John Bull's First Job
A Little Learning
By PATRICK ANDERSON
For years I had been terrified of war, without deciding whether I was a pacifist, a 'war neurotic' or just a coward. I was about to marry an American artist. The terms of my fellowship required me to leave the States 'for some part of the British Commonwealth.' We decided on Canada and • an advertised job in a Montreal school, although schoolmastering would have been inconceivable to me two years before when I was president of the Union at Oxford, a scholar of my college and pretty much of a romantic snob.
The frontier--a concept familiar to us, God knows, from Auden and Isherwood was said to be difficult, and we were in fact turned back once, cabling frantically for additional refer- ences and sleeping out that night in the garden of an abandoned house. The next day, against all odds, we made it and I was given the job.
Selwyn House was fashionable largely be- cause it was 'run on English lines,' which meant discipline (the `stick'), plenty of Maths and Latin, no frills, a somewhat bedraggled staff of authentic Englishmen (few Canadians could have lived on the salary, which ceased completely for July and August) and a crisply efficient dictator of a Head whose military bearing, prowess at tennis and bridge and sleek white convertible LESLIE ADRIAN Is on holiday were much appreciated on Pine Avenue and in Westmount. A good many of the parents were millionaires with names famous in timber, aluminium_gold-mining and so on: there was a careful quota of Jews (whisky and furnishings) and a very small group of French Canadians (generally politics and the law).
But the reason for my, appointment, and for the reinstatement, at a lower salary, of a senior member of the staff who had been summarily sacked after twenty years without a pension, was the influx of British refugees. We had an Earl' and a Lord and at least one Honourable, the son of a previous Governor-General; we had a plump little Sitwell; and the brightest boy in my form was Rudi Dolfuss, the murdered Chancellor's son.
For approximately £30 a month (for ten months) we shepherded these nice but privileged children about the comfortable old house, with the upper school in what had been the maids' bedrooms and, the infants in the old drawing room. We knew nothing of modern amenities such as tea breaks; although the Head served some of the boys an excellent luncheon, for he was fond of good food, we were not encouraged to attend, loping off instead to a cafeteria or secretively munching sandwiches in the tiny staff room. At Christmas though—when we eyed our mounting piles of presents from the boys with some jealous apprehension—the Head 'did the right thing' by treating us to an enormous dinner. Starvelings that we were, unused to drink, unsure what to say and without any real status in the school, we were scarcely hilarious. At the end of the first of these strained occasions I went home and vomited.
To my surprise I found I was supposed to be a sports master, although the more onerous duties connected with this post—in particular the refereeing of school matches--were soon taken off my hands by the worthiest but most depressed- looking of my colleagues, a man who supported a rapidly increasing family through additional jobs as an organist and a garage attendant. Being a sports master meant that I did no teach- ing in the afternoons. Instead I took the boys to soccer on the top of a near-by mountain, packing the juniors into a couple of taxis which, by making use of the shelf above the back seat, could accommodate about ten each. When the snow came in November, we substituted a visit to the YMCA, where the boys practised march- ing to 'There'll Always be an England' and then went swimming. But ice-hockey was 'the real problem. 'You must learn to skate,' the Head brusquely reminded me at the interview. My job, my neurotic compulsion to stay safely employed, depended on this.' During that autumn wobbled round frozen backyards and, at Christmas. teetered anxiously across cheerful American rinks, to canned music.
I learned thus to skate .after a fashion, but proved an incompetent referee. This was un- fortunate because the boys were obsessed with hockey and the rink lay directly beneath the Head's window: the weather was often below zero, the frozen whistle tore chunks off my lips, the opposing teams—each with no fewer than three alternating lines of manic little forwards— wore indistinguishable costumes, and when I gave a wrong decision over the off-side rule the scorn of our Earl (today a Duke)• who was of course determined not to seem an English cissy, was terrible to see. I still bear the scar of a zooming puck. My discipline in several of the classes was causing me trouble, too, and if I feared the appearance of the Head at his window above the rink this was nothing to my alarm at the thought that he might switch his public address system into reverse and hear one of my French lessons.
Yet, at the end of the first year, 1 began to feel more hopeful. I had won over the Head by getting my wife to prepare an enormous picture-chart of a feudal manor which I hung in my classroom: it was, I believe, the first visual aid (as such things are now called) to enter the school and, although I had done little or no work on it myself, it was held greatly to my credit. I was beginning to win over the boys by joining them in the playground—I was drawn magnetically to my tormentors—and even more by my ability to tell them stories. Many of the stories were horror ones and I left absolutely nothing to their imaginations, my initial aim being to scare She pants off them so that I could enjoy the maximum amount of attention and peace. On the last day of term I reached my apogee; blinds were pulled down and the child- ren hid under their desks. Yet there was never a complaint about a nightmare.
Towards the end of my schoolmastering, by then surprisingly happy, I encountered a psychia- trist who convinced me that my 'war neurosis' had a genuine basis and that I need not have' dreaded the arrival of call-up papers so much during the past few years. By then I was an accepted figure in left-wing and Bohemian circles, where neurosis was almost de rigueur. I was editing magazines and publishing avant- gar•de poetry which perhaps too often turned to the boys in the attic bedrooms, the heroes spurting across the rink.
When I left, my gentle dusty colleagues pre- sented me—known, horribly, outside the school as 'the Dylan Thomas of Canada'—with the Collected Poems of John Masefield. The boys cheered, the parents clapped politely. They and I had never made rapport. They regarded all of us as no more than chauffeurs. Later one of them, belatedly a student at McGill where I had be- come a lecturer, asked me for extra tuition. I charged her atrociously and, aware of the diamonds on her fingers, often succeeded in so undermining her confidence at the end al the first hour that she pleaded for another, and sometimes even a third.
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