“A relentless tease”-was this Jeremy’s preferred form of entertainment at Gresham’s to while away an hour on a winter’s morn,a means of exciting attention from his peers as he made crude sexual remarks gleaned from his farmyard background about the new influx of girls as boarders,or was there a more sinister undertone to his bullying as he rose among the ranks and wielded his brand of vengeance among the younger,defenceless and more impressionable boys,as he became increasingly aware of his station:not on a par with the cleverest boys of the landed gentry,one of whom he might well have faced several years hence in that Chelmsford courtroom. Did Jeremy finally expunge the memory of those earliest years as he reflected on that little boy on the school bus with an apple in his satchel draped round his torso,frightened to converse lest he let slip his refined accent and draw more opprobrium from his coarser fellow passengers.
Jeremy thus found by chance his place in the social hierarchy and not in any intrinsic or extrinsic forces however benevolent their intention. Such forces were sadly lacking in Jeremy’s upbringing as Jeremy missed that benign human contact,that one person who could draw him aside,put a kindly hand on his shoulder and enquire genially as to the boy’s well-being. Jeremy reacted to the myriad of forces at play with alienated compliance tinged with a strange bitterness as he drew ever-closer to himself as he fantasised about an as yet unmorphed sense of revenge. This artificially monied atmosphere of Gresham’s was characterized on the tenets of most societal structures,namely money,power,status,authority,force. It was the latter which earned Jeremy a modicum of respect as he discharged a firearm on occasion alongside the Young Cadet Force and which became etched on his mind as he gradually came to realize that this could become a means to an end.
