THE HEADMASTER OF Millfields Primary School was an overweight, kindly, bespectacled man with a face that was always a bright pink. His name, by happy coincidence, was Mr. Pinkerton. He was a romantic socialist whose ambition was to instill in his charges a love of those rich things — poetry, art, Russian achievements, music, the beauties of the natural world — that might console them during lives that would almost certainly be poor, coarse, and disappointing.

Early in the summer term of 1956, he eased himself smilingly into Mrs. Pullen’s classroom with a large, fat envelope under his left arm. The children stood up. He bade them, pinkly, to be seated.

“Boys and girls,” he said, “as you know, you will — I am sorry to say — be leaving us at the end of term. We — I — shall miss you. You were among the first children to come to this brand-new school, and you will be among the first to leave it. You will be going to secondary schools, where you will learn new skills and how to be grown-ups.”

Clem, seated in the third row, paid only intermittent attention to this speech. His eyes were fixed, sidelong, on Hazel Cork, who could be relied upon to have a fit when anything out of the ordinary happened. Hazel’s fits threw her from her seat onto the floor, where she would writhe and swear and try to eat her ponytail and display her knickers. Clem was unsure whether he wanted this to happen or not.

“Today,” Mr. Pinkerton continued, “you are going to sit quietly at your desks and do a test. There’s no need to be frightened of it. It’s just a way to help us decide which kind of secondary school will suit you. But I want you to concentrate and do your best. And Mrs. Pullen and I will be watching to make sure you do not copy answers from your neighbors.”

Mr. Pinkerton smiled to soften this stern injunction.

He sat in Mrs. Pullen’s chair while she heavily yet softly patrolled the room. He was not at all sure what he thought of the eleven-plus examination, or “the Scholarship,” as it was commonly known. On the one hand, it offered working-class children such as these a troublesome route to betterment. The brightest among them might, just might, claw their way to positions in life that their parents could not imagine. His own heroes had done exactly that and changed the world. On the other hand, the eleven-plus was designed to sort the sheep from the goats. It was socially divisive. (Even though there was no reason to suppose that sheep were superior to goats. Or vice versa.) Mr. Pinkerton entertained an idea — more exactly, a dream — of a system in which all children, boys and girls, were educated together and in which their particular talents were nurtured and equally valued. The details of such a system evaded him. They were beyond his imagining.

He surveyed his harshly barbered and unkempt flock. It was unlikely that any of them would pass, anyway. And as far as the boys were concerned, that might be just as well. Newgate Grammar School represented all that he found deplorable. God help a boy from a council estate who found himself there. Lamb to the slaughter. Kid to the slaughter. One or the other.

Someone in the back row farted, audibly, setting off a susurration of titters.

“Boys, girls,” Mr. Pinkerton said as sternly as he was able, “please.”

Seven weeks later, George Ackroyd came home from work to find his wife in a state of high excitement. She waved a sheet of paper at him, wobbling the pink hair rollers under her head scarf. She’d had a home perm; the kitchen was full of its rank and acrid stink.

“Clem’re passed the Scholarship, George! He’re got a place at the grammar school!”

“What?”

He read the letter, still wearing his bicycle clips.

“Ruddy hell.”

He read the letter again at the blue-flecked Formica kitchen table.

“Where is he?”

“I dunno. I told him, and he went off on his bike.”

Win came in from the garden, wearing her laundry whites.

“He go to that Newgate,” she said, “he’ll start to think his shit dunt stink.”

George’s feelings about the matter were complicated, as were his feelings about his son generally. His first thought was that there had been some sort of mistake. Clem was a quick little reader, and he was a dab hand at drawing. God only knew where he got it from. Other than that, he was not noticeably different from the other boys on the estate. He had the same yokel accent and rough manners, the same scarred knees resulting from bike accidents, the same obsession with climbing trees. He was hungry all the time. He ruined his clothes in bloody, muddy, and unruly games of football in the local park. And now this!

George lit another Player.

A couple of years earlier, he’d noticed that Clem’s drawings were mostly of war machines: tanks, planes, and imaginary monstrosities that spat flame and bullets, all rich in technical detail. This pleased George; he thought he’d found something, a common interest, that would span the silent distance between his son and himself. That Christmas he’d bought the boy a Meccano set, and the two of them had spent the long and dreary December afternoon building a dockyard crane, George’s fingers nimble with the fiddlesome nuts and bolts. Clem’s initial enthusiasm for the task had soon waned. He’d been more interested in the plans and diagrams than in constructing the machine. George had finished the job unaided, had experienced a childish pleasure winding the crane’s little winch to hook the lid off the mustard pot. Then Clem had spent much of cheerless Boxing Day drawing ever more madly complex Meccano plans, numbering each component and providing a number key. He’d covered the blank side of half a roll of leftover wallpaper. The set itself was never used again. George had been disappointed in his son, just as he had become disappointed with everything else. But here was a thing, now: passing the ruddy Scholarship!

George felt himself to be a cut above the rest of the estate. Rather than join the beery crowd watching Borstead Wanderers boot a ball about, he spent his Saturday afternoons doing jobs around the house, keeping it dress-parade smart. He wished others would do the same. The Leggetts had turned number 16 into a one-family slum. He’d seen a rat in the street the other night, and he was pretty sure where it’d come from.

There were three wages coming in, now that Ruth had her part-time job at Griffin’s, managing the till and checking the prescriptions. In all but name, he was the foreman at Ling’s. His wages went up a pound a week every year. They were doing all right. George was proud of the fact that his wife had a new washing machine that gurgled itself empty via a ribbed gray pipe into the sink. He’d bought himself a new bike. Secretly, he nursed plans to rent a television set. His son getting a place at Newgate seemed part of . . . it. What “it” was, George couldn’t rightly say. Change? Progress? Socialism? Well, that hadn’t lasted long. Bloody Tories were back in. Short memories people had. As soon as they could put bacon and cheese in their sandwiches again, they’d gone and voted Conservative, like the idiot sheep they were. “It” was a better life, though, no matter what. The future he’d fought for. He’d imagined love, respect, comfort, pranky sex. “It” hadn’t turned out to be that, though. Quite the opposite. But his boy had passed the Scholarship.

Suddenly and urgently George wanted to know if any of the other kids on the estate had passed. He hoped not, by Christ.

Sundays, in the 1950s, were days of fathomless boredom and infinite silence. Clem hated them, numbly. His grandmother’s power over the household had diminished since the move to Borstead, but in accordance with some deal or treaty he had not witnessed, she still held sway over Sundays. In fact, since she had fallen out with the chapel and joined those Brethren loonies, keeping the Sabbath holy had got a lot worse. Clem was not allowed to play football or ride his bike or go down to the park. Nor read comics, which gave off a satanic aroma that only Win’s subtle nose could detect. There was no proper breakfast because there would be a Big Dinner. The Big Dinner was mince-and-onion pie with potatoes and sprouts. The house brewed the smell of it through the morning. He had to wear Best Clothes, which, on this hot summer day, consisted of a clean Ladybird T-shirt and long khaki-colored shorts that bloomered out below a snake belt. In the afternoon, while the grown-ups snored to the wireless, he swung himself back and forth on the front gate, pushing himself away from the post with his left foot until the hinge groaned and sent him slowly forward to the post again, with a clonk. And a clonk. And a clonk. The sun burned his cropped head.

Something moved at the edge of his dazed vision.

“Wotcha, Ackroyd, you skunkwhiff.”

Goz Gosling, perched on his almost-motionless bike. Goz lived on Milton Road, on the far side of the estate from Lovelace. He was something of an outsider. In part this was to do with his odd looks. Goz had black curly hair that sat on top of his head like a nest that had landed there without him noticing. He had darkish skin and a long nose that widened at the end like a spoon. (It was a belief shared by Win, among others, that a Gyppo had once spent the night in the lower branches of the Gosling family tree.) Goz was strange in other ways, too. He had funny ways of talking, as if he hadn’t settled on a voice of his own. He laughed at things that no one else did. He didn’t like football. He was, however, the estate’s undisputed champion at slow biking. It took him ten minutes to cover the twenty yards from the corner to Clem’s gate, and when he got there, he held the bike stationary, jigging his shoulders and twitching the handlebars to keep his balance. Then, with a tragic wail, he fell sideways and clutched the gatepost.

“Orright, Clem? Hot enough for yer?”

Clem shrugged. “Nah. Call this hot? My dad says when he was in the desert, if yer wore a tin helmet —”

“Yer brains’d be cooked in quarter’n hour an you’d go mad an die. You told me.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. Twice.”

Clem pushed himself away from the gatepost, and when he clonked back, he said, “What’re you doin?”

“Nothun. Thas bloody Sundy, ennet?”

Goz switched his voice to posh, like an officer in the films.

“So I thought I’d undertake a spying mission deep into enemy territory. Loaded the jolly old transmitter into the saddlebag. Codebooks in my pants, where Jerry’d never think to look. Cunning, eh? Sewerside pill on my tongue, see?”

He stuck his tongue out to reveal the Polo mint, sucked thin as a wedding ring but still intact, on its tip.

“Wanna come for a ride?”

“Yeah, but I can’t.”

Goz sighed, got off his bike, and dropped it into the hedge. Clem saw that he was barefoot, which was amazing. Goz sat on the curb with his naked feet on the hot road and his back to Clem.

He said, “I hear yer passed the Scholarship.”

“Yeah,” Clem said after a pause.

“So’ve I,” Goz said.

“You hent.”

“I hev.”

A long silence. Then Clem said, “Hev anyone else? Woodsy, or Cush, or any of them?”

It was a monumental question packed with fear.

“Nah,” Goz said. “Not as I know of, anyhow.”

He turned and looked up at Clem.

“So thas just me an you, then, ennet?” He grinned, displaying his buck teeth. “We’re gorna get some stick, young Ackroyd.”

George’s pride in his son’s achievement flipped into outrage when he received a packet of information from the grammar school. The first item was a grudging letter of congratulation on headed notepaper and signed by Miss A. D. Withers, Secretary to the Headmaster, Lieutenant Colonel B. O. Bloxham, MBE. The second was the school brochure in a buff cover featuring an ink drawing of Newgate’s splendid Jacobean frontage.

The Sir Henry Newgate School, George read, was founded in 1606 by Sir Henry Newgate, Bart, the grandson of Sir John Newgate, appointed Sheriff of Norfolk by King Henry VIII. Originally (and properly) known as the Sir Henry Newgate School for the Sons of Gentlefolk, the school’s values emphasized, and continue to emphasize, academic rigor, discipline, and Christian values. The school chapel, completed in 1621 . . .

George took up the third item. It was a list of what Clem would need when he went to Newgate. Everything was, helpfully, costed and could be procured, exclusively, from Treacle and Phipps, School Outfitters, of Cathedral Plain, Norwich.

“Hell’s bells,” George said, looking up at Ruth. “The blazer is five quid, and the badge is ten bob on top of that, sew it on yourself. And he’s got to have house tabards for sport, whatever the hell they are. Stone me.”

Ruth scanned the list. “That all come to more than thirty-five pound, George.” She’d gone rather pale. “An thas not countun shoes. He’ll need new.”

George ground his cigarette out in his saucer.

“I thought education was meant to be free in this ruddy country,” he said.

That evening Win went up to her bedroom and returned with four five-pound notes in her hand. She handed them to her astonished daughter, along with a heavy sigh.

“I dunt spose we can hev the boy gorn off to the grammar rag arsed,” she said sorrowfully. “Thas a good job some on us hev put somethun away for a rainy day insteada spendun it all on newfangled contraptions.”

And she turned and smiled at George with implacable sweetness.

Also in the year 1956, a rockabilly American singer called Carl Perkins released a song called “Blue Suede Shoes.” Being a song about fashionable footwear, it left the people of Norfolk largely unmoved. As did “Hound Dog,” by Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley. However, in Norwich, two so-called coffee bars played the songsincessantly on their jukeboxes, and in full sight of passersby, black men from the nearby American air base jived with white girls. The police were summoned.

A film called Rock Around the Clock, featuring a fat-faced man called Bill Haley, who had a curl pasted onto his forehead and a band called the Comets, provoked young people to get out of their seats and dance in the aisles of the Norwich Odeon. The police were summoned.

That summer, six Teddy boys and their girlfriends appeared on the seafront at Cromer. The young men wore jackets — lavender, powder-blue, and pink, with black velvet collars — that hung to their knees. Their black trousers were tight on their skinny legs, and they wore suede shoes with thick soles. They sported Elvis hair, Brylcreemed into waves that met and slumped onto their foreheads, and long sideburns. Their girls wore tight sweaters over brassieres like the noses of jet aircraft, and loose skirts. They were surrounded by curious locals and photographed eating chips by the Eastern Daily Press. (The photo was published above the characteristically witty caption The Teddy Boys’ Picnic.) The police were summoned. The Teds were arrested on suspicion of Causing Excitement and put on the next train back to London.

Politicians and bishops and newspaper editorials thundered dire warnings about the pernicious effects of that latest vile import from America, rock ’n’ roll.

It would also be the subject of Lieutenant Colonel Bloxham’s stern address to Clem’s first Newgate School assembly, in September.

The salesman at the school outfitters (it might have been Mr. Treacle himself, considering the slithery sweetness of his manner) got the measure of Ruth and Clem as soon as they entered the premises. He’d had a good many Scholarship boys through the doors that summer. Ruth was wearing her best clothes and spoke in her best Miss Selcott voice, but he smelled the anxiety coming off her, sharp as ammonia. When Clem was kitted out and staring, appalled, at his reflection in the full-length mirror, Treacle coughed behind his freckled hand.

“If I may suggest, Modom?”

Ruth blushed at him. Her head was full of panicky arithmetic, knowing exactly what was in her purse. And the price of the leather satchels.

“Boys,” Treacle said, “have the regrettable habit of growing. Especially at this particular age. They can’t help it, of course. One minute they are four foot six; the next they are five foot two. You purchase a pair of shoes, size seven, and by the time you get home, his feet are size nine. What is one to do?”

Ruth waited fearfully for enlightenment.

“I normally recommend buying larger sizes, Modom. A blazer of this quality is a considerable investment, after all. It would be not unreasonable to expect it to last two years.” He considered Ruth’s tired footwear. “Or even three. The cap is probably fine. In my experience, boys’ heads grow more slowly than the rest of ’em.”

Clem’s soul iced up. The cap was the worst thing imaginable. It was, like the stupid blazer, a pukey shade of green. It had a stupid button sort of a thing on the crown, from which four lines of gold braid descended, north, east, south, and west. Above the cap’s blunt peak, the embroidered badge — something like a dragon peering through a bunch of flowers — looked like a target a Nazi sniper might aim at. If only. Given the choice, Clem would have preferred his brains splattered over the mirror rather than be seen wearing the bleddy thing on the estate.

So when, on the first morning of the new term, Clem waited for Goz to come down the street, he wept.

“You look a right twot,” Goz said, stationary and upright on his bike.

“So do you,” Clem said, wiping his face with the overhang of his sleeve, pretending his tears were snot or sweat.

“I know. These caps’re a form of cruelty.”

“I’m not gorna wear it. Round the corner, I’m gorna stick it in me saddlebag.”

Goz nodded like a judge. “My spies tell me,” he said, “that if we’re caught not wearing them, we get our arse thrashed. And that it hurt.”

“Bollocks.”

“Yeah. Them an all. Ready, then?”

As soon as they turned onto the Aylsham road, they were ambushed by their former comrades, dressed in hand-me-down Secondary Modern uniforms. Clem and Goz crashed through with their legs kicking right and left, their brown leather satchels bouncing against their backs. A hail of stones and unripe conkers fell just short of their bikes, but the taunt reached them, echoing in the tunnel of the railway bridge:

“Grammargogs! Grammargogs! GRAMMARGOG BASTARDS!”

Later that same week, Edmund Mortimer suffered his first heart attack. Luckily, he was holding the telephone at the time — he was trying to get through to his son, Gerard, in Canada — and when he fell, he dragged the instrument off the desk. The crash brought his housekeeper hurrying to the morning room.

And in November of that momentous year, a boat called Granma departed the coast of Mexico and headed for the island of Cuba. It contained eighty-two hairy revolutionaries — among them Che Guevara — led by a man called Fidel Castro. Their lunatic ambition was to liberate Cuba from the American-sponsored dictatorship of a man called Batista. Improbably, they would succeed, and Fidel Castro would make a significant contribution to twentieth-century history and to Clem Ackroyd’s yet-undreamed-of loss of virginity. Clem would, no doubt, have been interested to learn this, but at the time his mind was on more urgent matters. When the Granma slipped into the Gulf of Mexico, he was in a tearful agony of dread. He and Goz had been bushwhacked by the Sec Mods again, and Brian Woods had thrown Clem’s cap into the back of a passing lorry loaded with beets. His dad was going to go mental.