The story I have read is called ”The happiest days of your life”. It is about a young boy who is visiting a boarding school with his parents. The parents are very interested in this boarding school, and believe that this school will be the best for their son. The boy is very quiet and doesn’t say anything. When they arrive at the school, they are welcomed by a nice looking maid. The headmaster’s wife is talking to them before her husbond arrives. The wife is very friendly and when the headmaster arrives she is showing the boy the prepschool. The headmaster is in the meantime talking to the parents.
When the boy gets back from the tour he has been talking to some of the boys at the school. The boys were not very friendly, and have told him that they will mash him if he is going to this school.
The parents on the other hand has already decided that the boy is going at the school. They talk about it in the car, and just after they have agreed to send the their son to the school, they ask the boy if he wants to go there. The boy still doesn’t reply.
This story takes place in a very rich environment. The house for instance is a period house wich looks like an old mansion. The door is also opened by the maid and the magazines the headmaster couple read is also very typical for the upper middle class.
The headmastercouple are actually very diffrent from each other. The wife is very kind and polite, and I believe that the children at the school is very fond of her. She is also very down to earth, she doesn’t care weather the family lives in Finchley or Hampstead. Unlike the headmaster she is used to children. The headmaster is very awkward around children, he puts his cloumsy hand on the boy’s head. It doesn’t seem as if he nows how to handle children. He is a perfectionist, you can see that by the way he looks”his clothes were mature rather than old his skin well-scrubbed, his shoes clean, his geniality untainted by the least condescension”. He has been studying at Oxford, and has probably gotten very used to be around adults and books only, so he does no longer know how to talk to someone who isn’t as informed as himself.
I find the parents very annoying. The mother is very snobbish and is very keen on mixing with the richest of people. You can see that in her reaction when the headmasters wife asks if the live in
Finchley. The mother doesn’t like the wife because of that remark. She is not so concerned about her child, and she is patronizing him with a very high pitchey voice.

The father is obviously sending his child away, because it can give him great business contacts.
The boy is the maincharacter, but he is also the person who says the least. He is very nervous and scared to see the school. He doesn’t even read the comic or open the box of chocolate he has been giving. He is also very shy, and does whatever a grown up tells him to do. For instance when the headmaster’s wife asks him to come with her, he just follows her like a magnet.
The story is written in the 3. person by an omniscient author wich makes the story very entertaining to read. In one moment we are hearing about how nervous the boy is, and in the next we dont want people to think we are from Finchely, when we hear it from the mothers point of view. It also makes it a lot easier for us as readers to know what is really going on, when we hear more than one side of the story. The story doesn’t keep the tense either. It is in the end, when Charles is following the headmasters wife that we suddenly have a dramatic present tense. I believe the author changes the tense because it makes the story a lot more interesting in the end, and makes us notice the last bit the most.