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By Root 10478 0

were bad enough; the claustrophobic little town was a nightmare; but the really intolerable thing was the common room. It became almost a relief to go into class. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. And it was real boredom, not my modish ennui. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect that they will fail. The senior masters stood like gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility... or so I began to feel during my second term. I could not spend my life crossing such a Sahara; and the more I felt it the more I felt also that the smug, petrified school was a toy model of the entire country and that to quit the one and not the other would be ridiculous. There was also a girl I was tired of. My resignation was accepted with resignation. The headmaster briskly supposed from my vague references to a personal restlessness that I wanted to go to America or the Dominions. "I haven't decided yet, Headmaster." "I think we might have made a good teacher of you, Urfe. And you might have made something of us, you know. But it's too late flow.,' "I'm afraid so." "I don't know if I approve of all this wandering off abroad. My advice is, don't go. However... _vous l'avez voulu, Georges Danton. Vous l'avez voulu._" The misquotation was typical. It poured with rain the day I left. But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and, although I couldn't have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.

2

I heard that the British Council were recruiting staff, so in early August I went along to Davies Street and was interviewed by an eager lady with a culture-ridden mind and a very upperclass voice and vocabulary. It was frightfully important, she told me, as if in confidence, that "we" were represented abroad by the right type; but it was an awful bore, all the posts had to be advertised and the candidates chosen by interview, and anyway they were having to cut down on overseas personnel--actually. She came to the point: the only jobs available were teaching English in foreign schools--or did that sound too ghastly? I said it did. In the last week of August, half as a joke, I advertised: the traditional insertion. I had a number of replies to my curt offer to go anywhere and do anything. Apart from the pamphlets reminding me that I was God's, there were three charming letters from cultured and alert swindlers. And there was one that mentioned unusual and remunerative work in Tangiers--could I speak Italian?--but my answer went unanswered. September loomed: I began to feel desperate. I saw myself cornered, driven back in despair to the dreaded _Educational Supplement_ and those endless pale grey lists of endless pale grey jobs. So one morning I returned to Davies Street. I asked if they had any teaching jobs in the Mediterranean area, and the woman with the frightful intensifiers went off to fetch a file. I sat under a puce and tomato Matthew Smith in the waiting room and began to see myself in Madrid, in Rome, or Marseilles, or Barcelona... even Lisbon. It would be different abroad; there would he no common room, and I would write poetry. She returned. All the good things had gone, she was terribly afraid. But there were these. She handed me a sheet about a school in Milan. I shook my head. She approved. "Well actually then there's only this. We've just advertised it." She handed me a clipping. THE LORD BYRON SCHOOL, PHRAXOS The Lord Byron School, Phraxos, Greece, requires in early October an assistant master to teach English. Candidates must be single and must have a degree in English. A knowledge of Modern Greek is not essential. The salary is worth about �600 per annum, and is fully convertible. Two-year contract, renewable. Fares paid at the beginning and end of contract. "And this." It was an information sheet