Practice

Jonah Pike boxed for the county from the age of thirteen and was, by sixteen, genuinely good.

That mattered, in the way it matters at a school, and it bought him a position he could not otherwise have held — because Jonah was not clever and was not rich and was not funny, and Freddie Kerr-Wallace was all three, and the arrangement between them had been settled so long ago that neither of them could have described it.