When I heard that N.T. Stonex was dead, my first thought was that I had once nearly killed him myself - not out of malice, though this easily could have been true; rather, out of inadvertence. In the beleaguered, attenuated world of the English private school in wartime, he was my form-master, my housemaster, my Latin master, and my scoutmaster, in which diversity of functions he dominated most of my waking hours and not a few of my nightmares. It was in the last capacity that in nearly dispatched him to join his forefathers. He had been teaching bicycle repair and maintenance to the scout troop and foolishly offered his own machine to be experimented on. I disassembled it capably and reassembled it somewhat less capably. Next morning he called me to his study and informed me, more in anger than in sorrow, that on his way home it had fallen to pieces beneath him. He had been coasting down a steep hill at the time. He was compelled, he told me, "to leap into the gushes to avoid oncoming traffic."
He had given names, of course, not merely initials. I knew what they were, and I still do. But after more than forty yeas, I can no more bring myself to utter them than would a devout Jew spell the true name of his Maker. Our paths first crossed in 1942. I was a new boy, elevated to the glory of my first long trousers, fresh from a parochial school - a brooding, sullen building with an outside lavatory so festering and malodorous that it would have been worth half a chapter to Dickens in one of his grimmer moods. Huddled in air raid shelters dug deep beneath the playground and lit by minimal blue bulbs, we had scribbled the examinations on which the rest of our lives depended. By some miracle of concentration, I had achieved a scholarship; and here I was, rescued to nothing, adrift in an ocean of strange faces, a flyspeck in the history of a school that went back at least to Cardinal Wolsey and, some claimed, to King Alfred. In the true English tradition of inculcating self-reliance through terror, I had been given no orientation, no instructions. Everyone else knew where he was going, but not I. I did not know which class I was in, or where it met, or what I was supposed to be doing when I got there. I wished I were dead.
An Unexpected Teacher
What led me to Stonex, and created a bond of sympathy even when I had cause to hate him most, was that he was an odd man out himself. His oddity began with the fact that he was there at all. In a world at war, he was a conscientious objector. Rumor said his brother had been killed in the fighting, and this had turned him against it. Whether this was true or not, I never discovered. But he must have faced an unusually generous draft board - or, more likely, faced an ordinary board and bullied them; for, while other conscientious objectors were made to drive ambulances or work in factories, he was allowed to continue in his own profession. Thus, he was the only youngish master in the school. His colleagues were either graybeards and baldheads past the age of service or - the ultimate atrocity of war in this male enclave - women, inflicted on us for the duration. These harpies were far more intimidating than any male I later encountered - so defensive, so prone to imagine slights and insults that they would send us for a beating if we whispered.
Stonex did not beat us. I never saw him lay a finger on a boy. He had other, more effective methods - principally, a vein of acid sarcasm that could flay the skin at twenty paces. In the cosseted, insulated, PTA-controlled world of
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