Ministers’ Sons Came by Car. He Came With Chapter Four.

At the Stefan Batory school in 1930s Warsaw, some pupils arrived by car with a soldier at the wheel. Their fathers were ministers and generals, and the drivers opened doors for boys of fourteen. Other pupils came by tram.

One of the tram boys had something the car boys could not get from their fathers: the next chapter.

He wrote a detective serial. It was set among the English upper classes, whom he had never met, and he read the new instalment aloud to his classmates on a set day each week. There was a country house. There was a body. There was, by all the best rules, a colonel. The sons of the government sat and listened like everybody else, and like everybody else they wanted to know who had done it.

A corporal can get you to school. He cannot tell you who did it.

This is the purest form of power available in a classroom, and I have watched it at work. The middle one, aged ten, ran a serialised story about a hamster who robbed banks. He released one page a day at lunch. Within a fortnight a boy whose father owned half a ski resort was bringing him crisps.

The Batory boys were the sons of very important men, and their fathers were still parents. One former pupil remembered a government minister pacing the corridor outside the head’s office, turning his hat in his hands, while his son was inside. Ranks do not survive that corridor.

I have done the corridor. Last spring I was called in about the middle one, who had been using the hamster serial to settle a dispute over football. I arrived ten minutes early, paced, studied a display about the water cycle and sat down next to a boy waiting to deliver a message.

He asked if I wanted to hear his story. I said yes, because I was desperate for anything that was not the next ten minutes. It was about a dragon accountant.

It was good. It stopped on a cliffhanger. The door opened before I found out about the dragon, and I went in to hear about the hamster. I am still waiting for the next instalment of both.