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  The assorted, casual, chattering historians in the third floor staff-room seemed to Mr Hogg to get more and more cheerful every day. A cheerfulness which increasingly irritated him. Standing by the kettle waiting for it to boil, he tried to avoid social contact by staring out of the window. He dreaded their teasing comments. A miserable countenance said it all.

  "Cheer up, Simeon! Think of all those exam scripts you'll never have to mark again!"

  The window looked out on to private gardens. A scene Mr Hogg had contemplated for over 30 years, but now it appeared to have a new meaning. He saw not just shrubs, trees and lawn: he saw freedom. A cat was idly cleaning itself. Happy cat, contented cat, lucky cat!

  They had all recently entered into a new millennium. This would be his fifty-eight year, and he had reached the time of life when most other people were younger than himself. It had not seemed five minutes since the reverse was the case. For the first time he started to think about death. How much longer did he have left? He had recently read that the average life expectancy for a white man in the Detroit area was seventy-three.

  "Seventy-three! Only fifteen years left! My God!"

  To get the scale and size of fifteen years he considered the scope of the previous fifteen years. 1988! It was nothing - yesterday! It was hardly worth calling it 'the past'. 1988 was still very modern. In that year kids were already walking around with personal stereos and wearing digital watches on their wrists. Satellite TV's, video recorders, computers and electronic games were in nearly every home.

  Fifteen years! It was like a death sentence .... and he was wasting the little time which was left: the few precious remaining years!

  Ten minutes later he was in the rest room washing his hands and, suddenly, noticed his pained old face in the mirror.

  "Too right! I am the picture of gloom."

  But it was his face, only older. Inside he was the same. He could go back much further than a brief fifteen years. He could go back a length of time which made a big difference. He could go back half a century to the 'stone age' when he wrote on a slate, using a slate pencil, under the stern authority of a Victorian schoolmarm. He could go back 40 years to the time when .....

  Suddenly he looked at the reflected image and tried mentally to delete the many lines and other sad, sagging acquisitions of age. He particularly studied the eyes. Basically they had to be more or less the same eyes which had looked back at him in 1960 - a year he often thought about. He imagined the constant cheerful expression of those eyes, as they once were. Smiling, dancing eyes, lit up with joy...

  He leaned forward to the mirror -

  "Are you there, Dobba? Are you still there ... somewhere?"

  At the end of that day he stood outside the 'Office of the Principal', but the old sign, with the old name 'W.M. Forbes Ph.D.', had long been removed and now with egalitarian simplicity it said - 'Betty Lou Vanderburgh'.

  With the crumpled note, which had requested this interview, stuffed in his grey suit pocket, together with his contentious list of grievances, he was fearful, but, notwithstanding, now prepared to engage in a full scale confrontation. He gave the door two firm knocks.

  It was opened at once by the child within causing a waft which sent several papers flying to the floor. The great desk of Dr Forbes had been moved up to the wall, away from its previous intimidating 'position of power' which was directly in front of the summoned, subordinate member of staff.

  There were now two comfortable chairs in the centre of this room facing each other giving the impression of parity and democracy. Simeon was not fooled. For all her skill conveying the sympathetic and empathetic approach, Betty Lou was the same powerful dictator which Dr Forbes had once been. The window dressing was different, but the reality was the same: what Betty Lou wanted, Betty Lou got!

  Instinctively he wanted to get stuck in. Unilaterally he would resume making his students once more accountable. He would return to writing grades on scripts. He would give regular tests and end of semester examinations. He would ignore the new computer generated reports and issue his own, which proclaimed grades, percentages and class positions together with real honest comments. He would re-introduce and publicly display his league table of the ten best achievers of each class. He would go it alone .... and he intended to tell her so!

  He wanted to get it over with. She could not actually fire him, but if open hostilities came to the surface, she, and her progressive Mafia of recently appointed disciples, could make life even more intolerable for Mr Hogg. He steeled himself for the appalling scene to follow and its aftermath.

  However, it was she who had called the meeting, and it was she who would have to launch the reprimand - then he would respond.

  It seemed to take an eternity as she stooped to pick up the papers. He helped.

  "Oh thank you, Simeon, so kind. If only my office could be as neat and organised as your pristine room. They tell me you actually clean it yourself?"

  "Well ... just a few minutes at the end of the day ... I .."

  "If only all my troops were as conscientious as you are! Do take a seat."

  She beamed a wide smile. This initial benign banter was interpreted by Mr Hogg as a softening up process to prepare the way for the censure and possible ultimatum to follow. She reached for a file and sat facing him. Apprehensively he noticed it was a file inscribed with his own name. His throat went a little dry. She looked up and smiled again.

  "Do you know, Simeon, that you're the longest serving teacher here? Really! You're not quite as old as Tim Bucheye, but out of 178 teaching staff, you ... Here it is ... September 1968. 'Magna cum laude'. What an achievement!"

  On the face of it the tone was sincere, but he could not help thinking that possibly she despised his long dull career spanning three decades in the same old subject, in the same old school, without any effort to seek promotion and move around the country. To Simeon it was simple. He loved history and had only ever wanted to be a classroom teacher. Management had never interested him.

  She leaned back and smiled at him again. The smile faded slightly to an expression of concern with a gentle hint of puzzlement as she put the next question -

  "Have you given much thought to retirement, Simeon?"

  So that was it! That is how she would solve her problem. But how? The earliest possible date was 2005 when he was 60. He had every intention of breaking out of the 'Socialist Republic of Eisenhower High School', even at a reduced pension at this first chance. Colleagues would tease him -

  "Are you going at 60, Simeon?"

  "Is the Pope Catholic?" was his standard response. He would sell up and return to England, to the 'sceptred isle' he had left so long ago and so loved. Mr Hogg responded to the Principal's question.

  "I certainly intend to apply for the early option of 60 if it can be achieved."

  "That's what I wanted to talk to you about, Simeon. It's a hard fact of fiscal life that a valuable teacher like yourself is much more expensive than an inexperienced probationer, and as you know, I have to balance the budget. At risk of sounding like 'The Godfather', I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse." She took a breath.

  "As you know the Board of Regents had their meeting on Friday and, Ed Dyer, the Chairman who has just negotiated our new state Constitution with the State Senate ... Well you know all about that. The long and short of it is this, Simeon. Strings have been pulled. If you want to cut loose, you can go this year on the same terms as if you were 60 years of age!

  In fact ... if you wish Simeon .. as it's the last day of Semester, tomorrow being Good Friday ... you can go this very day! What d'ya say?"

  Mr Simeon Hogg could not contemplate a better Friday. He wanted to leap up into the air and say - 'Whoopee!!' But in fact, he said in his quiet dignified British tone -

  "Thank you, Miss Vanderburgh - I'll go today."

  Chapter 3

  The Agony, the Erotic and the Ecstasy

  Simeon floated out of the Principal's office and into the
familiar, comfortable retreat and blessed silence of the rest-room. Once more he took an interest in the image in the mirror. This time it beamed back at him two generations younger. He reached out to touch the hand of the boy in the reflection. He had reached out over, and through a time-span of 43 years. He had made contact with Dobba.

  Out in the hall, a few students were walking towards him. He recognised one young man who had been very difficult during this winter semester. Right now it all seemed so trivial. The rejuvenated teacher was bubbling with mischievous excitement and had a sudden urge to lunge towards the youth, give him a kiss and big hug. The wild urge was wisely suppressed and, as expected, Mr Hogg walked past the group with his usual quiet dignity.

  "Mustn't lose my pension before I get it!" he thought.

  He became thoughtful. Was it something to do with this process of escape? For some reason his mind travelled back forty six years and four thousand miles to a hill-top mining town called Heanor in Derbyshire. It was the end of a lunch-time when, once again, he was 'unwillingly creeping' back to his hated destination, Mundy Street Boys School, a place of endless Monday mornings inflicted by a sadistic master with the willing assistance of his cruel disciples. This day was going to be different, on this day an extraordinary event occurred.

  Hangdog and dawdling up the right side of Market Street - he stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the sight before him. It was beautiful. It was stunning and magnificent. A visual orgasm symbolising all the promise and hope of a future, in stark contrast to an unbearable present. It was everything to love and he loved every part of it as he slowly walked around this long, low, wonderful orgy of dazzling chrome. His eyes caressed the knife blade fins, with their rocket launcher taillights and were delighted by the aggressive bullet bumpers. It oozed power and seduction, occupied a wide swath of the road, but common-sense and practicality was put on hold when this dream machine was conceived. Motionless it was, yet one knew that in motion it would glide in silence and complete superiority. Simeon gazed through the tinted huge wraparound glass windshield onto the bright array and multiplicity of controls. Automatic transmission, air conditioning, power steering, photoelectric beam adjuster and of course - cruise control.

  Do not forget, reader, this was 1957! In 1957 very few people in Heanor were fortunate enough to own a car. If they did have a car, almost always little, boxy and black, a heater was considered a luxury extra! This bright gleaming vision could have been an alien craft from another world. In fact it was from another world, a world with advanced technology called the United States of America, a promised land which Simeon Hogg would one day visit. But on that day, in Heanor, on Market Street, he found all the other cars small, sad, ugly, dull and contemptible.

  Perhaps it was that brief shaft of light, that defining and electrifying moment nearly half a century back which gave birth to his present pride and joy. His 1959 Cadillac Eldorado was patiently waiting for him in an individual locking garage. A few long standing members of staff had this facility, a valuable and important privilege for Simeon Hogg. The original owner would have purchased this luxury model for under ten thousand dollars. It was now under-insured for $100,000, and had cost its present doting owner a small fortune to lovingly keep it in mint condition over the last 28 years. A magnificent monster from a past age, this eighteen foot, two ton dream on wheels was the most American part of the stern British schoolmaster who had never lost his English accent.

  But once behind the huge wraparound windshield and space-ship style dashboard with every conceivable gadget at his fingertips, Simeon would bring the massive engine to life and slowly, the long, low, orgy of dazzling chrome would silently glide past curious pedestrians. Young people admired, people who would not have been born for another three decades after the original conception of this beautiful sculpture of mobile grandeur. They saw it every day, but every day they stopped and they looked. They looked with varying responses. Some were critics and condemned the automobile as gaudy arrogance, an affront to the ecology and common-sense. Others shared the adoration of its proud owner and savoured the vision, delighting in the knife blade fins, with their rocket launcher taillights and gleaming, aggressive, front bullet bumpers.

  He sat back comfortably on the hand-stitched leather seat, and with one finger on the immense power-assisted wheel, guided the stately and lovely expanse of poetic metal out of the campus.

  A sadness descended. He pondered the practicality of taking his alluring automobile back home with him to narrow country lanes in the wilds of Derbyshire where he intended to live. There was the high cost of trans-Atlantic transportation, not to mention expensive specialised maintenance and the bankrupting thirst of a V8 seven litre engine to consider.

  "I'd love to have you over there, if only just to look at you, you gorgeous hunk! You're the best part of the United States, the one part I'd dearly like to take with me. Sorry, darling. You're too big and too ravishing! It just won't work. At long last it's time to say goodbye."

  His ambition was to live in a remote part of the Peak District in modern comfort but tolerating no neighbours and no modern noise. It would be a considerable expense to achieve this ambition, making a big hole in the totality of his wealth. This consisted of the retirement lump sum, the proceeds of his house sale and life savings. He would need a new car in the United Kingdom and there would be very little money to spare. The vintage Cadillac had been an investment. Even back in 1975 they were becoming increasingly rare and soaring in value. This was an excellent specimen with all original gadgetry in working order. Even the Autronic Eye (automatic head-lamp dipper) was fully operational.

  A wave of grief swept over him as he imagined a stranger owning and touching his cherished choice. Yet again he went through the mental calculations and considered the feasibility of taking the car back to England. Once again the rational answer came back; a clear no.

  Homeward bound, he was now driving due north out of the city limits of Lincoln Gardens and into the city of Allen Park. But there was no change, everything looked just the same. Indeed the table-top, perfectly flat, urban environment of the vast Detroit conurbation was all one to Simeon Hogg who had never come to terms with the American landscape. The vista before him was an endless, ugly, untidy clutter of utility poles supporting a mesh of phone wires and power cables. The edge of the sun dazzling, rough white road, gave way to soft mud into which no flowers were ever set and no weed would grow in the hostile salty and gritty mix. Beyond this bleak margin were numerous dull parking lots, used car lots under the tasteless, garish, ever clattering, cheap plastic buntings. Hideous gas stations were scattered among cheap and flashy hamburger joints - all with their myriad gaudy signs screaming out low low prices in an endless blitz of unrestrained and unplanned commercialism. It sounded nice on the map - Lincoln Gardens and Allen Park, but parks and gardens they were certainly not.

  The great car floated on bravely soaking up jolts from deep pot holes in the ill-repaired, cracked concrete pavement. Almost every road was a straight line running exactly north-south or east-west, forming a grid of depressing metropolitan sameness within a fifteen mile radius of Downtown Detroit.

  It was a cruel functional world which the foreign driver had suffered since he first disembarked from the old Queen Elizabeth in 1963, the day before John F Kennedy was assassinated. The death of the President also signalled the death of Simeon's 'American Dream'. Within days he was pining for his homeland, but in all these 40 years Simeon had never found the courage to make the big return. In those far off days in the previous century, emigration was massively expensive, a one-way trip: it was forever. Family, friends and the American people in general told him daily that he was very fortunate to be in 'The Land of the Free'.

  "What's ya beef, Mack? Most young guys like you, back in ol' decayin' yorup; why, they'd give their right arm to be able to come to the United States! Quit ya whingin'."

  As time passed, connections were formed, friendships forged and new roots put down in
terms of employment and eventually college. Earnings were high and material living standards were good. In 1969 he heard about the scandal of English teachers eking out a living on a net starting salary of twelve pounds a week. Starting American teachers in south Michigan were paid nearly seven times that amount. Home-sick he may have been, but the ex-patriot was able to accumulate capital, and at the same time, visit Britain every long summer vacation to see it at a level of comfort, and luxury, denied to Englishmen of average means.

  But he had not seen bluebells since the spring of 1963. He had not seen the mellow mists of October in the Derbyshire Dales, or the romantic fog of November, or the glistening white brilliant frosts of January since being a teenager. Every part of the British year, save for July to early September, had been denied to him for over a third of a century - and now he was entering the autumn of his years. That special meeting of just a half hour before had changed everything. He was going home. He was going back to England - forever.

  The car was safely garaged and the driver now indoors. He could not settle. He was churned up with an excitement which Simeon had not known for some time. He reached for the 50,000 scale Ordnance Survey map of Derbyshire -

  "Where shall I look? How shall I look? By car? Cycle would be better. Where to stay? Hotel in Buxton?"

  He looked at the complex geography of sharp peaks, twisting dales and tangled ravines which could not have contrasted more with the monotonous, horizontal expanse beyond his window. This was a pointless exercise without knowing what properties were available, but it mattered not. At this moment he needed the nostalgia. He needed to soak up Derbyshire. Home. Memories. His eye drifted to the south east corner, looking for Heanor, a hill-top coal mining town which was just three miles off the map.