The story goes that they stripped off his green suit, and conveyed him to the toilet block where they spent half an hour flushing his head, until such time as the local police arrived to quell the minor riot. But I saw none of that. I remained in the classroom with the bulk of the other boys, fingering the yellow fuzz on my chin and seeing this worrying recent advent with new eyes.
    Naturally, academic reprisals followed. Wacka Braun and Doodles Weekes were expelled, and spent a lot of time after that lurking in alleys, in ambush, waiting to get Demented Demetre. Some say they did and others that they didn’t, but that hardly mattered. The other fringe participants were suspended and the rest of the class were lashed by other teachers and kept in detention writing lines for a full week—I took my share of the punishment with a welcome expulsion of guilt—and there was even talk of criminal charges being laid. But all that mattered little to a bodgie. The police escorted Mr Demetre about the school, which somehow made him look all the smaller, and in each class he took there was always a second big strong teacher to ensure discipline was maintained. It didn’t work. Mr Demetre himself stuttered and stumbled through his lessons, his confidence shot, and even when the stubble of a new beard began to appear on his chin, it was too late. The hypnotic hold he had once had over us was broken and could never be repaired.

As I was passing on the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today;
I wish that man would go away.
    You just can’t go past a title like The Man who Never Was. Especially when it’s a true story. Ewan Monagau, a very proper English Naval officer had to wait for official secrets clearance before being able to tell anyone of his remarkable war experiences. His mission (Operation Mincemeat) was to try and confuse the Germans about the location of the D-day landings and he came up with the idea of a dead officer washed up on the shore behind enemy lines carrying documents full of disinformation. The nutty plan approved, there followed the difficulties of obtaining an appropriate body—even at the peak of the war—and making the ploy convincing. Superb stuff, and made into a no less superb movie with the sublime Clifton Webb as Montague and Gloria Graham as the girl who uses her own tragic history to provide fake love letters for the corpse and then finds she has to convince a German spy (Stephen Boyd) that he really existed. The most marvellous thing about the whole business was that apparently the trick worked.
    The above poem, by the way, is not the one used in the film. This occurs as a sort of prologue to the opening credits as we watch the body washing up on the beach.
Last night I dreamed a deadly dream,
Beyond the Isle of Skye.
I saw a dead man win the fight,
And I dreamed that man was I.
Scary stuff.