Ranasinghe was a charming boy and we immediately got on very well. His parents had asked Tutors from England to send out a tutor because he had become undisciplined at school and was doing badly in his schoolwork. 

I could find nothing wrong with his intelligence and the problem was a mystery to me. I spent a lot of time playing tennis with him; that is his great passion and he is very good at it. We became close friends and slowly he opened up to me. 

He said that he had got in with a rough lot of boys at school and they felt that it was ‘sissy’ to work hard and ‘cool’ to slack and they had prevailed upon him to do exactly that. He didn’t dare do otherwise as they were the cool gang and he didn’t want to fall out with them. 

I was with Ranasinghe for two months during the summer holidays and we became very close; he really confided in me. Slowly he came to see me as a role model and I managed to give him the confidence to do what he wanted to do when he went back to school and to pay no attention to the cool gang. He told me that, thanks to me, he now had the confidence to do so. 

I spoke to his father a month after the start of the next term and he said that Ranasinghe was a changed boy; he was doing well at school and had shunned his old friends and was happy to have done so. He now had a new set of friends with whom he got on very well. -LG