A small, rather smart, car drove through the gates of Hartlow School on the border between London and Hertfordshire. The man in the car was not ugly, but neither was he beautiful; he was neither too fat, nor too thin; he could not be said to be old, but he was not too young, either. His arrival in the town did not create any great stir, nor was it marked by anything out of the ordinary. This was Dr John Watson's first day as Headteacher at the most exclusive boarding school in Britain.
He had woken that morning and known that this was the right decision, the right change for him. After years working at inner city schools and failing academies John would be directing the education of a very different type of student. Hartlow's 'Old Boys' made the school famous in itself; politicians, oligarchs, a handful of sheiks - and John knew he would be selling a comodity to the school board wholely different to his previous jobs - academic prodigy, rather then a grade A - C pass. But he was ready for it, prepared for the tax avoiding elite on mass. He had shaved carefully, dressed with great thought and eaten his breakfast staring out the window, distracted.
Now John was in front of the school's main building at quarter past seven. The weather had finally changed. After two weeks of resplendent skies, a drizzle now fell on the town. Under a black umbrella he stood looking at the wide stone steps that led to the entrance - a large door wrought in iron and dark wood. Students would not be arriving for an hour or so, so John took a moment to watch the sleeping school alone, before the sound of wet Land Rover tires and suitcase wheels filled the streets. After a few minutes the rain suddenly intensified and reluctantly he allowed the moment to pass, making his way up the sodden steps, through the door and into the gloam of the building.
It had been Mike Stamford who had convinced him to apply for the job. Mike, on his way out as resident Head of Science, had needled John into going for an interview. An old friend from medical school, John had never escaped the feeling that Stamford had disliked his decision to join the army. The last Headteacher had been on the surface a cheerful man, ruddy in his tweeds, on his arm a home county beauty who had been admired by staff and student alike - and who had left to be a government advisor to the Education Secretary, obviously shrewder than anyone had thought. And so John has entered a vetting process so searching that candidates for Supreme Court Judge would have expected no less. There had been endless rounds of interviews, endless tasks set to determine his skill with strategy and budgeting. Somehow he had come through the other side as the strongest applicant and now… and now here he was.
Inside, the dark porch led back into the building and after another pair of doors came a square hall from which up stairs and through leading corridors all the classrooms in the main building could be found. It had a high vaulted ceiling of carved stone and long low-lying stained glass windows that reminded John of the gothic cathedral in Glasgow. At eight o'clock the rest of the staff would meet here to formal greet the new Headteacher though John had met them all briefly during the summer at his induction and subsequent meetings with the Heads of Department and Housemasters. Then at nine o'clock students would arrive and settle into dormitories, greet their friends, ignore their parents. At two o'clock he would give his first assembly to welcome back the boarders and introduce himself. But for now, John sat on the bottom step of the staircase and waited.