Our art teacher had the habit of gripping his gown in both hands – at chest-level, like a Victorian making a speech, his thumbs in his lapels – and staring out through the classroom window, smiling at the memory of all the fine things he had seen.
“Boys,” he might say after a minute or two’s silence, “the Wembley Exhibition had the most marvellous pavilions.” More often, it was cathedrals he remembered: those that lined the route of the London-to-Edinburgh train, a progress that started in
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