To Sir with Love

Braithwaite rides a double-decker bus to his first day at Greenslade Secondary School. Among the other passengers on the bus are large “charwomen,” who remind Braithwaite “somehow of the peasants in a book by Steinbeck: they were of the city, but they dressed like peasants, they looked like peasants, and they talked like peasants” (5). These working-class women make inappropriate jokes to one another and the conductor, some of which regard the physical attractiveness of the narrator, especially in contrast to their husbands’ lack of sexual vigor. Braithwaite finds their commentary amusing.

Another woman, noticeably nicely-dressed and of higher class, boards the bus, and a boy offers her a seat next to Braithwaite. She declines to sit next to the narrator, and the conductor reprimands her, but she ignores him, content in her superiority, which impresses Braithwaite. Braithwaite gets off at the next stop, preventing the conductor from further engaging with the woman, much to the conductor’s annoyance. Braithwaite believes he has done the conductor a favor.

Braithwaite enters London’s East End, which appears radically different from its literary references. In place of his fanciful imaginings of the stomping ground of classical authors, he finds “nothing romantic about the noisy littered street bordered by an untidy irregular picket fence of slipshod storefronts and gaping bombsites” (9).