forty years on

One of the continuing joys of having been a teacher is renewing contact with former pupils. I must have taught thousands of boys in my 33 years at Challoner's alone. Most, I trust, will remember me, if at all, with at least a degree of gratitude. The very small number with whom I didn't get on at all probably wouldn't want to speak to me if they saw me in the street, although that is not necessarily true for my part, while a rather larger number (I hope) seem to enjoy a chat. I've had people come up to me on trains, in bus queues or in distant places, introduce themselves and remind me that I taught them some text or other, or that I did or said something they remember, although I usually don't, many years ago. Generally I can't recall much about these people, and more often than not I don't even recognise them at first. After all, everyone probably has fewer than fifty or so teachers in a lifetime, and they are all already adult, and so not too different from their future crumbly selves, whereas a teacher has generations of pupils in varying degrees of maturation, little resembling the people they will become.

This week I had an email from somebody who was in my form, 4D, when I arrived at Challoner's in 1969. Rob knows someone on the staff, googled me and sought me out. It doesn't always happen, but I remember him well, and with considerable affection. He played a small part in my first production at the school, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in 1971, and Pizarro in The Royal Hunt of the Sun the following year. I recall his quick-witted ad-lib in one performance when a soldier dropped his sword, and I also remember his Streets of London duet with another pupil at an Evening of Music and Poetry. We had lost contact for years, and it was good to read about what he had done with his life (a great deal, although he was not parading his achievements).

At my school, Penzance Grammar School, or Humphry Davy G.S., as it became (alas, no more) we sang, at the end of every term and on Speech Day, what I thought at the time was a rather florid Celtic Twilight school song linking the school with King Arthur, a fanciful connection in view of the school's foundation in the 1920s. I sang it smiling then but I think of it wistfully now, and although I have never been able to attend any of the Old Penwithians' annual dinners in late December, I am told that the song is sung with both gusto and reverence, and even a tear in the eye, not all of which need be attributed to the consumption of alcohol. One phrase often comes to mind, and it is true of all the schools I have attended or taught at (Tolcarne Primary, Newlyn; P.G.S./H.D.G.S.; Nottingham High School, and Dr Challoner's G.S.):

By memory's chain we linked remain,

Whatever may befall.

I think that is true in many cases, and many teachers, including perhaps my son (for teaching seems to be a benign inherited disease in my family), will agree.