Absolute Beginners

nd cosy cottages, and roads made of mud, and agricultural numbe

Cool, this is London, not some hick city in the provinces! This is London, man, a capital, a great big city where every kind of race has lived ever since the Romans!’

Neither of them asked me why I’d come, or why I’d not been for an eternity, which in my book are two signs of civilised human beings – because, believe me, most hosts are bullies holding pistols at your head, but not this couple.

The Dean gazed round at the teenage products like a concentration camp exterminator

And though that dreadful old cub master with his awful shorts, and his floppy khaki hat, was queer as a coot and even queerer, he didn’t interfere with any of us kids in any way, and actually succeeded in teaching us morals – can you believe it?

against your better sense to tell it

I’ve often explained to her that to show you’re a friend of the coloured races, and free from race prejudice and all that crap, you don’t have to take every Spade you meet home and drag him between sheets. But