When he first arrived at boarding school, Billy was implacable. He had never before had to conform to such a rigid code of conduct, which seemed to have nothing to do with education, but merely served to confine Billy and confuse him as to what he was doing there anyway. From time to time he would notice a group of children who had gathered in a corner somewhere to confer together, and then an overwhelming desire would come upon him to confess his loneliness and confusion to them. However, he lacked the confidence to confide in his schoolmates, so his sense of inner conflict just grew greater and greater.
The school day seemed to consist mainly of a series of empty formalities. It started with the school assembly, a mighty congress of sleepy, barely conscious boys and bored looking teachers. Here the headmaster would take the stand to confront the boys with the evidence of some mischief or congratulate someone on winning a scholarship and so on. In his mind, Billy could never connect any of this with his reasons for being there, and so he took to skipping it, often for many consecutive days at a time. After the assembly came a long string of lessons, one of which was given by some balding schoolmaster who would recite from a sheaf of notes that looked even older than he did. There was one lesson, however, which was different from all the others and that was the Greek class, where the teacher was a rather glamorous young woman called Miss Lee. This may have been because Miss Lee was a good teacher, or it may simply have served to confirm that the person Billy missed most was his mother, but in any case the consequence of this was that Billy started to excel in Greek, and this in turn led his achieving high scores in Latin.
At about this time, Billy was discovered to have been absent from assembly, and was punished with the loss of weekend privileges for a whole term. The consensus among the teachers was that this punishment was overly severe, and Miss Lee came to console him. She told him she had a bad conscience about what had happened, but she suggested that with Billy’s consent she was going to enter him for a national Greek composition contest. Instead of a punishment, he should consider his loss of weekend privileges as an opportunity to conserve his energy and consolidate his grammar and vocabulary.