Greetings Noble Sir

by Nigel Flaxton

  He had spotted a section of the outer wall surrounding the College site which had some stones damaged by bomb blast or decay, or both. With a struggle he found sufficient toe and finger holds to enable him to make a grab for the coping stones on top of the wall. He tested this in daylight, with two friends keeping watch for stray pedestrians who might have been understandably suspicious about a student climbing over the wall into the College when the front door was not very far away. He didn’t try actually going over the wall, for that might have been spotted from the College, even though his selected position faced an end of the building with few windows and hardly any rooms in regular use. He arranged for a friend to leave one of the windows unlatched just before lights out, after which he judged it most unlikely it would be found and closed again. It was quite impossible for ‘god’ to check every window every night. Then he tried his first run in deadly earnest.

  He said afterwards that almost the worst time was waiting long enough at his girlfriend’s to ensure the streets around the College would be deserted. For once he couldn’t keep his mind on his studies. However, in due course he arrived at the foot of his short but vertical climb and, as he had hoped, he had the street to himself. At this point there was extensive open ground belonging to a factory on the opposite side to the wall, so that there were no houses to harbour prying eyes. All he had to achieve was some nimble footwork, a massive pull on his arms when his hands curved over the top, and he was astride the wall.

  The street was well illuminated with gas lamps installed by the Victorian city fathers and Jon felt for Lady Godiva as he momentarily straddled the wall, but no one saw him and seconds later he dropped into the welcoming and complete darkness on the College side. Here, it seemed, no light penetrated and he was glad to sit against the wall in the deepest shadow and let his eyes become accustomed to the gloom.

  As soon as they had done so he realised that although the College had no room lights on anywhere, nevertheless a great deal of light was reflected over the wall from the street lamps, so much of the ground between the wall and the building was by no means as dark as he had first thought. Peering round nervously and stooping as low possible he ran quietly across the intervening space to his target window. He pulled at the metal surround to the heavily leaded pane and to his intense relief it swung open. It took a matter of seconds to pull himself up, twist sideways to squeeze through the narrow opening and drop noiselessly on to the dusty floor of an unused office. After listening carefully he closed the window quietly and opened the door.

  His progress down the pitch dark corridor was uneventful and he found the narrow doorway in the oak panelling which was the back stairway entrance to Upper East. The stairs creaked abominably and he could feel his heart racing even though he was climbing with the speed of a ninety year old arthritic. He reached a corner where he could see the faint glow from a very small bulb which was left on all night on the small landing at the end of Lower East. Gradually he turned the next corner and could see the light itself.

  Here he knew that he had to be extremely careful indeed because leading off to the left at this point, opposite the entrance to Lower East, was a short corridor which led to a staff flat. Jon knew very well that this particular flat housed Major and Mrs Darnley. However, it was protected from the sounds of the College by a very solid but plain oak door and he surmised that it was most unlikely that they were sleeping in the room immediately on the other side of it. Surely, he thought, they would be asleep at midnight, wouldn’t they?

  He edged his way on to the landing and was about to take the two or three steps necessary to cross it when a sixth sense made him look into the shadows on his left. Staring back at him like a dragon in its cave was the VP!

  ‘Hell’, breathed Jon, and waited for the storm to break. He had suddenly become very weak, and couldn’t think clearly.

  ‘Who you?’ slurred Major Darnley.

  ‘Kennton, Sir’, said Jon, and waited.

  ‘Humph’, said the VP and turned his head away slowly. Jon was incapable of moving even if he had thought to try. He vaguely wondered whether he would be thrown out of College immediately or whether there was some interim punishment that was meted out to first offenders, and if so what it might be. He fervently wished he had done some research into the matter before attempting his escapade.

  Jon waited again. The VP remained standing, stock still. Then Jon dared to look at him more closely and realised with a shock that he wasn’t standing upright - he was leaning. In fact he was propped up against the wall of his corridor and wasn’t moving at all.

  He was very drunk!

  From being just weak with shock, Jon became paralysed. What on earth could he do? He couldn’t just disappear to bed; the VP had seen him and he had stupidly given his name which surely would be remembered. Then he thought that if he offered to help perhaps the VP would be just a tiny bit grateful and might let him off with a rollicking. What had he to lose?

  ‘Sir’, said Jon, at last finding the means to move his legs and going towards the Major, ‘may I open the door for you?’

  The VP sprang into action.

  ‘Don’t you come at me, young man’, he growled barely coherently, ‘I warn you, I can shtand up for meshelf.’

  ‘No Sir, you don’t understand’, gasped Jon, trying to squeeze past him in the very narrow corridor, ‘I’m just going to open this door for you’.

  ‘Leave ‘t ‘lone, thassmydoor - noshyours, goway!’

  ‘Please Sir, let me,’ said Jon, groping towards the door with his right hand and scuffling desperately as the situation began slipping away from him.

  The VP suddenly gave him a mighty push which sent him staggering back on to the landing. ‘You can’t push me around,’ he bellowed. ‘No gen’leman takesh that from anyone. C’mon, put up your dooks.’

  Thereupon he lifted his fists like an old prizefighter and slowly and most unsteadily circled Jon, who stared back at him with fascinated horror waiting for the cobra’s strike. He couldn’t believe what was happening to him.

  It got worse.

  Gerremup. I maybe in my cupsh, but I can shtill fight. Gerremup, or you’re a coward, shir.’

  The last sentence was delivered with awful finality, as though it must force Jon to defend himself forthwith or seek some quiet corner and blow his brains out in the approved gentlemanly manner.

  Jon glanced towards the closed dormitory door. Surely someone must have heard the racket? Couldn’t someone come out and help him somehow?

  Help did come, but from a totally unexpected quarter.

  A chink of light gleamed suddenly in the little corridor, and a face peered out. Jon glimpsed wavy grey hair enclosed in a net, and a gentle but solemn face above a long blue dressing gown. There was a momentary pause, then the door opened fully and Mrs Darnley stepped out.

  She put her right arm across her husband’s shoulders and after a second or two succeeded in capturing the wildly waving left fist jabbing in exploratory fashion towards Jon’s face.

  ‘William’, she said quietly but with firm authority, ‘you should be in bed. Wish this young man goodnight and come along.’

  He turned and she looked him fully in the eyes. There was a fractional pause, then he deflated and turned meekly towards Jon, who could only gaze.

  ‘Shorry, ole man - got to go. Wifesheer. Prappsh have fight ‘nother night. Goobye.’

  He tottered gently along his corridor and into his flat, guided by his attentive wife. The door closed.

  Jon collapsed in a heap on the bottom stair of the flight leading to Upper East. In the fevered turmoil of his mind one question leapt at him. What was going to happen tomorrow when the VP sobered up and realised what had occurred? With stark clarity he realised the VP would be doubly furious - not only had Jon been out after lights out and had broken into College, but he had now seen him in t
he full glory of his ‘cups’.

  ‘Realising he knew I’d seen him completely sloshed,’ Jon confided to us afterwards, ‘I thought he’d be so angry he’d chuck me out of the place next morning. Hell, I felt absolutely awful: I thought I was going to spew up there and then’.

  But further help was at hand.

  Light gleamed again as the flat door opened once more and Mrs Darnley slipped out. She glanced behind her, satisfied herself that she was alone, and came to Jon who jumped to his feet blushing his confusion.

  ‘Don’t be upset, Mr, er...’

  ‘Kennton’, spluttered Jon.

  ‘Mr Kennton’, she continued, ‘you weren’t to know this, but my husband has these nights every now and then. Relic of past Army life, I’m afraid. He’ll be fine in the morning and he won’t remember a thing. Slip up to bed now and don’t worry.’

  Jon stared, unbelieving.

  ‘Go on, I mean it,’ she said with a suggestion of sharpness in her gentle voice. ‘And don’t worry - tomorrow he probably won’t know you from Adam.’

  ‘Er, well, thanks, Ma’am,’ stammered Jon. ‘Thanks for your help. Goodnight, Ma’am.’

  He turned and began to climb weakly up the stairs. She watched him, briefly. He turned at the first corner and glanced down at her.

  ‘Next time make sure he doesn’t see you,’ she said in level tones, then raised a gently admonishing finger and was gone. Jon went weak again.

  Next morning as he was making his way to the lecture room Jon spotted the VP crossing the quadrangle. Though there were other students making the same journey he felt the VP had eyes only for him. It was also perfectly obvious their respective speeds and directions were such that they were on a collision course.

  Jon turned crimson and became wet with sweat. Surely the VP would know him immediately... and then what?

  Slowly they got closer. Jon dared not look at him. His eyes became fascinated by the path on which he was walking and every stone glistened with quite exceptional clarity. Then he heard humming. He looked up sharply. No, he hadn’t been mistaken. It was coming from the VP!

  ‘Ah, good morning, Mr Kennton,’ he said brightly. ‘A very pleasant day, don’t you think? How are you finding the work now?’

  There wasn’t a trace of recognition in the Major’s eyes In fact, Jon was amazed to notice, neither was there the tiniest hint of a hangover. He stammered a reply and lost himself in the crowd.

  But a few hours later, when the power of rational thought returned, he realised the VP had addressed him by name whilst during the night both he and his wife had had to ask who he was.

  None of us ever did find out whether the VP really had forgotten what he had done and said in his cups, or whether he simply did a superb cover up job. Neither did Jon ever meet him again in the course of his nocturnal rambles, which he continued of course.

  After all, he had virtually been encouraged to do so by a most understanding lady!

  Chapter 7

  Early in the new century it is fascinating to look back over one’s experiences in education during half the previous one and try to set them in a broad context. Plus ça change, plus ça même chose may be true of some elements, but the last few decades certainly saw real and permanent changes both in organisation and teaching method.

  The basic unit of a class of pupils with a single teacher comes from antiquity and may very well continue long into the future. Some of the earliest cuneiform script from the ‘Land of the Two Rivers’ deciphers as the gripes of students:

  ‘The days of the schoolhouse are long and hard....’

  and sketches show lines of benches on which the trainee scribes sat facing a tutor, learning to be literate. Descriptions suggest they were boarders.

  I wonder what the pupil/teacher ratio was. Did the tutors, and the scholars’ parents, complain of large classes? Were they hamstrung because of the cost of clay tablets? Apart from organisational problems - and I’ll bet there were some - the lessons could not have been just exercises in literacy. The people involved were struggling towards the development and use of written language leading to increased complexity of ideas and thence to greater social interaction. Rulers wanted this to increase power; merchants wanted the same for increased trade and wealth, warriors wanted it to enhance the waging of war.

  No doubt as they struggled to master the patterns of wedge shapes on their clay tablets the students revealed varying levels of thinking ability. No doubt tutors revelled in teaching the brightest and struggled with the slowest. The basic problem of conveying a mental concept that you possess to someone else who doesn’t have it has been the stuff of teaching across the millennia and will remain so throughout whatever is the future for the race. Maybe it will be enhanced through brain implants everyone will have if futuristic science is to be believed - provided individuals can afford them.

  Narrowing the focus to the late nineteenth and all of the twentieth centuries, it soon becomes clear that only in very recent years has something appeared that gives both teacher and student an ability to exchange and grasp concepts and information in ways that were virtually impossible before. The computer.

  Lessons must be significant experiences.... How teachers have striven to achieve that through the ages! It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the cinema’s developing technology began to be available to schools. Not extensively, of course, due to cost - that perpetual millstone. First the film strip projector, or slide packs, could bring a neatly packaged series of photographs into the classroom with a clarity (if the room was adequately blacked out) largely impossible in printed pictures. Then came the cine-projector, one available perhaps to a consortium of schools, or more likely borrowed on a rota from a Teachers’ Centre. The first Geography film I saw demonstrated (in 1948) gave an excellent explanation of contour lines - hills cut into expanded segments the edges of which comprised the contours. How much more sharply the notion was conveyed than in my description to classes of a man with a football pitch line marker walking round a hill at precisely the same height all the time. Nevertheless I did supplement it with a visual aid - a model cobbled together from a number of shaped pieces of plywood lessening in size and covered with plasticene which could be dissected to reveal the contours of the twin peaked ‘Dog Bone Hill’.

  Gradually we struggled to possess at least one strip projector per school; later you could expect one cine projector likewise. But both suffered from the need to have a room that could be properly darkened. In modern classrooms with low ceilings this could be achieved, albeit at some cost, so it was usually done in one or two rooms, necessitating the booking of these whenever you wanted to show a film. But in old buildings this was virtually impossible. The Victorians tended to build classrooms on the grand scale - with large windows sensibly divided into many small panes (misdirected balls caused less costly damage) but set high so wandering eyes could not be distracted by street scenes. High ceilings allowed these windows to be of considerable height thus welcoming plenty of daylight. Alas, blacking out these was inordinately expensive.

  Nevertheless, when the films had been booked and received through the post, (I genuflect to various now-defunct education film libraries), the projector and room booked, the timetable altered to accommodate the latter and one’s displaced colleague placated, how vividly portrayed was that particular lesson. Yes, a significant experience indeed. Interestingly most cine and film strip projector material was in colour from the early fifties.

  If you are of the pre-computer generation, for whom educational films were a normal facility, look back and estimate how often you saw one in your particular school. All too often, though a projector was available, it spent too much of its life on a stock room shelf. The reason was this particular teaching aid was not readily to hand. Deploying it was cumbersome.

  Radio programmes were available to schools throughout t
he half century - indeed for considerably longer. I can still remember listening to a programme, in company with the entire complement of my thirties’ Infants’ School assembled in the hall, on the theme of new traffic arrangements heralded in towns by ‘Belisha beacons’ and the 30 mile an hour limit.

  But lessons had to be arranged to fit programme times and centred upon programme content. Much later the tape recorder eased the logistical problem and replaced it with stern warnings about the infringement of copyright in playing (and keeping) the result.

  Television followed radio and the cine projector. At first it had all the same problems - one receiver per school which had to be booked and timed for transmitted school programmes. Although blackout was no longer needed, screen size was an early problem, and classes had to be deployed in matey scrums to view adequately. There was usually some prior aerial shifting to get the best reception. But in the early days, of course, by no means all of the Country was covered. Schools and homes in less populated areas had to be patient.

  Nevertheless it was worth waiting for - especially when colour arrived, followed by the amazing invention of the video-recorder. I can remember my excitement at hearing that this facility would one day be available for widespread use. What range of programmes we would be able to use for our classes! What freedom we would have to show material when it fitted into our programme of lessons rather than the other way round!

  But when it came there was the inevitable package of restrictions. Some time ago a school suffered a swingeing fine because a teacher recorded a Shakespeare play at home one evening and showed parts next day to supplement his lesson. One of his pupils commented ingenuously on this at home - to her TV producer father.

  Television, however, demonstrated an unsuspected power. It has a magnetic appeal to a class that is stronger than radio or a cine film. I cannot wholly account for this phenomenon, but I realised it one day when, as a Head, I took a visitor into a class that I would not normally have chosen to demonstrate close concentration upon work. Indeed its members were usually quick to seize any opportunity to switch attention to a visitor. Some were notorious for exercising their views that History is boring, Geography is boring, Religious Education is ever so boring.... The lesson was Biology and the class was watching a television presentation of the internal organs of a rat. I would not rate the material highly as compulsive viewing. Yet not a single head turned towards we two intruders. Indeed I would have loved to experiment by taking in a current pop idol and seeing how long awareness took.