Many children who went through Mr Gordon’s school might remember him with a shudder of distaste. He was an intimidating man. Autocratic, domineering, subject to volcanic eruptions of rage in which he would hurl pieces of chalk at the head of any child, boy or girl, who had driven him mad by – he never hesitated to name it – their stupidity. And not only name it but yell it like a thunderclap. It was the 1950s, and his aim was true. The children were terrified of him.
At the age of eleven I dimly recognised, although I could not have given it any name, a tortured soul. I was aware, in a childish, confused way, that Mr Gordon was deeply and profoundly unhappy. It was clear that he was an intellectually driven man, humiliated by his modest position as headmaster of a small, isolated village school in a Lincolnshire backwater. It was also obvious that he disliked or detested most children. Their rowdy messiness, triviality, laziness and vulgarity, their very immaturity encountered on a daily basis, kept him in a state of near-constant fury and frustration. He was a man whose civilized values collided head-on with his baser instincts, and fought a losing battle for supremacy.
In year six at Binbrook Village Primary, it was all or nothing. Marooned in an environment of mediocrities, Mr Gordon was a perfectionist who made no concessions for the cerebrally challenged. His classes began each morning with ten frantic minutes of mental arithmetic. Sets of a dozen random numbers from one to twenty were shouted out without pause, and a hapless victim selected to write the sum on the blackboard. I can guarantee that none of Mr Gordon’s pupils was ever cheated out of small change in later life.
For art and nature lessons, rain or shine, we were hauled outside the classroom. The object was to extend and refine our senses to the limit of the possible, and beyond. “Observe the physical world! Remain in place and observe it with undivided attention until you can see the grass growing.” “Stay absolutely still. Do not move! Concentrate, listen, until you can actually hear the sounds of the grass growing.” “Capture the structures and shapes of the objects around you and the hues of the sky. Don’t stop until you have them accurately down on paper.” Later in the playground, amid the growling and complaining, I stared at the marks of shoes on the ground and the shapes of shadows.
We had a school fair for the summer solstice. Only their fear of Mr Gordon could have persuaded the truculent, scornful boys to dress in old-fashioned costumes for Morris dancing, or prance around the maypole, which even then was an anachronism. And only he could have got us to sit in circles and play saucy traditional games in which, if you missed the ball thrown by the child in the middle to a member of the opposite sex, the penalty was to be kissed in front of everyone. We were embarrassed, giggly, but there was a frisson of excitement.
Mr Gordon watched these games with an unreadable expression. In the radio programme of folksongs for schools that we listened to, unwillingly, every week, he had always shown a preference for the romantic. I liked those songs too, and I was not too young to guess that here, perhaps, was the clue to the enigma, the emptiness that lay at the heart of his distress. For, on all the evidence, he was a passionate man
Not content with short compositions and stories about a day in the life of a penny, Mr Gordon ordered us all to go away and write a full-length novel. I went away and did this, my first. Written secretly after school over several weeks, it was illustrated with coloured drawings and heavily influenced by Enid Blyton. It was called The Secret of the Green Medallion. My father was posted away from RAF Binbrook before I could show Mr Gordon the completed work. I had only attended his school for one term, and he never knew I had followed his advice, or that he had a lifelong influence on at least one student.
For many years I carried with me a small autograph book. Among the entries was Mr Gordon’s name, inscribed by thick black fountain pen in a masculine, calligraphic hand. Immediately afterwards I had obtained the autograph of the Assistant Head, an affable, well-liked and unremarkable man despised, I knew, by Mr Gordon. He had written part of a popular verse by Charles Kingsley: ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.’ Mr Gordon would have been contemptuous of such an exhortation, and I too took satisfaction in despising it.
Much more recently in a book of quotations I discovered there was a second line which the Assistant Head had chosen to omit. It was: ‘Do noble things, not dream them, all day long.’ This, I knew, Mr Gordon would have endorsed. The poem was called The Farewell.
Chapter in book My Favourite Teacher, edited by Robert Macklin, University of New South Wales Press 2011.