What was it all about, Alfie ?

I hated school, and spent as much time out of it as I could. My grammar school was a harsh place to be, and it is rare in having not only an Old Boys’ Association, but also a Survivors’ Association. I was 30 before I felt I had come to terms with my education, though the school did not justify the word.

Alfie was Alfred Ridler. He taught chemistry and I was not alone in hating both him and chemistry.

Alfie was about 60 years old when he was teaching me. He had a first-class honours degree and loved chemistry. The chemistry labs were ancient, and smelled heavily of gas. We sat at benches flicking balls of mercury about, and teasing it out of cracks in the wood.

The thing we all feared about Alfie was his patience in staying after lessons, through breaks and after home-time until you eventually got things right. We would stand in a line, our exercise books open at the latest page, hoping that we’d get Alfie’s imprimatur and that we’d be able to flee the lab.

But few got to escape first time round in the queue. Alfie would read your account with care, scribble a couple of questions on it – questions, not, not comments. He never wrote comments – and you would be left to go figure. If anyone ever asked Alfie a question, he had a set and immutable mantra: ‘Well, I wouldn’t know’.

‘I wouldn’t know’ meant that you had to go back to the bench, think the thing through, and come up with a different solution.

Though I did not know it at the time, and felt nothing but irritation and a rising sense of panic about just how late after tea Alfie was really prepared to stay, Alfie was teaching me to think.

He never declared that that was the point of his chemistry lessons, but it was. There would be an experiment. Alfie told you to watch carefully what happened, make notes, and then explain why it happened. It was the scientific method for dummies.

He alone was the teacher who challenged your way of thinking. The rest were happy to get you memorising the text book.

Alfie was very happy with the wrong conclusion if that’s what your careful thought processes led you to. He would smile benignly and nod sagely and say ‘well done’. But he wanted thinking and would accept nothing less.

It stayed with me all my life.

I could not see anything to thank him for then, and now it’s too late. But thanks, Alfie. I was a discouraging student, but thanks.