you'd hear them referred to indirectly

But it's perhaps stretching it to claim students who'd left were an actual taboo. If they had to be mentioned, they got mentioned. Most commonly, you'd hear them referred to indirectly, in connection with an object or a chore. For example, if repairs were needed to a downpipe, there'd be a lot of discussion about "the way Mike used to do it." And there was a tree stump outside the Black Barn everyone called "Dave's stump" because for over three years, until a few weeks before our arrival, he'd sat on it to read and write, sometimes even when it was raining or cold. Then, maybe most memorably, there was Steve. None of us ever discovered anything much about the sort of person Steve had been--except that he'd liked porn magazines. Every now and again, you'd come across a porn mag at the Cottages, thrown behind a sofa or amidst a pile of old newspapers. They were what you'd call "soft" porn, though we didn't know about such distinctions then. We'd never come across anything like that before and didn't know what to think. The veterans usually laughed when one showed up and flicked through it quickly in a blas?way before throwing it aside, so we did the same. When Ruth and I were remembering all this a few years ago, she claimed there were dozens of these magazines circulating around the Cottages. "No one admitted to liking them," she said. "But you remember how it was. If one turned up in a room, everyone pretended to find it dead boring. Then you came back half an hour later and it would always be gone." Anyway, my point is that whenever one of these magazines turned up, people would claim it was a left-over from "Steve's collection." Steve, in other words, was responsible for every porn mag that ever showed up. As I say, we never found out much else about Steve. We did, though, see the funny side of it even then, so that when someone pointed and said: "Oh look, one of Steve's magazines," they did it with a bit of irony. These magazines, incidentally, used to drive old Keffers mad. There was a rumour that he was religious and dead against not just porn, but sex in general. Sometimes he'd work himself into a complete state--you could see his face under his grey whiskers blotchy with fury--and he'd go thudding around the place, barging into people's rooms without knocking, determined to round up every one of "Steve's magazines." We did our best to find him amusing on these occasions, but there was something truly scary about him in these moods. For one thing, the grumbling he usually kept up suddenly stopped and this silence alone gave him an alarming aura.