A 656-page novel by a Darlington author which so neatly captures the feel and spirit of life and schooldays 50 years ago that it becomes social history.

There’s the mad chemistry teacher Bunsen Prosser “enthusiastically incinerating something or bubbling a horrible potion in a flask” when Tubby Wanless sneaks in, offering the dentist as an excuse for his lateness – “his high flush of Amber Nectar and reek of cigarette smoke was hardly noticed in a stinking place like the chem lab”.

But, as is so often the way, even though Tubby applied himself to less academic things, he knew what he should have been learning. “He could generally keep us right about an experiment we had seen, but he had rarely witnessed it in its entirety in a class where he was often not compos mentis.”

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