“Adley, you horrrrrrrible vile little wretch!”

I can still feel the fear. Terror might be a more appropriate word. It’s September 1974, and I’m sitting in the back row of my classroom, two in from the window.

The least visible place to sit. I’m not on an edge or a corner, and I have a line of heads in front of me sporting dodgy 70s haircuts that further obscure me from the teacher’s view.

Plus I can see out of the window, space out, explore the universe outside.

Today however there is to be no escape. I know it and the reason I’m terrified is that I’m about to do something that I know will cause me tons of strife.

English Public Schools are manufacturing businesses that produce what is known as Oxbridge candidates: students who are likely to be offered a place at either Oxford or Cambridge universities. The more Oxbridge candidates a Public School produces, the higher it is ranked.

At my school, ‘O’ Level Exams start at 14, two years earlier than the national norm. Before choosing which subjects you want to take, you have to decide two things: whether you are inclined to the Arts or Sciences, and to which college at which Oxbridge university you will apply.

At the age of 14 your colyoomnist is very far away from knowing the answer to either of those questions. Boiling inside me is a powerful cocktail of self-pity, lust of both the physical and wander varieties, mingled with a dreamy ambition to be a writer. More than anything, I don’t want to go to university.

That is the problem. Today that’s a very big problem indeed, because as I well know, the first lesson of the year is a session with RAGS.

RAGS is Mr. Stokes, the deputy headmaster, who posts on the TODAY board in the cloister much-dreaded lists of boys’ names; boys who have to report to his office before 9.00am, to be dealt with accordingly. Each list ends with the four typed letters of his initials, R.A.G.S., so obviously he is universally known as RAGS. It is very possible that Mr. Stokes is an honourable and good man. I only know him through the eyes of a teenager, and am quite sure he’d not deny he enjoyed the power he had over us.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.