A sixteen-year old kid from a south Bucks village walked into High Wycombe library one rainy October day after school had ended, picked out a book by the spine from the fiction shelf and read
and he understood something – that life existed beyond his valley and beyond the school walls and beyond cleaning the floor at Woolworths and beyond anything that his parents or teachers or betters had ever led him to believe was out there; he understood that he would be heading out into that world just as soon as the opportunity arose, and so after just a few more months of enduring the drudgery of riding buses into town and walking up a mile-long hill to an institution where they beat him if he refused to be coerced into believing all the bullshit that he was being fed, he told them all to F-off, donned his afghan coat and flares, emptied his little wooden locker in the green-painted corridor of its exercise books and a hand-me-down geometry set in a faux-leather case, walked through the gates, looked down the hill one last time, and entered that life.
