"Tinker Tailor Solider Spy"

[fiefoe]

The relationship between Jim Prixdeau and young Bill Roach is probably the most hopeful one in this book, and I just learned today that there's something like Prideaux's experience in John le Carre's biography too.

• His father was agreed to be the richest in the school, a distinction which cost the son dear. Coming from a broken home, Roach was also a natural watcher.
• He was like an animal frozen against its background: a stag, thought Roach, on a hopeful impulse; something noble.
• And he noticed as a generality, a thing to store away, that people with bad backs take long strides; it was something to do with balance.
• in the listless tone that schoolboys always use for saying “no,” leaving all positive response to their interrogators.
• It seemed a wonderful thing to Roach that anyone just arrived at Thursgood’s should be so self-possessed as to pinch the actual fabric of the school for his own purposes,
• Therefore this chance question, levelled at him in the cramped trailer by a creature at least halfway to divinity—a fellow solitary, at that—brought him suddenly very near disaster.
• In a quaint way, they actually added to the aura of gentleness which quickly surrounded him, a gentleness only possible in big men seen through the eyes of boys.
• But when the exam came round Jim presented a quite different paper. “You can look at this one for nothing,” he bellowed as he sat down.
• Bill had a feeling he could not describe that Jim lived so precariously on the world’s surface that he might at any time fall off it into a void; he feared that Jim was like himself, without a natural gravity to hold him on.
• Indeed, he might have been the final form for which Bill Roach was the prototype. {Such a nice segue.}

__ an extremely English adventure book: Biggles, Percy Westerman, or Jeffrey Farnol,