted at the top of his voice about how much trouble we were in.

‘But, we don’t go to your school any more,’ we said, threw our satchels onto the fire – I took my good fountain pen out first – gave him the appropriate hand signals with both hands and ran away.

They wrote to my mother, who told me I had wasted a perfectly good jacket.

I suppose she was right. I could have given it to one of those poor children she’d been telling me about.