Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet Page A

or not.
    “Today,” Mr. Pinkerton continued, “you are going to sit quietly at your desks and do a test. There’s no need to be frightened of it. It’s just a way to help us decide which kind of secondary school will suit you. But I want you to concentrate and do your best. And Mrs. Pullen and I will be watching to make sure you do not copy answers from your neighbors.”
    Mr. Pinkerton smiled to soften this stern injunction.
    He sat in Mrs. Pullen’s chair while she heavily yet softly patrolled the room. He was not at all sure what he thought of the eleven-plus examination, or “the Scholarship,” as it was commonly known. On the one hand, it offered working-class children such as these a troublesome route to betterment. The brightest among them might, just might, claw their way to positions in life that their parents could not imagine. His own heroes had done exactly that and changed the world. On the other hand, the eleven-plus was designed to sort the sheep from the goats. It was socially divisive. (Even though there was no reason to suppose that sheep were superior to goats. Or vice versa.) Mr. Pinkerton entertained an idea — more exactly, a dream — of a system in which all children, boys and girls, were educated together and in which their particular talents were nurtured and equally valued. The details of such a system evaded him. They were beyond his imagining.
    He surveyed his harshly barbered and unkempt flock. It was unlikely that any of them would pass, anyway. And as far as the boys were concerned, that might be just as well. Newgate Grammar School represented all that he found deplorable. God help a boy from a council estate who found himself there. Lamb to the slaughter. Kid to the slaughter. One or the other.
    Someone in the back row farted, audibly, setting off a susurration of titters.
    “Boys, girls,” Mr. Pinkerton said as sternly as he was able, “please.”
    Seven weeks later, George Ackroyd came home from work to find his wife in a state of high excitement. She waved a sheet of paper at him, wobbling the pink hair rollers under her head scarf. She’d had a home perm; the kitchen was full of its rank and acrid stink.
    “Clem’re passed the Scholarship, George! He’re got a place at the grammar school!”
    “What?”
    He read the letter, still wearing his bicycle clips.
    “Ruddy hell.”
    He read the letter again at the blue-flecked Formica kitchen table.
    “Where is he?”
    “I dunno. I told him, and he went off on his bike.”
    Win came in from the garden, wearing her laundry whites.
    “He go to that Newgate,” she said, “he’ll start to think his shit dunt stink.”
    George’s feelings about the matter were complicated, as were his feelings about his son generally. His first thought was that there had been some sort of mistake. Clem was a quick little reader, and he was a dab hand at drawing. God only knew where he got it from. Other than that, he was not noticeably different from the other boys on the estate. He had the same yokel accent and rough manners, the same scarred knees resulting from bike accidents, the same obsession with climbing trees. He was hungry all the time. He ruined his clothes in bloody, muddy, and unruly games of football in the local park. And now this!
    George lit another Player.
    A couple of years earlier, he’d noticed that Clem’s drawings were mostly of war machines: tanks, planes, and imaginary monstrosities that spat flame and bullets, all rich in technical detail. This pleased George; he thought he’d found something, a common interest, that would span the silent distance between his son and himself. That Christmas he’d bought the boy a Meccano set, and the two of them had spent the long and dreary December afternoon building a dockyard crane, George’s fingers nimble with the fiddlesome nuts and bolts. Clem’s initial enthusiasm for the task had soon waned. He’d been more interested in the plans and diagrams than in constructing the