Indiana Jones meets Dead Poets Society
The teacher who inspired me to write was a flamboyant, Rolls Royce driving mixture of adventurer and academic. No wonder I wanted to emulate him.
A few blogs ago, we asked which authors had got our readers into books. We were overwhelmed with the responses – clearly we had tapped into a very rich vein of emotion. Everyone was so generous with their stories of reading under blankets late into the night because they could’t tear themselves away from Malory Towers or Harriet the Spy.
This time, we wanted to look at who got us into writing. As schools have just broken up and teachers get a breather from what has been the most horrendously difficult year, it seems fitting to celebrate those who taught us and got us on the road to filling the blank page. I admit, I have a selfish motive. Last week, I had lunch with my old English teacher, Jeffery. I hadn’t seen him for 44 years.
I recognised Jeffery the moment he walked through the door. He was every inch the man I remembered and hadn’t even aged much. The face was familiar, in spite of the years in between, and the eyes still flashed with that mischievous defiance I remember so vividly. All the years between our last meeting disappeared with the first gin and tonic. As we talked, I recognised more and more of where many of my own opinions about the world had been shaped. Jeffery told me about his life, his birth – during an air raid on Poole harbour – and his exotic back story. We shared scandalous stories about our origins. We covered the four decades between our last meeting in languid anecdote. Jeffery is not a lists or bullet points type. Stories, bon mots, asides and funny observations were woven into the fabric of our conversation. Characters appeared, left and returned. He told me the inside scoop on the curios that were his fellow teachers including one who smoked a pipe in class. (One day, he put his pipe in his jacket pocket and it caught fire. Dangerous being a teacher back then.) Over the course of two and a half hours that went in a flash, we barely scratched the surface. My, it was fun. Round two is in a couple of weeks.
I had managed to track my favourite English teacher down after years of sporadic attempts to find him. The only record of him was a newspaper story from 2002. Jeffery had a sideline back then in trading antiques. At weekends, he trawled flea markets and second hand book shops for bargains. One weekend, he discovered twenty original drawings by William Blake hidden in the pages of a book in Edinburgh. He bought the book and sold the drawings at Sotheby’s for a small fortune. He went into antique dealing full time. (Can you blame him?) After that, the trail went cold. But my perseverance was rewarded and, having found him again, I invited him to lunch to say a proper thank you for being such an inspirational teacher.
Jeffery only taught sixth form and he had a reputation for being acerbic. On the page and in real life, he had style. He brandished an outsized black Mont Blanc Meisterstuck, from which flowed scrolls of very dark blue ink in a glamorous, spiky script. The one Jeffery used set him apart from the other teachers who just used biros. His pen was, like its owner, conspicuous – the very opposite of anonymity. A pen and a man of note. He also drove to work in a 1930 Rolls Royce Phantom II shooting break. Not the average teacher’s car. It looked as though the aristocrat of English motoring had taken sexual advantage of a Morris 1000 maid from below stairs and created bastard offspring. But it was another marker of Jeffery’s eccentric approach to the world, which I loved.
I suppose there’s no wonder in the fact I liked him so much. What impressionable 12 year old boy wouldn’t be struck by a larger-than-life, Rolls Royce driving, militaria collecting, well spoken, flamboyant one off like Jeffery as their teacher? He was hardly anodyne or forgettable, like all the others. Jeffery was somehow different. Better. A cut above. Way above. He was loud, supremely self-confident. He was forceful. And he had interests outside school and teaching. It always felt that he was teaching to fund adventures in more interesting endeavours, such as hunting for exotic antiques and archaeological rarities. Like a sort of British Indiana Jones. He was an excellent teacher, got us to parse sentences (I remember him shouting at another boy because he didn’t know what part of speech ‘was’ was) and directed us in productions of plays. He just wasn’t like any of the other teachers – more Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, but in a pith helmet. Jeffery had style.
Jeffery could exude menace which rose to volcanic fury if provoked. He didn’t suffer fools. But he was also quick witted and affable and if you got on his sunnier side, you would bask in the brightness. Like all great teachers, he made you want to do well.
Under Jeffery’s tutelage, my written English blossomed and it was his encouragement which propelled my desire to write. When I moved to my senior school aged 13, I was able to impress my next English teacher by using the word “anachronism” correctly in my first essay at the new school. My new teacher read the essay aloud to his A level students as an example of good writing, which really got my confidence up. I never looked back and English became my favourite subject. That was Jeffery’s doing.
Great teachers often play important roles in literature, film and TV series. The stern but ambitious-for-her-brightest-students Maestra Oliviera in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. John Keating, played by Robin Williams, in Dead Poets Society. And Julia Robert’s character, Katherine Ann Watson, in Mona Lisa Smiles, where she tries to inspire the girls in her class to aspire beyond finding a husband and having children. Teachers open our eyes and help us find what we love. They show us the heights that can be achieved and encourage us to strain for them. But while they deserve to be celebrated, they rarely are. This is not the case in all cultures.
In Russia, all children go back to school on the same day at the beginning of the new academic year: the 1st September. It is known as Knowledge Day. The pupils take flowers into school for their teachers and the new first year pupils (children start school aged seven in Russia) are taken to their first class on the shoulders of those students who will be leaving school at the end of the academic year. The ceremony is called ‘First Bell’ and it happens nationwide in a country which venerates education. It is a moving ceremony to see. Maybe we should borrow such a tradition and celebrate those who set us on our way in the world? Especially, given we are writers, those who helped us discover the joy of writing.
Who inspired you to write?
Who inspired you to write? We’d love to hear about the quiet heroes who made the written word come alive for you and made you want to set pen to paper. For you, it may not have been a teacher but someone else. This blog, as well as the lunch we had, is my thank you to Jeffery. I owe him a lot more than a lunch, but it’s a start. Who would you like to thank? Do tell us the story of that person and how they got you into writing. We’d love to read it and celebrate that person with you.
That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?
Walt Whitman