Barring Brian Manning, who taught me art for the five years I was at boarding school, the only other master who accompanied my secondary education for the full five years I was there was Martin King who taught us Spanish. I liked him very much and his classes – right the way through my time at Tonbridge – were a welcome oasis from an environment that at first I found very tough and cold. It isn’t that he was particularly warm at first – he insisted on calling us by our surnames, as was the custom, until we began our lower sixth – but yes there was something human and benign (in the good sense) about the environment he nurtured. I no longer recall when this episode happened but it may well have been sometime around our lower sixth when he had agreed to call us by our chosen Christian names; Oli, Chris, Jim…etc. I think one of us might have asked him a pointed question regarding his celibacy (I suppose he must have been in his mid fifties at that point)…..and he suddenly opened up to us. He told us he had never got married because in his youth the woman he had wanted to be with had broken his heart. I know who said this and I won’t name him but that person guffawed from the back of the class “Yeah…right!!” and what he didn’t say aloud but was inferred and understood by all of us – including Mr King – was that the old boy was “a poof”. It was ever so brief but I saw the flash of pain in Mr Kings eyes, he lowered his voice and told us to turn to page 96 in our books.