Tom

I was very lucky, as a young teacher, to work in some interesting schools. But the best school was both interesting and a very happy place to work. The staff were an eclectic mix of talents and personalities, and we were all united behind the head in trying to make it a good school.

 

One year Tom, another teacher and myself were in adjacent mobile classrooms (glorified huts) sharing the top juniors. Tom had always taught the top juniors.

 

Tom had been in the tank regiment in the war. His brother had been killed in the Far East, and Tom had neither forgotten nor got over it.

 

After the army, he had gone onto teaching, like so many others. He was coming towards the end of his career when I knew him. He had taught in only the one school, and during his thirty or so years there he had taught in the same classroom.

Tom was old school. He had no fancy views about education. His classroom was just that: an empty box to teach a class in. Though he had been working in the same room for decades, it carried no personal touches, nothing to indicate indwelling, or even habitation. There was not much work on the walls, and 'display' was limited to a few curling papers artlessly drawing-pinned to fawn notice boards. It was not a room busy with the hum of excited learning.

Children feared Tom, who had taught their parents. Many of the parents STILL feared Tom. He had on his desk the sole of a plimsoll. He had cut the upper away. This dusty relic wasn't used as in former days, but the sight of it kept the class in order.

Tom taught hard stuff. His class were 10 and 11 years old, and very mixed ability. He taught from the blackboard (actually green). Conic sections, volume of a cone, box analysis of sentences. All stuff he had remembered from his own secondary school and kneaded into some sort of inexplicable curriculum for his annual performance. If the children were not interested, they did not dare mention it. If they did not understand it because they could not actually read much, well, that was their problem.

Tom was both gruff and strict, and had a fuse so short you never saw trouble coming. And trouble was terrifyingly volcanic.

With staff he was much the same, but on a franker level. You knew where you stood with Tom. It might be uncomfortable knowledge, but you knew alright. He was not a man to mince words, to dress up the obvious truth.

He had a couple of friends on the staff. He was still, in his sixties, a handsome man, and could be charming. He had clearly been a devastatingly attractive catch when he was young, and had retained the charm long after the looks had begun to wrinkle.

You didn't argue with Tom. The best you could hope for was a dismissive grunt as he turned away, stalking off in a famous mood.

Tom could laugh, and his yellow teeth and a noise like gravel in a faulty mixer betrayed a lifelong love of smoking. A lesson was the longest he was ever away from a cigarette. When he laughed, it was almost as if he was testing to see if he still could.

 

Children, staff, parents all feared Tom. Even the head was wary of upsetting him. Tom took this for respect. 

 

Tom was not sure what to make of me. If he could have fired me, I am sure he would have. I was a teacher so different from himself as to be unrecognisable even as a teacher. He thought I was soft on the kids, and probably soft in the head. I did for the dress code what the Luftwaffe had done for Coventry. I seemed to have a talent for annoying him, not least when I wanted to keep pet rabbits under his classroom where I had identified the perfect spot for a row of hutches. He could have made more effort to hide his view that I was a complete idiot, but he did not feel the need.

 

He did not care for innovation of any kind. Things were fine as they were, and the more familiar the better. Nothing new should be allowed to ripple the surface of his safe predictability of coming to work.

At the end of the summer, I wanted to have a disco for the kids in our year. They were about to leave the school and it seemed like an obvious thing to do. Nobody had done this before and though the idea did not affect Tom, he was more than clear in his views. It was a mad idea. It would give the children ideas. Modern music was dreadful, and the volume would damage the kids' ears, leading to an outbreak of premature deafness in the area. The parents would think it was crazy. It would demean the school. It was extra work for the staff (though he wasn't involved in any way). It wasn't what the school was about. It wasn't what ANY school was about. It would have a negative impact on behaviour and he would be left to pick up the pieces.

He made his views clear at a staff meeting, and pulled no punches. It was simply a mad project and would jeopardise us all.

The week before the disco, Tom popped into my classroom, politely ignoring the apparent chaos of lunchtime activities. Would I like some lights for the disco ? He happened to have some that he had used at home. And how about the sound system ? The one in the hall was pathetic and would not be loud enough for a disco. He could bring in a much better system if that would help.

You bet it would help.

Tom and I spent hours after school rigging the place up, climbing unsafe ladders, testing the equipment. He was the only member of staff to help me cross the t's, dot the i's. He was infinitely patient. We even joked together when things went wrong. When it was all set, Tom disappeared. He wanted no part of the disco. He did not want to be tainted by it. But the success of the disco was in large part due to Tom's hidden collaboration.

 

Much later, we discovered a shared love of music, and I was invited covertly round to his house with my guitar. He was an enthusiastic and skilful organist, though at school this was never revealed. Like Wemmick, he shrugged off his home life somewhere on the journey to school in his battered and ancient Volvo.

I still do not know why he helped me with a project that was such anathema to him. But he taught me two things that have stayed with me all my life. You have to help people do what THEY want to do, not what YOU want to do. And respect. He had earned that. In spades.

Tom. I owe him way more than disco lights and loud music.