CHAPTER IIIM
R. AND MRS. EVERARD CARTER were seated at breakfast, with Master Bobbie Carter, aged four, who could feed himself very nicely when it wasn’t a boiled egg. Everard Carter had the largest house in Southbridge School and was right-hand man to the headmaster, Mr. Birkett. In the early days of the war, the Hosiers’ Boys’ Foundation School had been housed at Southbridge and the two schools had a working amalgamation, but as the war went on most of the London school had gone back to its old quarters, leaving behind it some forty boys and two masters who had by now almost become part of Southbridge. Kind Kate Carter had seen in the refugee boys a good excuse for the managing and fussing for which men, in her opinion, were created, and “Ma Carter” was as popular a figure as the headma
