strangereality153

I was eleven years old. It was a day toward the end of my last year of primary school. The teacher's name was Mrs Smith. She was feared and loved in equal measure. In the middle of the afternoon, apropos of nothing in particular, she called the class to attention.

"We've been having trouble with the taps in the boys' toilets being left to run and causing floods," she said in her sternest manner. Everybody went silent, became still. You didn't want Mrs Smith zeroing in upon you in particular, not when she was in this kind of mood. She allowed a few moments to pass, ratcheting up the tension.

"Neil," she said to the boy sitting nearest to the door, "go and check the taps in the boys' toilet and make sure they're all turned off."

Neil departed at speed. Mrs Smith watched the door shut behind him. Her entire demeanour changed as she spoke to us all: "When Neil comes back I will say that we are going to stage an experiment. I am going to knock on my desk and I want all of you to count the knocks. I will knock seven times, then I will ask you all to say how many knocks you counted. But! You are all to say that you counted eight knocks. When I ask Neil how many knocks he counted, I want you all to listen to what he says..."

We didn't know what to make of this. I didn't know what to make of it.

"So, when you hear me knock seven times on my desk, you are all to say you counted eight. Does everybody understand?"

We did understand the plan, if not the purpose. I was still thinking about it when Neil returned, out of breath. Everything was fine in the boys' toilets, of course. It was just a ruse.

"Thank you, Neil," said Mrs Smith as he sat down. I wonder if Neil was conscious in any way of the 20 pairs of eyes boring into him, wondering what this was all about, why he had been singled out for whatever this was.

Mrs Smith let a decent few seconds pass. Then she announced the experiment: we were to count the number of times she knocked on her desk. She perched on the edge of her desk and very deftly, with much theatricality, she knocked on it very loudly, seven times.

"Alison? How many knocks did you count?"

"Eight, miss," said Alison.

"Steven?"

"Eight, miss..."

And so forth. I was in the middle of the pack.

"Lord Strange?"

"Eight, miss," I said with a catch in my throat. I'd had a long time to think about having to say my piece out loud as part of the conspiracy. I felt overwhelmed.

Neil was called upon not long after me. How many knocks did he count?

"Eight, miss," said Neil without hesitation.

Mrs Smith smiled at him.

Of course, Neil had counted seven knocks, as he freely confessed. He said he had changed his answer to eight after hearing everybody else say eight, and concluding that he must have miscounted.

Mrs Smith addressed the class. I stared at Neil (who seemed oddly proud of his role as the stooge in the drama). I felt the full electric charge of a full-scale revelation. I knew what Mrs Smith was going to say before she said it. But I listened anyway. She lectured us on the importance of not going along with the crowd, of trusting our own perceptions, of resisting the urge to embrace what everybody thinks solely because everybody thinks it. The majority is not automatically right just because it's the majority, explained Mrs Smith in a gentle kind of fashion, one suited to a schoolroom of 11-year-olds. I thought about Mrs Smith's experiment for days. I have never forgotten it, or her.