Greetings Noble Sir Read online

  The event was highly interesting. Many of our pupils were comparative newcomers to local housing estates following clearance of old properties in the very same area the Free School was located. Most of our pupils had readily accepted the rules, regulations and general set-up of our School which, like many others of the time, was brand new, both in organisation and buildings. Most pupils wore school uniform but those who did not were not particularly unco-operative. The Free School pupils (sorry, members, they would object to the subservient role implied by the word ‘pupils’) wore whatever they liked which varied according to personality and means. Being recently formed they had not reached the stage when the group fixed its own uniform by tacit agreement - or internal coercion. They smoked all the time and we felt slightly churlish in not accepting the eloquent pleas from our pupils who suggested they should do the same because good hosts should always put their guests at ease! But we were six hundred strong; minds boggled at the resulting atmosphere had we agreed. Of course, this was before the time when such an event would keep local and possibly national newspapers in copy for days.

  One intelligent fifteen year old lass, packaged colourfully from green and blonde hair to red and black toenails, quizzed me hard about our School Committee. To me it was a means of teaching our youngsters the rudiments of democracy, since all classes elected representatives to it and it enabled anyone to ask questions about the running of the School and participate in the making of some decisions. Of course it was not a democracy and that was stated quite openly, but to the Free School lass the whole thing was an exercise in hidden control. It was a means whereby we produced a false awareness in the minds of our pupils by making them think they were participating with the controlling power in the School, whereas in truth we were subtly keeping them repressed in a way which made them unlikely to be rebellious. No doubt that is how it looked to some youngsters on some School Committees or Councils, but it isn’t what we intended.

  I refrained from inquiring into the level of indoctrination which our fair visitor was receiving. From her conversation I doubt whether her own education was intellectually free. But I won’t digress further into how on earth any education can be so.

  To my chagrin I have to admit that as a student I didn’t view my lesson notebook as it was intended either - a means to help me teach well. I saw it as contributing to getting me through the ‘Principles and Practice of Teaching’ and so I determined it was going to reap for me every available mark. I was in the greatest need of a lesson and, fortunately, that was forthcoming early in my block practice. But in the meantime I continued to worry about other matters.

  ‘How are you lot getting on with blackboard writing?’ I asked them. ‘Mine’s still appalling - I was never very good at handwriting in any case.’

  ‘Ah, you mean the Eleventh Commandment,’ said Trevor. He was referring to an exercise recently set us by the VP.

  ‘Gentlemen, you will all practise writing the following statement on a blackboard:

  LEGIBILITY IS THE FIRST ESSENTIAL OF GOOD HANDWRITING.

  This is to be written in cursive script and practised over and over again until you can write it perfectly. It must appear absolutely level, but you must not draw any lines underneath. All lower case letters must be of identical size. Each of you will be required to produce it when I ask, and I shall judge it by laying a ruler above and below to test your accuracy. I shall also judge its standard from the back of the room, from whence it must not appear too large nor too small. Needless to say I shall also judge the individual letters and their spacing.

  ‘I feel, gentlemen, that if you can be near perfect in this one simple exercise, you will have a standard ever before you to which you should aim when writing on a blackboard. Remember, you have no right to comment upon the standard of a pupil’s handwriting unless you can demonstrate yourself the high standard to which he or she should be aiming.

  ‘Therefore, if you ever have any odd moments to spare, pick up a piece of chalk and practise. There are many boards in the various rooms in College, as you will have noticed. Feel at liberty to use them for this purpose at your leisure,’ he concluded expansively.

  Though we joked about it at first, we came to view matters differently when we tried doing it. No matter how I started, facing a blackboard, I couldn’t keep my writing level. I soon realised the solution lay in good footwork, but putting that into effect was easier said than done. If I moved too slowly the line of writing began to describe something of an arc and by the time I reached the end it was plunging floorwards. I tried to speed up, but then the effect was precisely the opposite. My attempts to co-ordinate hands and feet in the exercise produced a lovely switchback effect.

  We stood in front of blackboards and sweated away at the job until our upper arms and shoulder muscles ached. The sentence assumed such importance in our lives that we couldn’t imagine how it had been omitted from Moses’ tablets of stone.

  ‘I take so long over this that if ever I tried writing so well during a lesson the kids would have a ball behind my back,’ I complained.

  I put this to the VP rather more tactfully when I next saw him at a tutorial meeting.

  ‘If that is so, Mr Flaxton, as I am sure it is, the remedy is obvious as every good teacher knows. You prepare your blackboard notes beforehand, with illustrations whenever possible, and either turn the board away from the class or cover it with a sheet if it is a fixture. Then, at the right moment, you reveal your work dramatically and your class is spurred to do its work by the high standard you have set.’

  We exchanged glances. Surely the VP was getting away from day to day reality in the classroom. Trevor tried to hedge him.

  ‘I can see the value in that, Sir, but I’m bound to say I have never seen that high a standard of board work amongst the teachers who taught me.’

  There was a gentle chorus of ‘hear hears’ as we felt his rather daring shaft had penetrated. We were wrong.

  ‘Then they weren’t St Andrew’s men!’ beamed the VP with his arms spread wide to emphasise the transparency of the explanation. ‘We produce the best here, gentlemen, and therefore I’ll brook no excuses. So, carry on with your practising.’

  We did, but it seemed that whenever any one of us achieved a level of which he was proud the VP would whirl in with gown trailing, armed with a blackboard ruler, and demolish hopes.

  ‘No, no, no, Mr Flaxton! The letters of FIRST are at least a quarter inch above those of THE and ESSENTIAL. And look at your capital L - cursive script is supposed to be beautiful and flowing, but you have contrived to draw the coils of a boa constrictor.’

  I remembered all this some years later when I was living on a new estate in the south. I made the acquaintance of a chap who lived in the house opposite. We helped one another slosh cement around because we both had paths to lay. He was a representative for a medical firm in London. One day he greeted me with a surprising idea.

  ‘Nigel, they’re going to introduce a B.Sc.(Econ) course in the evenings at the local Tech. I’m going to enrol - why don’t you join me?’

  Evenings would be possible, I thought. Nevertheless there was a snag. ‘But they’ll expect you to have A level Economics, surely; I haven’t got that.’

  ‘Neither have I, but they’re starting with an A level course - I’m going to do that first. Then next year they’re going to get a really top man from a London university.’

  I thought for a while. ‘Why not? Let’s give it a try.’ So we enrolled and enjoyed a happy and successful one-evening-a-week first year - I even joined my friend in Economic History because he needed a second subject and it was on the same evening. Then, one year later, we enrolled with a number of other people, mostly teachers, who were looking forward eagerly to what promised to be a lively and stimulating course. It even made the local paper.

  Then we met the London lecturer. He was young, personable
, and obviously knew his stuff. But as a teacher, alas, he was a disaster. He made just about every mistake in the book and we practitioners simply cringed. But it was his blackboard work that was worst for me. As idea followed idea tumbling from his mouth in spate he would suddenly round on the board and slash notes and diagrams on it as though the chalk was a sword and the hapless board a dragon. By the end of the evening you could have carted the thing away and made a fortune offering it to the world of Art if you had the right contacts.

  ‘Half a mo, let me sort this out,’ he would say in answer to a question. Then he would stand at the board with his back completely to us, scratch his head, and say, ‘Have a natter amongst yourselves, the answer’s here somewhere. Don’t worry, I’ll find it.’

  I have to admit that from somewhere amongst the mass of figures, graphs and notes which he had superimposed upon one another in a heavy scrawl he always did extract what he wanted. But writ large in my consciousness was LEGIBILITY IS THE FIRST ESSENTIAL OF GOOD HANDWRITING and the memory of my efforts under the critical eye of Major Darnley would make me irritable beyond measure. If only this man had been trained in elementary teaching and blackboard techniques, I thought, what a success he could have been. So did everyone else. Sixteen enrolled in September; by Christmas only three of us were left. They closed the class. I was left with much retrospective appreciation of the grind we had undergone at St Andrew’s in learning some of the skills of the trade.

  ‘I have the List of Schools to which you have been assigned for your first block practice,’ announced the VP, almost diffidently, at the beginning of one of his lectures. The atmosphere charged immediately and we waited, breathlessly.

  ‘I’ll read this to you in a moment. But first, I want to comment briefly upon your last essays....’ He knew how to keep us on the hook. The moment stretched to half an hour. Then, suddenly, he was skimming through it. ‘....Mr Ashterleigh, Netherly Farm Junior.....Mr Flaxton, Spenser Street Junior....Mr Forton, Houghton Road Junior....’

  Spenser Street! My heart sank because I knew very well where that was situated. It was in a rough area of back-to-back slums in between two main roads that met further on near the city centre, but on the old and dilapidated side. That was going to be tough!

  I let the others drift away after the lecture and sat cursing my luck. But not for long, because I have always tried to look forward and imagine good things ahead; in those days I was perpetually optimistic. After all, I thought, I’ve lived in this city all my life and though I live in a very pleasant suburb, many of my friends and some of my relations live in the older areas. During the War the people in these areas were marvellously friendly towards one another - and I remembered what I saw of that on VE and VJ days when the nation celebrated victory in Europe and in the Far East. The real spirit of Britain had bubbled up and welled forth there amongst the street parties and the flags and the bunting. I had wandered along streets very similar to Spenser Street just because I knew they were historic days and I wanted to feel the excitement at first hand. The kids would be just as friendly in school, I felt sure.

  In any case, I argued with myself, the tutors knew the schools, if you did well in a tough school they’d mark you up more than if you were in an easy one. Wouldn’t they?

  I stood up and looked around the lecture room. it was long and bare, with rows of narrow, vertical windows heavily leaded on one side, and plain square ones on the other looking out on to the quadrangle. The desks at which we sat were old and worn, and at the end was a low dais with a single lectern of similar antiquity. Across the wall behind this was the old blackboard with a badly pitted surface. On it was someone’s recent effort: LEGIBILITY IS THE....

  I dashed out, went to my locker, then grabbed Gordon Mersely. ‘Gordon, go and stand in there by the board. I want to photograph the lecture room.’

  ‘Whatever for, man, it’s not exactly photogenic!’

  ‘Never mind why, I just feel like doing it. In any case, I want to collect some pictures of the place to remind me of it in the future.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you’re right,’ he said as we went in. He looked at the board. ‘We certainly ought to record that for posterity. It’s not bad - probably that’s why the VP didn’t rub it off during his lecture just now. Do me a copy when you print it.’

  I know the negative survived a number of house moves as I climbed the promotion ladder in schools, but I haven’t seen it for years. It may still be in the massed paraphernalia of boxes I keep meaning to clear out sometime. But I don’t need to look at it to remind myself; the mental image is still perfectly clear thanks to the ‘Eleventh Commandment’.

  Chapter 6

  Major Darnley possessed that elusive quality, charisma, and we acknowledged the fact in our kinder moments. He wasn’t particularly eccentric but he certainly was unpredictable and we came to suspect that this was deliberate. It added to the sense of awe in which we very young men held him and so enhanced the power he held over us. This he used gently or harshly in varying measures and you were never quite sure which treatment he was about to dispense. He revelled in prowling the twisting staircases and narrow corridors during evening study, flanked by two ‘Committee Men’ from the Senior Year who usually looked suitably embarrassed at having to seek out any recalcitrant fellow student trying to dodge this enforced and hated chore. Its compulsory nature was most calculated to make us feel like children and made the attempt to treat us as men phoney. The VP knew this and wallowed in it. Yet we dared not cross him, because as the sole lecturer in the ‘Principles and Practice of Education’ we knew his would be the decisive voice in awarding our teaching marks. Those, we understood, were vital to our early careers.

  ‘Ah, Mr Flaxton,’ he would say, bumping into me in a corridor, ‘as you are going down the road in a few moments, you might bring me an ounce of Four Square Green tobacco’.

  Even if I had been going out he wouldn’t have known, but that was the manner of his giving a kindly instruction. And of course I had sense enough to obey - or to crawl, whichever way you care to look at it.

  But he was absolutely committed to the College, its reputation and to the standards of the teachers it trained. He boasted unashamedly that Education Authorities liked receiving applications from. St. Andrew’s men trained under Billy Darnley. He had established his standards years before and the measure of his success was that he had followed this with the more difficult process of maintaining the high level over a long period.

  ‘The way you men conduct yourselves in staffrooms and classrooms in future will show whether you deserve the seal of St. Andrew’s,’ he would say whenever he could swing a lecture round to this one of his store of favourite topics. It might start as a lecture on the theory of intelligence, but it would finish as indoctrination as to how St. Andrew’s men were to deport themselves... or else.

  ‘You can really say your prayers if any Headmaster reports you to me for unseemly behaviour whilst you are on schools’ practice,’ he would thunder. ‘A gentleman is always known by his behaviour and we only want gentlemen at this college! The way a man behaves to his colleagues will show whether he is a gentleman. If you truly wish to test a gentleman’s behaviour.....’ he would continue and we would slide a fraction lower in our seats and quietly consign our pens to our pockets, for we knew what was coming. Major Darnley worked this particular piece of advice into his lectures at least once a term, ...’watch him when he is in his cups.’ A pause. He would look around, with the Churchillian line to his lips.

  ‘It is not wrong for a man, after a hard day’s work, to indulge himself on occasions and, if he is in convivial company, he will enjoy being in his cups. But even then he will know how to behave if he is a gentleman.’

  Another pause, and he would stare up and down the rows of young faces in the lecture room.

  ‘You will find out ere long whether you are gentlemen. Yes - ere long.’ There would
be complete silence. Mentally we would be asleep, leaving Major Darnley no doubt musing upon massive binges of his youth about which we could know nothing.

  Suddenly the spell break. ‘Now, take Spearman’s work, for example,’ he would say, briskly returning to his lecture, and we would shift in our seats and wake up.

  Naturally the first time he said all this he really did hold us in his spell. We thought it marvellous. Here was a man unashamedly recalling old fashioned virtues, allying them with old fashioned indulgence and advocating them to us who had had our early teens mauled by the War, by rationing, shortage and blackout, and were now entering manhood at an even more dismal time of harsh economic austerity.

  The notion of being gentlemen in their cups sounded delightfully profligate, so unexpected from the Vice Principal of a Training College maintained largely by the Church. We felt we were getting a glimpse of another and more human facet of the VP’s character. Then one night Jon Kennton was treated to a full performance all to himself.

  Despite the College’s stringent regulations and its dire efforts to keep us in late at night, one of us did stay out on occasions. Naturally this posed the problem of getting back in after lights out, which certainly wasn’t easy. Knowledge of Colditz was not widespread at the time but had we been party to it we would have felt it almost as difficult to break into St. Andrews as it was to escape from that other formidable fortress. Jon Kennton had met a newly qualified teacher who taught girls’ PT. (In those days it was still Training, not yet Education.) She was rather attractive, with the kind of figure which seemed to be mandatory for young female PT teachers, and she was helping him with his studies in method. Jon was in fact older than most of us, having served in the Navy towards the end of the War. He was demobbed in time to join our Year in College. His greater experience made him rather more adventurous than the rest.