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Fair point about any of our 13-year old selves!
I didn't mind his description of his thuggishness myself, but if I were going to object to it, it would be on the basis of Rebanks pointing his finger only at the teachers, when it would seem to me there were a lot of factors in play. Tension at home, where the barely literate father asserted his authority over his educated wife, and where literacy wasn't valued. One has to infer that the reason his mother didn't bring up her kids to love books was that she wasn't allowed to, or because she was too ground down to make the effort. Resentful teachers, who perhaps had little choice in the occupations open to them; it might be lousy to be their students, but that goes both ways, especially if you didn't want to be in a classroom teaching them, either. I think Rebanks could have been more generous in assessing the common misery of everyone in a failing economic environment. It wasn't the teachers; it was everything. Rebanks is too apologetic for the male hegemony and not especially sympathetic to the women's plights.
I'll say it; I wonder who's gonna get the farm when he kicks? Not the girls.
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