Oh, the glorious British "public" school system!  The one which is open to any child whose parents have lots of money.  Some days, for no reason my own public school days come back to me...

In previous posts, I have told of the teacher, caught in flagrente abusing a boy from a local village, who was allowed 48 hours to leave the UK, as the chief constable of the county had a boy at the school and the scandal would have been bad for morale.

I also have told a "schoolmate" of mine with a double barrelled name, who sexually assaulted me, and was later apprarently killed by an Arab  soldier  who had quite possibly been given the same treatment by said double barrel in Oman.

Well, this morning I have remembered a third incident, long suppressed for no better reason than I don't enjoy recalling my schoooldays.

There was a really nasty rugger-bugger bastard called N (he probably also had a first name) who, a few years after leaving school killed an old woman in - as coincidence would have it - Hove or Brighton.  It sounded like a clear case of murder - he was robbing her at the time.  But he got off with manslaughter, and only a few years inside.

Why?  Well it so happened that my stepmother was a friend of N's stepmother, so I heard the inside story.  And N's stepmother (before the days of the supposedly more neutral Crown Procesecuation Service) was a Police Soilcitor.  She managed to organise the dropping of the murder charge.