[updraught]

"This is from what was once a school kid who failed the final English exam with a mark of 28%"

If you went back to school now you'd probably get %96. Things have changed ... a lot.

Those old english teachers liked to terrorise everyone.
Ours would lean on a tall steel filing cabinet and get angrier and angrier until he'd slam the cabinet in rage. All his spare chins would wobble. He'd then call us a bunch of idiots. That was it. It never got any better that that. End of class, to be repeated next time.
You were never going to do much good if lived in the sticks. Reading between the lines of some dry Graham Greene novel was never going to make sense.