Chapters 7-8 Summary

Chapter 7, "Three Simple Stories," begins with a narrative of an 18 year old student who is admittedly: "shuttered, self-conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting." (Chapter 7, page 171)

Since other people the same age behaved in a similar fashion, the narrator did not see his actions as being particularly unusual. In between graduation and university, the student took a job as a pre-school master. The ideal of the job was clearly more wonderful than the actuality, which was spending summer days in a crammer half a mile from the narrator's house, rather than living in an old stone mansion teaching privileged children with doting parents. Instead, the new tutor was in charge of a bookie's son and a solicitor's daughter. The house was present, however, as was the family. The father was a spy, the mother an actress. The grandfather...