I write about this in my ‘art’ blog because art is not about art if it is not about life. I heard today, unexpectedly, of the death of my secondary school English teacher. It was not just his death that shocked me, for he was young, but the unhappiness of his death. I was surprised, too, by the effect the news had on me. My teacher was not the sentimental, saccharine Robin Williams of my schooldays, and he was never carried high upon his cheering students’ shoulders. But he was the teacher who presented a novel – The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (brave choice) – in such a way that the first seismic shift in my confident, inherited belief system took place. In that, he ‘changed my life’. I have never forgotten that, but the impact of the first two years of his wonderful teaching were swamped, in my ungenerous and critical student mind, by the last two years of our teacher/pupil relationship when I considered him to be dogmatic and rigid in his thinking. Ironic, perhaps, considering the flexibility he introduced into my own thought. (And I never forgave him for choosing the poems of Sylvia Plath over The Four Quartets…)
We sparred. But I took it as given that he was as strong and certain as he seemed. As an adult I have found that he was not. As any other human being, he was fragile. I think now that his attraction to dark works and dark poetry reflected an internal bleakness. And I wonder whether the fact – and I see now that this is not the stuff of jokes, as we liked to think at school – that he had the chill misfortune to be the handsome visual double of Peter Sutcliffe did actually cast a dark shadow upon his life.
Perhaps he thought his life was too ordinary, and his gifts had not been met in teaching. Like most ordinary people who live ordinary lives, teachers most particularly, and artists, he gave gifts and planted seeds. But perhaps he – like many others who give gifts and plant seeds – never saw the oak trees grow. Perhaps he stopped believing that from his work trees did grow.
At some point in my life I stopped believing I must be a frothy cherry, and I aspired to be an oak. Many people have played a part in this transformation, and he was one. I thank him.
