Greetings Noble Sir

by Nigel Flaxton

  The moment my intention crystallised occurred one day when the Headmaster walked into the Fifth Form and asked, unusually diffidently, whether anyone wished to take up teaching as a career. I believe he found it strange that anyone at that level - nowadays year 11 - should be thinking so far ahead. Traditionally, for him, fellows went on to university and considered the notion of employment after graduating. But we were approaching the end of the War and government needed to plan ahead. In schools, however, the notion of careers advice for students lay well in the future.

  ‘Your Headmaster says he believes you could become a good teacher, Flaxton,’ I heard the Principal saying. Applicants were not College members, of course, hence he used my surname as at School.

  ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted to be, Sir,’ I croaked, ‘I think I’m reasonably good at explaining things to children. I’ve had a little experience at Sunday School,’ I finished lamely, woefully aware of the inadequacy of my reply. I wanted him to thrust incisively at me on the topics I had mulled over in preparation - the History of Education in the nineteenth century, a favourite of mine in History exams, or how I thought I would be able to control a class, but he seemed interested only in trifles.

  I had learnt something about control from experience as a prefect. Due to being swept into an accelerated stream I entered the Sixth at a very young age and found, when the prefects’ list of classes was drawn up, that I was assigned to 5C. Prefects had the duty of standing in front of ‘their’ class at the beginning of each session and keeping control until the teacher arrived. The members of 5C were my age, indeed some were older because they were repeating the year. Some, also, were quite hefty. I suffered from the disadvantage that my growth pattern was slow to begin with but accelerated later when I grew nine inches in three years. I was still fourteen when I faced 5C for the first time and all of five feet three.

  To be accurate, I didn’t actually face them immediately the first time we met. Having seen from the list who they were getting, they prepared a simple reception. As I walked through the door I was seized from both sides, lifted off my feet, hurried across the room and thrust feet first through the opposite window opened ready for the purpose. Considerately they knew the drop was only four feet and there was a small border of bushes outside to accommodate my fall. The window was then firmly shut.

  For a moment I pondered my pride and position; then a sixth sense emerged from somewhere. I strode back into the building, straight to the classroom, flung open the door and walked in very decisively. For a split second 5C stopped their mirthful noise and I eyed as many as I could directly.

  ‘I grant you round one, gentlemen,’ I said with as much poise as I could muster, mentally grateful that I enjoyed acting. ‘Round two will be mine, however, since you know prefects carry the authority of the Head.’

  Some smirks were interchanged, but we all knew the hierarchy was established and I would be in control. Everyone knew perfectly well in what form the authority of the Head was meted to anyone sent to him on a disciplinary matter. From then on 5C and I enjoyed our relationship and, unusually, the story did not travel around the School. I learnt more in those few moments than I could possibly have imagined at the time.

  ‘Alright, I’ll take you,’ said the Principal suddenly. ‘I will send the formal letter in a day or two. Term starts quite soon, as I’m sure you know.’ He stood up and held out a hand.

  ‘Welcome to St Andrew’s, Mr Flaxton.’

  I bit off the question, ‘Who?’ and managed to suppress surprise at the form of address. I struggled to my feet, took his hand and muttered some totally forgettable platitude. He turned away, then as I made for the door, asked me to invite in the next candidate. Our eyes met as I held the door open for him and I smiled encouragingly. But when term began I looked for him in vain.

  I walked out of the College feeling a strange mixture of anticlimax and elation. The interview had been ridiculously low key; I’d had no opportunity to show what I thought was mettle. But very soon that gave way to thorough excitement because I now had my career, even though I wasn’t entering it in the way I had intended.

  Looking back, over sixty years later, I have no regrets whatsoever. The endless fascination of teaching lies in the fact that it is entirely about people. Different age groups present different problems and satisfactions - a class of seven year olds is different in most respects from a class of adults, but not entirely so! I have taught both, and all ages in between.

  It is the same with schools. Each is different and each has its particular problems and successes. In the majority of cases the latter predominate, even though the former are more readily noticed, especially by the public at large through being seized upon by the media. Gradually throughout the second half of the twentieth century society turned its spotlight on to the educational arena which, on balance, has been to the advantage of both. In scrutinising education the discussion, understandably, is conducted in broad terms of policies, organisations, systems, curricula, discipline and so forth. But to the vast majority of children, their parents and their teachers what occupies most of their concern about schools is what sort of people come together in them and what takes place in the day to day interplay of their lives.

  That interplay is full of ordinary human stuff, most of which has no attraction for the media and so goes unreported. If you really look into the school world there is much humour, good friendship, and a surprising amount of respect, albeit often hidden beneath a disparaging veneer, balanced by some disagreements, occasional nastiness, some frustrations, and occasional sadness. There are successes and failures amongst both pupils and teachers, just as in any other area of human activity.

  Many people assert that teaching to-day is very different from what it used to be. Certainly some things have changed dramatically but I feel its basic elements remain broadly similar to those I experienced in my early days as a teacher. Certainly I have never had cause to regret being successful at that College interview, though I have never had such an easy one since, no matter for what post I applied. As I walked home that wet August night the glistening pavements were strewn with cascades of stars and on the whole they have continued to shine brightly ever since.

  And I have found that I don’t hate Latin, though for a fortune I still couldn’t pass an exam in it.

  Chapter 3

  The bomb had crashed through the roof and exploded in the middle of the small hall excavating a crater, where the floor had been, into which the remnants of the School had fallen. It was obviously only a small bomb but sufficient nonetheless for the School also was small, very small indeed. Three classrooms had clustered round the hall but their inner walls were demolished and their rubble, intermingled with twisted and shattered desks, now lay in the crater. The door of a fourth, much smaller room, hung precariously over the pit from one rusty hinge. A nameplate proclaimed the title of the former occupant with hollow importance. Headmaster remained remarkably legible. No attempt had been made to clear the site.

  Above, charred slateless rafters etched a chequer pattern against the sky. Outside, the walls bore little trace of the internal chaos. They were built of strong stone and had directed the blast upwards, gutting the inside and the roof.

  From the little building the high surrounding walls survived smooth and unbroken encircling the College’s original playing field, itself now a series of grassy hollows and mounds where other bombs had fallen. The School was the ‘Practising School’ where many former students had learnt to teach. The pupils who attended from nearby houses had received the best and the worst teaching, with a mixture in between, as novices struggled with their charges. Fortunately, at all times there were the College tutors and the resident teachers to counteract mistakes and moderate blunders. As with the great majority of schools there were successes and one former pupil progressed to become a Fellow of the Royal Society. But its very existence was a nineteent
h century concept. It was outmoded but still functioning as the Second World War began. The bomb brought about its demise, fortunately achieving it without hurting anyone.

  Gordon Mersely, Malcolm Ashterleigh and I were exploring the College the day after we arrived.

  ‘I wonder when they’ll get around to clearing up this mess,’ I said.

  ‘It certainly won’t have a high priority,’ Gordon asserted. ‘They’ll never rebuild it, of course.’ He kicked a brick into the crater, which echoed noisily.

  ‘What takes its place, I wonder?’ mused Malcolm.

  ‘Oh, the senior men have told me that,’ replied Gordon. ‘We’ll still get plenty of practice. It’s divided into three kinds, observational, instructional, and block. We start the observational kind quite soon, apparently. They send us to look at schools we won’t be doing the other practices in, such as nursery and infants, schools for the deaf and the blind, for delicate kids, and so on.’

  ‘That could be interesting.’ I said. ‘I’ve never been into places like those, except when I was an infant myself. We do the other practices in junior and senior schools, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Gordon. ‘Instructional practice is half a day a week in schools with a group and a tutor. Everyone takes it in turns to teach whilst everyone else watches. For block practice we go into schools pretty much on own, for four weeks at a time.’

  ‘No tutors?’ asked Malcolm.

  ‘You are attached to one, I’m told, and he visits you occasionally. Most of the supervision comes from the staff at the school.’

  ‘You have been genning up, old boy,’ said Malcolm. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this ruin.’

  The College staff were trying hard to bring their courses up to date. For this they needed far more than a single Practising School. The city had a rich variety of schools caring for children with various problems. It also had a few new nursery schools for two to five year olds, largely experimental. The idea of sending children to school before the traditional age of five was quite innovative.

  Educational Psychology was advancing again from strides made before the war. Study of children’s play was becoming important to see the role it played in children’s learning. As Gordon said, our first experiences at this early stage were to be observation without any practice. So I found myself in a group that was to visit a Nursery School containing a very modern facility. This certainly did not extend to its buildings which were solid nineteenth century, but inside a room had been adapted for the special purpose of observing young children’s natural play.

  A section of one side of this room had been removed and replaced by a screen of stiff, fine, dark green mesh. It was illuminated by artificial light on the classroom side so it appeared quite solid, seemingly a large unadorned board. On the other side of the screen was a small room in which an observer could sit. Its walls were black and there was no internal light. From this viewpoint it was easy to watch children in the classroom through the mesh. But before our visit the tutors impressed upon us the need for absolute silence in the observation room because it would become quite useless if the children knew they were being watched.

  The School was in a depressed slum area which had been opened up considerably in recent years with the help of the Luftwaffe. The people who lived there were rough and tough Midlanders whose courage in the blitz had burst forth from their natural resistance to being pushed around by anyone. Hitler had united them as never before and ensured their combined wrath was directed at him personally. The children were natural chips from the parental blocks.

  My group happened to be the first to visit the School from our Year in the College. We were welcomed by the Headmistress, Miss Webster, who spent some time talking to us about pre-war developments in the education of children in Geneva, about which most of us knew absolutely nothing. Then we were directed to the classrooms to move about and talk to the children and get to know something about them.

  There were two classes, each containing about thirty children, known respectively as the ‘seniors’ and the ‘juniors’. The former were aged from three and a half to four and a half, the latter covering the tender age of two and a half to three and a half. There were six teachers, three assigned to each class, but only one had as yet completed her training.

  Our group of ten students divided equally. I then entered the first nursery classroom I had ever seen. It comprised the seniors and everyone was active, very active indeed! Some were painting with large brushes on paper pinned to upright easels, some were playing with sand and water using gaudy beach buckets of various sizes and were covering themselves liberally with the mixture. Others were rolling plasticene and making animals and people. One was playing with a large wooden railway engine, sitting astride it and jerking it forwards, dragging coaches behind. The room was furnished with tables, grouped informally, with benches around the room and a sink and tap in one corner. There were some picture books, a few dolls, a motley collection of other toys, and drawing paper, glue, small rounded scissors, powder paint, bits of wood, crayons, in seeming profusion.

  Used as we were to extreme austerity in all things and especially in our own wartime classrooms, we couldn’t believe our eyes. Gordon Mersely blinked in astonishment.

  ‘Heck, I didn’t think I’d be saying I wish I was back in school myself!’

  ‘Too true,’ I agreed. ‘I remember doing work in my Infants’ School sitting firmly in a desk and risking a smack if I stood up before being told. This looks like fun!’

  We towered over the children, of course, and so crouched down as we talked to them. They seemed very self-possessed and uninhibited and very soon we realised they were used to having visitors because it was, in its way, a ‘Show School’.

  ‘What’s that you’re painting?’ I asked a mop of mouse-coloured hair hunched over a piece of paper on the floor.

  ‘It’s Peter, init?’ the mop replied without moving.

  ‘Who’s Peter?’

  A pink face appeared as the mop turned. ‘Me rabbit, course,’ its owner emphasised with exaggerated deliberation, disgusted the palpable idiot hadn’t instantly recognised her pet.

  ‘Ouch!’ I exclaimed as the railway engine hit me provocatively on the ankle. I moved involuntarily and the tough, ill clad driver surmounting it with an impish look in his eye pushed it onwards with very loud ‘choo, choos’, satisfied the simple ploy had successfully cleared his tracks.

  I looked up to see Gordon in conversation with Miss Carstairs, the teacher in charge of the class.

  ‘Yes,’ she was saying, ‘I have two assistants as you see, so we keep our eyes on about ten children each, when they’re all here. Sometimes, of course, we have quieter activities, such as when one of us reads a story. Whenever the weather allows we take it in turns with the junior class to go outside - you probably saw the climbing frames outside as you came in. There’s a larger sandpit out there, as well, and of course we have some tennis balls.’

  ‘Can any children come here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but priority is given to families whose mothers have to go out to work. Some lost husbands in the war, of course, as you’d expect.’

  ‘How long are the children here each day?’

  ‘We open at half past eight, and the children are brought in between then and half past nine. They’re collected between half past three and a quarter to five.’

  ‘That’s quite a long day for the very young ones, isn’t it?’ said Gordon.

  ‘Ah, but they all have a sleep for part of the afternoon,’ smiled Miss Carstairs. ‘They need the break - and so do we, sometimes!’

  ‘What about food?’ I enquired, pen poised over my notebook. We were charged with writing about everything we could see and getting information about anything we could imagine. The notes were to be written up in ‘Notebook B’; the equivalent ‘A’ was for practice l
essons we would teach. At that time we were happily unaware of how many editions there would be.

  ‘We’re fortunate in having a British Restaurant here, so the children have meals prepared in it, though they eat them in this room. On the whole they’re good; certainly it means the children get one balanced meal a day. Oh, yes, the parents pay two shillings a week towards the cost. You need to put that in your notes,’ she grinned.

  Subsequently those pontificated: ‘Because a British Restaurant is attached to the building the School therefore has the advantage of the most modern food preparation machinery. The menu is prepared for the children on a fortnightly basis; they have meat three times in one week and twice the next, fish pie and cheese pie once or twice in alternate weeks. The children also have processed egg, vegetables and of course potatoes, etc.

  ‘A qualified nurse attends the School each day to give treatment to any child who needs it. Children can have a course of sunlight treatment if it is necessary. A doctor visits the School on regular occasions, so the medical needs of the children are also well looked after.’

  The government should have signed me up to run an advertising campaign. But Gordon threw the spanner.

  ‘All this seems excellent for these children, but how many Nursery Schools are there in the city?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the problem. At present there are very few, less than five per cent of the under-fives get this opportunity. But those that do are in the poorest areas, so we’re starting in the right places. Once the Country is through this austerity period that’s hitting us all so badly, whilst we pay for winning the war, I hope enough will be built for all children.’