When I was invited to Amsterdam in 2001 to deliver a lecture there, I visited the house of Anne Frank and found it an immensely moving experience. Visitors walked around in silence, clearly very much affected by the photographs, diary extracts, letters, horrific facts and historical details shown on the displays. We walked through the small entrance to the upper floor, originally hidden by the bookcase. How could several families manage to survive in this space for so long? I asked myself. Still on the wall were the little cut-out pictures, one of Princess Elizabeth, which Anne had stuck up.
In 2002 I took my daughter Elizabeth to see the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. I remembered sitting in that vast theatre, now beautifully restored to its former glory, all those years ago to see a very different production: The Rivals. Lizzie and I were now in the posh seats in the circle, but I glanced back to see the very top of the balcony where I had sat in the seats Mr Williams bought for me nearly forty years before.
At the end of the last act of the play, Anne runs down the stairs on stage chattering excitedly. She is now a young woman and tells her parents how good it is to be alive on such a bright sunny day. She is full of optimism and hope. Her mother and father, clasping each other, stand frozen centre stage. Beneath the stairs in the half-light, unseen by Anne, are two sinister figures in dark trench coats. The Gestapo have found them. When the curtain fell there was no applause. The huge theatre was completely silent. Then people left the theatre quietly, unhurriedly. Lizzie cried on the way home. The following day she read my old dog-eared copy, bought from the book club, of The Diary of Anne Frank, from cover to cover.
A Christmas treat at the school was the showing of a film to the whole school, crammed into the hall. It was a black and white film flashed on to a large white sheet pinned to the back of the stage, and the projector invariably broke down at various intervals, usually at the most exciting parts, to loud catcalls and whistles of disapproval. Being Christmas and near the end of term, the teacher operating the projector was tolerant of the noise. The film always seemed to be a Second World War drama like The Cockleshell Heroes or The Cruel Sea. In Ill Met by Moonlight, the youthful Dirk Bogarde was on stirring form as the British army officer given the task of working with the partisans in occupied Crete to kidnap a local Nazi commander. We booed when the Germans came on screen and cheered the British. We were all very patriotic in those days.
*
I guess I must have had a very pronounced Yorkshire accent when I was at school, but my teachers made no attempt to teach me to ‘speak properly’ as the poor woman in the primary school had attempted to do. Of course, Mr Dyeball and Mr Pike would correct us if we were slovenly in the way we spoke; they were quick to point out jargon, colloquialisms and slang and certainly would not tolerate swearing, but we were never criticized for the way we spoke. We were encouraged to answer questions, express our views, perform choral readings, read plays aloud in class, debate and make presentations. I am grateful for that, for to attack a child’s way of speaking is to attack something which is so much a part of him, which he brings from his home and which he has learnt from his parents. I have met so many people with regional accents who had teachers who tried, by one means or another, to ‘knock it out of them’. They have been corrected, held up to ridicule, given lines and sometimes punished for supposedly mispronouncing words.
So – I have been massively fortunate in my schooling. Much of what I hold dear was first shown to me by teachers like Miss Greenhalgh, Mr Williams, Mr Firth, Mr Schofield and Mr Pike. They inspired me, encouraged me, took an interest in me, and convinced me that, despite my humble background and my average abilities, I could achieve anything.
It was Mr Williams who decided that some of the Eleven Plus failures were bright enough to be entered for GCE O level and persuaded his staff and the local education authority to go along with him. It was unheard of at the time for a secondary modern school to enter students for external examinations, and it was thought by many that if these youngsters hadn’t come up to scratch at eleven they wouldn’t achieve much five years later. It is a fact that there are some of us in life who are ‘late developers’, and I have met many people who performed poorly at school but flourished in later life.
The prevailing view at the time was that the secondary modern pupils would be best occupied studying practical subjects like woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing, rural studies, housecraft and cookery – to equip them for apprenticeships and the more menial jobs in society. Leave the academic stuff to the teachers at the grammar school.
The pupils at South Grove were the product of a working-class generation which clearly knew its place in the pecking order. At the time there was little in the way of aspiration for boys at the secondary modern beyond going down the pit, working in the steelworks or maybe getting an apprenticeship. They were raised in a close-knit, homogenous community and learnt not to have too many expectations, because this would only lead to disappointment later on. Young people, very largely, accepted this and knew their place in the world, their only ambition being to secure a job locally that they could keep for the rest of their lives.
Mr Williams, the product of a working-class Welsh mining family himself, thought otherwise. He believed that many of his pupils had real potential to succeed academically and he was determined to give them a chance. So the staff at South Grove embarked on an exciting initiative to teach the older pupils the O level syllabuses. It was a brave enterprise when I look back, for many of the teachers, I guess, were inexperienced in teaching for external examinations, unlike their colleagues up the road at the grammar school. My teachers were being tested themselves, and perhaps this was an added incentive for them to work with greater enthusiasm, drive and determination. In the event the cynics were proved wrong, for many of us left South Grove with a string of O levels, many with distinctions in the different subjects. For example, twenty-seven in Mr Pike’s class passed O level English Language and twenty-two passed O level English Literature, with some, like myself, achieving the very highest grades.
It was impressed on us by the headmaster when we embarked on the courses that we had to work very hard, spend a deal of time on our studies and be prepared to stay in at night to complete the large amount of homework that inevitably would be set. He also told us that the school was, in a sense, being tested and we should prove wrong those who didn’t think we were capable.
Listening to Mr Williams telling us that we were the first in this new initiative, the guinea pigs, and that we shouldn’t let him and the school down, I was determined to succeed and applied myself seriously to my studies. After school I would walk down Moorgate Road into town and straight to the public library, where I would spend a couple of hours in the peace and quiet of the reading room. It was an enormous, silent place with wall-to-wall shelving, large square tables and hard-backed chairs. It smelt reassuringly of floor polish and old books. I would sit at one of the large tables below a leaded window, which was set ten feet above the floor so that no one could peer in and those in the library would not be distracted by the bustling world outside.
The public library tended to attract a certain clientele. The regulars included the industrious mousy girl with round glasses poring over a textbook, the unshaven individual in the flat cap reading the Rotherham Advertiser, the intense-faced woman researching her family history, whose table was piled high with books, the elderly man come in out of the cold who gently snored in the corner and the sad-faced misfit, in the National Health glasses and wearing a ridiculous coloured bobble hat, who spent his time flicking aimlessly through a tome the size of a doorstep on some esoteric subject like The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Medieval Woodcuts.
Behind the curved wooden counter sat Miss Tissiman, the librarian, scanning the room, ever alert and watching in case anyone should raise a voice or be seen eating.
I got to know Miss Tissiman well during the two years I studied for my O levels. At first I wa
s daunted by the prim little figure in the white blouse and grey pencil skirt, with silver hair scraped back savagely over her scalp and into a tight little bun. When I asked for a particular book she would emerge from behind her counter and lead the way to the appropriate shelf where the tome was to be found. On one occasion she came over to my desk, both hands clasped in front of her, and told me she had observed me using the books. I felt suddenly guilty of something. She then explained that when turning a page one should do so by sliding an index finger beneath the top of the page and turning it. ‘To do as you are doing, turning the page from the bottom, damages the paper and leaves a thumb mark.’ I apologized. She gave a small smile. ‘Most people turn the page from the bottom. You are not alone in doing so.’ Since then I have always turned the pages of a book the way the librarian taught me and passed the instruction on to those I have taught.
On another occasion, after she had rung her small bell to signify that the library was about to close, she stopped me and commended me on my diligence.
‘Perhaps when you have completed your studies,’ she told me, ‘you might consider a career in a library. You clearly like books.’ Then she gave a little smile before adding, ‘And know how to handle them.’
The following week she presented me with a collection of pens, some paper and a pencil case, explaining that these had been left unclaimed in the library and perhaps I could make use of them.
Miss Tissiman was another person in my life who opened a door for me. As the O levels approached she suggested that I study some past papers, to give me an idea of the kind of questions which might come up, and on one occasion she sat with me, dictionary in hand, stressing that I should become very familiar with the words used by the examiners, words like ‘consider’, ‘evaluate’, ‘assess’, ‘describe’, ‘estimate’, ‘calculate’, ‘justify’ and ‘summarize’, because many a student has failed through not answering the question.
The week before the start of the three-week examination period I told the librarian that I wouldn’t be coming into the library again for some time. She shook my hand and wished me well.
‘Remember to read the questions carefully,’ she said, ‘check through your work and never leave the examination room early.’ She gave a little smile. ‘I’ll be thinking of you.’
38
Mr Theodore Firth (Theo) was a very different sort of teacher from the other members of staff at South Grove. He was a stout, red-cheeked man with tufts of sandy-coloured hair at the side of an otherwise bald head and had a roar like a lion and a stare like the sweep of a scythe. He was the archetypal Yorkshireman: bullish, plain-speaking, lacking in sophistication, a no-nonsense sort of man who could put the very fear of God into his pupils. There was no pacing up and down the classroom for him, no sitting on the end of the desk and, above all, no noise. He would stand like some great Eastern statue, legs apart, arms folded over his barrel chest, jaw jutting out, surveying the neat lines of desks that faced the front of his classroom.
Many pupils lived in fear of this larger-than-life character, and when we entered his room we did so in complete silence and with great trepidation.
Mr Firth rarely addressed any pupil by his or her name. Boys were invariably called ‘Johnny’ and girls ‘Mary’, but in my last year at South Grove he started to call me Phinny or Phineas.
Mr Schofield recalls Theo thus:
When I first joined the staff at South Grove, I was greatly impressed by the number of strong characters, some of whom were very forceful. The most memorable was Theo Firth who specialized in history. He had a fearful countenance and his classroom was meticulously clean and ordered. Strangely enough he often came to school in an old sports jacket with leather patches on the arms, no tie, baggy corduroy trousers, plimsolls in the summer and Wellington boots in the winter, which made him look a somewhat bizarre, unkempt character. I often wondered what happened to his teeth, for his gums were bereft save for one large tooth, what he called his ‘pickle-chaser’. When container dinners were served at the church hall near the swimming baths, Theo was always in charge of taking a contingent of dinner boys down Alma Road in perfect order. People often commented how well-behaved the pupils were. Of course, no boy would have been so foolhardy as to misbehave when Theo was in charge.
Young people these days clearly know a great deal more than I did at school on a whole range of subjects; they seem more adventurous, outspoken and sophisticated, but many I have met on my visits to schools sadly don’t have the grasp of English history and knowledge of important historical dates that I had at their age. One reason for this is that history, when I was a lad, had a much higher status in the curriculum and was compulsory for all, but another, more important, is that I had a teacher who brought the subject to life.
At primary school I undertook projects about the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Vikings and the Normans as children do today, and then at secondary school I started on the fascinating journey of discovery through the history of England and then Great Britain, learning about significant events and famous characters, important treaties and world-changing wars, great battles and life-changing inventions in chronological order. Now pupils choose their options and after the age of fourteen it may be the case that they never study history again.
Some would say that there is no room in education for teachers such as Mr Firth, those unusual individuals who are out of the ordinary, idiosyncratic, who don’t always follow the various directives. In my view they are wrong. Such teachers frequently have a greater impact than the more conventional teachers and are often remembered years later when the ‘ordinary’ teachers have been long forgotten. Mr Firth was strict but he was scrupulously fair, totally committed but rather unpredictable and, provided you worked hard and were well-behaved, he posed no problem. He insisted on every pupil’s undivided attention, neat and accurate writing and work to be completed on time. In answer to his questions he expected the right hand of the pupil to be raised straight as a die and for the pupil to answer clearly and confidently. He could, so I was told, be a violent man and rumours were rife about him. The only occasion when he lived up to this fearsome reputation was when I was in my last year at South Grove and witnessed him dealing with the bully while I was trying to get my head around algebra with Mr Duffield on the other side of the hall partition. I had never seen him hit a boy in any of the history classes I attended.
Even before I met the man, my brother Alec had related gruesome accounts about how Mr Firth had hurled an insolent pupil through a partition in the school hall and there was blood and broken glass everywhere. Another time he was reputed to have thrown a board rubber at an inattentive pupil and the unfortunate boy was been taken comatose to Doncaster Gate Hospital. Then there was the occasion when Theo had supposedly hit a boy so hard with his slipper that he had set the unfortunate miscreant’s trousers on fire. Another time, it was said, he flicked, with unnerving dexterity, a piece of chalk which ended up lodged in a boy’s nostril. Stories about Theo, largely invented I guess, were legion, and such a reputation did wonders for his discipline.
I recall my first history lesson with Mr Firth. We nervous first years queued up outside the history room as he walked up and down the line scrutinizing us as a sergeant-major might inspect his new recruits. We filed into the history room and were assigned seats (hard wooden desks with fold-up seats, lids and holes for inkwells, entirely unsuitable for growing adolescent boys with long legs), and, much to my chagrin, I was placed on the very front desk. Portraits of English monarchs lined the walls, with a timeline stretching above them, and at the front, dominating the room, was an impressive teacher’s desk on a dais. At the side, under the window, was a substantial bookcase containing neatly stacked books and folders, a set of dictionaries and some reference texts. Directly outside the window, in full view of all the class, was a flagpole, which Mr Firth seemed to regard as his very own. On St George’s Day the white flag with the red cross would be hoisted, and t
he Union Jack was flown on Trafalgar Day and the Queen’s birthday. The Friday before Remembrance Sunday and on Armistice Day the Union flag flew at half-mast.
I began to really like history. I would sit silently, listening wide-eyed as Mr Firth related in his deep gruff voice stories which would later be written as notes on the blackboard for us to copy into our exercise books. We learnt of the tragic death of the noble Richard III (‘maligned by Shakespeare and betrayed by his supposed friends’), the murder of the seventeen-year-old Duke of York in the Wars of the Roses (‘beheaded by the perfidious Lancastrians and his head placed on a spike on the gates of York’), the ill-fated Queen Katherine of Aragon (‘poor betrayed Spanish princess’), the embittered Mary Tudor and mad King George III. I learnt about Mary, Queen of Scots (‘put to an untimely death by her jealous cousin, mishandled, traduced, a political pawn in the hands of the cold-hearted, treacherous Scottish lords’), the mighty Spanish Armada (‘defeated by the plucky English sea-dogs’), the Gunpowder Plot (‘which was all a put-up job by Queen Elizabeth’s scheming adviser, the Lord Cecil’), the foolish and fanatical James II (‘who threw his throne away’) and poor, weak misguided Bonnie Prince Charlie (‘the rightful King of England’). Of course he would tell us that there was the other side of the story; it depended on what accounts you read, but it was rare that the other side of the story was ever revealed to us. I still possess my history notebooks, which contain some memorable if suspect assertions: ‘Henry VIII was a bloody tyrant who, when he could not get his own way or when anyone challenged his authority, resorted to murder. He had his chancellors beheaded, left his opponents to die lingering deaths in the Tower of London, killed off two of his wives and, because the Pope wouldn’t give him his own way, broke from Rome and started his own church.’
We were given our exercise books and textbooks and instructed to back them in brown paper for the following lesson. We were told we must write neatly in fountain pen and warned that there would be serious repercussions for any foolhardy boy who failed to hand in his homework on time. He then reached for a stick of chalk and twirled it around in his fingers. We all covered our noses.
Road to the Dales Page 33