A Teacher Remembered

Yesterday I learned that an old friend - a very old friend, 98 years old in fact - had died. He taught me English - and much else along the way - at a suburban state grammar school in the 60s, and we had stayed friends ever since. Having gone suddenly blind in middle age, he continued - helped by a small army of readers - to be an extremely effective head of English and a brilliant, imaginative and inspirational classroom teacher. Happily, he took me - a stroppy bright spark at loggerheads with all other teachers - under his wing, presumably spotting potential. The result was that he changed my life, introducing me not only to English literature but to vast swathes of a wider culture of which, being from an unbookish and unintellectual background, I had been only dimly aware. He was fluent and well read in French and Italian, with a good knowledge of classical literature, not to mention music and art (he tried, and failed, to make a Wagnerian of me). He had taught in Switzerland before the Hitler War (as he always called it) and travelled widely in Europe until he was in his 80s. He introduced me to the glories of Venice, starting a lifelong love affair with that city. In later years, he would lull himself to sleep by taking virtual walks around La Serenissima - or by reciting Keats to himself. He had, of course, a vast amount of English poetry by heart, and reams of Shakespeare. In fact I never knew anyone with a deeper textual knowledge of Shakespeare - and his Shakespeare lessons had a lasting impact. To the end of his days, he would regularly be hailed by middle-aged men he didn't know from Adam, who, having got over the shock of finding the old boy still alive, would declare 'I'll never forget your King Lear lessons.' For myself, his greatest legacy was that he embodied the true meaning of education - not something you pick up at school and university and are done with, but a lifelong exploration, as natural as breathing, and ending only with the breath.
There is much more I could say about this remarkable man, but, this being the Thought Experiments blog, I would just pose this: Imagine if there were still state schools in this country that had such teachers in them. If any such still survive in the teaching profession, they will undoubtedly be in the public schools - but in the 50s and 60s teachers of similar range and gifts were, albeit not in great numbers, working in the state system. We grammar school oiks of that generation were indeed very lucky. Teachers of this quality touched many lives - far more than they knew - and the passing of any one of them hugely diminishes the world.