It was blessedly cool inside the Romanesque nave, its massive arches resisting the heat as they had done everything else that history had thrown at them in the past thousand years. Through the great west doors, which had been left open for ventilation, I could glimpse the ruins of the adjacent Norman castle, bleached white by the intense sunshine. In front of me were the serried ranks of prep school pupils at their speech day and I was presenting the prizes. The boys were in blazers; the girls in boaters and the staff were gowned. The head opined sensibly and the dean prayed. The organ thundered; the choir sang exquisitely and the soloist soared with that fragile, plangent beauty of the boy treble. It was quintessential England. And yet at least a third of the pupils were immigrant: black, yellow and every shade of brown.
As usual, I was speaking extempore and I would have liked to have referred to the composition of the school body in my short address.
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