A Somerset Lad

Fifty years ago this term, Miss Stanley was the English teacher for Form 1 Br at Elmhurst Grammar School. Miss Stanley loved literature and reading and words. Being among the dullest in the form, it was only in later years that I realised how good a teacher had taught us.

Fifty years ago, Miss Stanley taught us Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. Going through the lines of the Jabberwocky with my First Year class this afternoon, I thought it was probably the only poem I could remember from my schooldays.

Perhaps the learning of poems was not part of our education. More accurately, perhaps it was just not part of my education.

In schooldays, my daughter developed a habit of reciting poetry to herself while standing and waiting for things. There were two poems that recurred, both demanding greater skills of retention than the Jabberwocky.

The most frequently recited when we stood on railway platforms was W.B Yeats An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Perhaps Yeats’ protest against the pointlessness of the Great War had a point of contemporary reference for a secondary school student in the Noughties. The unwinnable conflicts being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan seemed as futile as the wholesale slaughter of 1914-1918.

The other poem she would recite was more baffling.  Perhaps it was taught in school Irish classes, it was an Irish translation of Oliver St John Gogarty’s The Ship.

Tháinig long ó Valparaíso.
Scaoileadh téad a seol sa chuan.
Chuir a h-ainm dom i gcuimhne
Ríocht na gréine, tír na mbua.

‘Gluais,’ ar sí ‘ar thuras fada
liom ó scamall is ó cheo.
Tá faoi shleasaibh ghorm Andes
Cathair scáthmhar, glée mar sheod.

Perhaps its meaning was not important, how many people in former times understood Procul Harum’s song Whiter Shade of Pale? Perhaps it was the sound of the words that mattered. Perhaps to be always looking for meaning was to be too literalist.

Perhaps learning the Jabberwocky set off fifty years of not understanding poems.

There was an announcement to Sixth Year students on the school tannoy (does anyone still call it a tannoy?) The students were to go down to the football pitch for a group photograph on the grass bank.

Walking down with the group of students from my classroom meant passing through unfamiliar territory, the corridor passing the doors of the changing rooms. In English and Irish, metal plates on each door said which rooms were those of the boys and those of the girls.

Even at remove of forty-five years, the doors prompted feelings of fear, they an old and long-forgotten sense of apprehension was revived. I hated physical education lessons in schooldays in the 1970s.

PE was a favourite class for some people.  For the muscular and the strong and the athletic and the lithe, it was a chance to spend an hour away from the confines of the classroom. For someone who was frail and asthmatic, it was a time that could not have passed too quickly.

The PE teachers were not bad people; in fact, their understanding of the capacities and constraints of the human body probably gave them a greater sense of empathy with their pupils than was possessed by some of those who taught us more academic subjects. It was just that they could not make someone into something they were not.

Memories of the first year at Elmhurst Grammar School in Street are still haunting: football, basketball, gymnastics, athletics, cricket – it was hard to know at which I was worst. The only certainty was that my name would never appear on any of the team lists that would be posted each week on the school noticeboard.

Having the lack of an aptitude that demanded anything by way of physical strength, agility or speed meant that PE became a subject to be avoided as much as possible.

When my asthma became so severe, that I was sent to school on Dartmoor, the greatest disappointment was the amount of physical activity on the timetable. Exercises outside every morning, gymnastics on Wednesday, football or cross country running on Saturday mornings. Football, I enjoyed, but cross country running was torture.  Heatree House, High Heathercombe, Hameldown, Jay’s Grave, Heatree Cross – it was gruelling.

Relief came in the autumn of 1976.

Taking examinations a year in advance, I had gaps in my timetable. My teacher told me to adjust my timetable so as to attend the classes that were necessary. Her benign approach allowed me to attend classes that were interesting and to completely avoid particular teachers.

The year had well progressed before she realised that PE was one of the subjects I had decided was unnecessary. Her instruction that I might join the rest of the class at the gym was said with a smile.

Perhaps even the PE teacher had given up on me by that point – the painful memories evoked by changing room doors were not repeated in those final seasons of secondary education.