Today I was a teacher, employed. True, I was also a teacher untried, but that could also be an advantage. I would learn, by God I’d learn. Nothing was going to stop me.

Oh God, forgive me for the hateful thoughts, because I love them, these brutal, disarming bastards, I love them …

So long as we learn it doesn’t matter who teaches us, does it?

Instead, we try to give them affection, confidence and guidance, more or less in that order, because experience has shown us that those are their most immediate needs.

The betrayal I now felt was greater because it had been perpetrated with the greatest of charm and courtesy.

It was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English.