Hamish was brilliantly clever and, I discovered, a gifted pigeon mimic

One of the boys was called Hamish. When he was fourteen he was a brilliantly clever, very funny, astonishingly skinny boy and, it transpired, he could imitate pigeons. The boys were alarmingly quiet that day and I was consequently on the alert. A faint cooing seemed to come from somewhere and then one of them said, “Is there a pigeon in the room?” I eventually was looking under my desk for the bird, while they read silently, with, I imagine, tears of joy streaming down their faces.

Once they locked me out of my classroom. Somehow or other they had all got in before me. I had my key but they had locked the door on the inside. The hectic, noisy corridor subsided into calm and quiet as the other doors shut. Then there was just me, pleading to be let in. At that point, horrifically, Clem Bell appeared some distance away.

Clem, the Deputy Head, was, from his appearance, made of mahogany; a small, squat, very good man of the old school and as hard as nails. His favourite story was of finding a boy at the school playing fields, carving something into the wood in the changing room. “What does that say?” he said, his hand no doubt on the perpetrator’s collar. “‘Clem is a bas’...now what could that be?”

“Clem is a bastion of the school, sir,” replied the youth. Clem laughed and laughed when he told that story. Still, I imagine the boy was put to death. Anyway, there was Clem, and there was me in the corridor. “Mr Bell is coming,” I pleaded through the door.

“Everything OK, Mr Wyllie?” said Clem.

“Yes, indeed, there’s something wrong with my key.”

There was a click, a shuffle, and the key turned. The door swung open. There the boys were, silently sitting studying.