So that he escaped the ragging he would have had to
undergo at Wrykyn in similar circumstance. It was only Mr. Downing who
gave trouble.
There is a sort of instinct which enables some masters to tell when a
boy in their form is wearing gym shoes instead of the more formal kind,
just as people who dislike cats always know when one is in a room with
them. They cannot see it but they feel it in their bones.
Mr. Downing was perhaps the most bigoted anti-gym-shoeist in the whole
list of English schoolmasters. He waged war remorselessly against gym
shoes. Satire, abuse, lines, detention--every weapon was employed by him
in dealing with their wearers. It had been the late Dunster's practice
always to go over to school in gym shoes when, as he usually did, he
felt shaky in the morning's lesson. Mr. Downing always detected him in
the first five minutes, and that meant a lecture of anything from ten
minutes to a quarter of an hour on Untidy Habits and Boys Who Looked
Like Loafers--which broke the back of the morning's work nicely. On one
occasion, when a particularly tricky bit of Livy was on the bill of
fare, Dunster had entered the form room in heelless Turkish bath
slippers, of a vivid crimson; and the subsequent proceedings, including
his journey over to the house to change the heelless atrocities, had
seen him through very nearly to the quarter-to-eleven interval.
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