There was the usual silence that greeted a question we hadn’t already been told the answer to.

‘What did you think?’ he asked the class. When Moss stopped, I was half expecting to be congratulated. Had I put in a modern word by mistake, or mixed up one of the character’s names? Not that I could tell. I listened carefully, trying to pick up what I’d done wrong. Then the teacher began to declaim my mock Dickens, using exactly the same tone and slightly exaggerated manner he used when reading bits of David Copperfield to us. The other boys stared at me with contempt: smart arse Trace again, they were thinking. So memorable, in fact, that I’d like to read it out to you.’ ‘Trace,’ he said,‘produced quite the most memorable piece of coursework that I have come across in my brief career as a teacher. The teacher raised it like a flustered referee holding up a red card.

He returned to his desk, opened a drawer and lifted out my Dickens piece.

Moss was a mild looking man, with a narrow nose, a small, wiry body and dark, greasy hair that he didn’t have cut often enough. He gave back everybody’s homework but mine. I printed it off, pleased with myself, yet sure Mr Moss - one of those sarcastic, nit-picking teachers - would find plenty of flaws in my work.Ī week later, when he was returning the assignment, Moss did something I’d never seen a teacher do before. After two or three drafts, the Dickens imitation was done. I used it for typing out essays and writing fiction, though my efforts so far had been pitiful, deleted the next day. When I’d written enough, I typed it up, using the Amstrad word processor my mother had bought for me, second hand, from an ad in the evening paper. In my bedroom, I scribbled away, losing track of time. Read it first, if you like.Yours must be different.You have carte blanche to do what you like, plot-wise, but it must be in the style of Dickens.’ Then he went on about Style for a while. ‘I’d like you,’ he said, ‘to pretend you are Dickens. We’d got to the end of chapter twelve when Mr Moss gave us a different kind of assignment. I had already decided that I would live in London one day. I joined in, but, secretly, I was enjoying myself, especially when Mr Moss told us about Victorian London, a place bursting with invention and energy yet, at the same time, squalid, even depraved. The rest of the class complained that it was too long. In English, we were reading David Copperfield. The first thing you need to hear about happened when I was fourteen.

Smokescreen by David Belbin