to Miss Gower - for grading. We've a good half hour, so anyone who fancies can have a quick dip as soon as he's found his stone - if you've got your costumes with you. But no nude bathing if you please, remember there are other people on the beach. And stick to the pools left by the sea. You all know what the current's like just here, you young buggers!'
They knew, all right: the current was treacherous, especially on an ebb tide. People were drowned up and down this coast every year, strong swimmers too.
Miss Gower - Religious Instruction and Geography - from her position roughly half-way back along the column, had heard Lane's gravel-voiced, parade-ground instructions. She gave a little grimace. Oh, she understood well enough why she was to grade the stones: it was to allow Lane and Dorothy Hartley a bit of freedom, so they could have a little 'ramble' along the rocks and find themselves a spot for a quick hump! Purely physical, of course, for their minds were totally incompatible.
Miss Gower tilted her nose and sniffed loudly; and now, as the pace of the kids towards the front began to speed up, she called out: 'All right, boys - hurry along. And remember this week's wild-life quest. We need some good razor-shells for the natural history room. Whole ones, still hinged together if you can find them. But please - empty ones! Let's not carry any rotting molluscs back, shall we?'
Farther back, along the path under the trees, where the rear was brought up by Miss Hartley and the monitors of her English and History classes, Stanley Green trudged, hands in pockets, his clever but vicious mind dark with thoughts of violence. He had heard Miss Gower's memo to the kids: no dead shellfish. No, but he'd like to fix it for a dead 'Speccy' Keogh! Well, maybe not dead, but severely mauled. It was that dumb kid's fault he had those maths problems to work out tonight. Dumb shit, sitting there like a zombie, fast asleep with his eyes wide open! Well, Big Stanley would open his eyes for him, sure enough - or close them!
'Hands out of your pockets, Stanley,' pretty Miss Hartley said from behind him. 'It's five months yet to Christmas, not quite cold enough for snow. And why the hunched shoulders? Is something bothering you?'
'No, Miss,' he mumbled in answer, his head down.
'Try to enjoy, Stanley,' she told him, a little archly. 'You're still very young, but if you keep on taking your spite out on the entire world you'll get old very, very quickly.' And to herself she added, like that frustrated bitch, Gertrude Gower...!
Harry Keogh was not a natural born voyeur, just a curious boy. Last Tuesday down here on the beach he'd stumbled on something, and he hoped to do so again today. That was why, after he delivered up his stone to Miss Gower, he checked that no one was watching him and cut away across the dunes and round towards the other side of the reedy marsh. It was only a little more than a hundred yards, but in half that distance he'd already picked up fresh footprints in the sand. A man's and a woman's; and of course he'd seen 'Sergeant' and Miss Hartley heading this way, as he'd suspected they might.
Earlier, Harry had conveniently 'forgotten' his bathing briefs; this had left him free to pursue his own interests, for Jimmy had subsequently gone off to swim with the rest of the boys. What Harry was looking for was simple: he wanted pointers. Sitting next to Brenda in the cinema and pressing his knee against hers (or, when she leaned close to him, squeezing her upper arm so that his knuckles touched her small breasts through her coat and jumper) was all very well and even sort of exciting, but it seemed pretty tame when compared with the games teachers Lane and Hartley got up to!
Finally, coming over a dune and crouching down he located them sitting on a patch of sand within a semicircle of tall reeds - the same spot where he'd seen them last week. Harry backtracked and quickly chose a place at the crest of another dune where he could lie down and peer through a clump of crabgrass. Last week she (Miss Hartley) had been playing with 'Sergeant's' thing, whose size Harry had found extraordinary. Her sweater had been up and 'Sergeant' had had one hand up her