Furthermore, when the Head returned to find the class in an uproar and asked the monitors who was talking, I would have thought it unlikely that even the most foolish monitor would fail to see that he could say ‘Just about everybody’ and thus accuse nobody in particular.
To say they hadn’t seen anybody talking was, under the circumstances, the act of sheer stupidity or a fearless mickey-taker.
And finally, to find in a junior school a child so expert in C P that he knows the cane hurts more on cold hands and so chivalrous as to pass on the information to a nearby damsel in distress was serendipitous in the extreme.
Clearly, I know nothing about human behavior.