John Bull's First Job
Failed in Divinity
By JOHN BETJEMAN
I WAS sent down from Oxford for failing in Holy Scripture. The cor- rect phrase for my sort of sending down was rustica- tion. My father had given me a good allowance while I was up and I had not used this for paying many bills, The credit system for under- graduates at Oxford in those days was excellent and it was many years before my bill at Black- well's for books was paid. In fact, I have an idea that it had to be paid out of my father's estate, after his death. My father stopped my allowance forthwith and confiscated my motor-car and told me I must either start at the bottom by working at the bench in his factory at £1 a week and live at home, or else make my own living. By staying at the country houses of friends I had made at Oxford, I was able to keep going until the time came round for me to get a job, the in- evitable job for all undergraduates in my posi- tion—that of a preparatory schoolmaster.
I went to Gabbitas, Thring and Company, scholastic agents in Sackville Street, and saw the principal, who told me I must get references from schoolmasters and tutors. To my surprise, Sir Cyril Norwood, who had been my head- master at Marlborough and seemed, in those days, a remote figure, produced a most useful and cordial reference. So did Oxford dons, who had been friends of mine, such as Maurice Bowra, Roy Harrod, Nevill Coghill and John 13ryson. But these were character sketches from friends. When it came to my tutor, I did not fare so well, for I had done little work for him and he supplied me with a reference which Gabbitas, Thring and Company advised me not to use. 1 do remember that he said in it that I Was amiable, which was an odd word for him to have used about our strained- relationship.
After several futile applications where I had admitted to being able to do all sorts of things I couldn't do, such as teaching music, gym- nastics, chemistry, engineering and athletics, I at last got a job at a .school in Metroland. The Post was that of temporary master at £30 for the term, and keep. The school- was a villal of three storeys in the Metroland Tudor style of about 1919, to which classrooms had been added. Even today it looks more .like a house than a school. It was what you might call mixed. There were some boarders packed into the available bedroom space and a majority of day boys, sons of executives who lived among the prunus, forsythia and silver birches of this inner part of Beechy Bucks and whose houses were variants of this school.
It was a happy place and I enjoyed myself there. There were certain disadvantages. I could not keep order among the older boys, some of • whom were boarders and taller than me and with broken voices and who, I felt, ought to have left in the previous year for their public schools. Instead of me ordering them about, they ordered rue about, and I suppose my anxiety not to offend them was partly ingrained habit from not too distant schooldays, partly physical terror and partly my congenital weakness of wishing to be popular. Another disadvantage was lavatory duty, after breakfast, when I had to tick off on a register the boys' evacuations. `Have you been?' to which they would reply, 'Have you, sir?' And, of course, there was cricket, played on a distant field, and which was hours of anxious' boredom, trying to get the boys in the deep field to stand up during the game and not to run away when my back was turned, and trying to remember the names of the places in the cricket field and how to hold a bat, and how many balls had been played in an over. The compensation, so far as the boys were concerned, was the teaching. Subjects like mathematics, in
which I had consistently failed myself, were quite easy to teach because in the master's copy
the answer was given in the end of the book and the boys thought one was very clever any- how, just because one was a master. But what for me was really worth teaching was English, particularly to the younger boys. Boys of eight and nine are rarely derivative. They have a strong sense of rhythm and rhyme. Life is a golden adventure for them, with terrifying dark corners. They all have poetry in •them and are not ashamed of writing it and reading it. I found myself humbled by these children whose minds were so sensitive to impressions. They liked what was simple and deep, like the lyrics of Blake and the nonsense poems of Edward Lear. Though they could never write a poem that was con- sistently good from beginning to end, they could produce phrases that Blake would have envied. I remember one poem by a boy of eight about death, which had the line: 'The square dark squeeze of a dead man's tomb.'
The staff common room was an attic at the top of the house and here I had two delightful colleagues who catered for two sides of life: the spiritual and the sybaritic. Mr. R was High Church, as I was, and next to the school was a handsome new church designed by Temple Moore, with a daily Mass, which Mr. R and I attended before school, when the early Metro- land sun shone through neo-perpendicular windows on to rough tiled floors and adzed benches and outside could be heard the steps of early commuters on their leafy walk to the station. Mr. S, my othr.r colleague, was a more romantic figure. who lo 'Iced like Ronald Colman and applied shoe blacking to the hair at his temples and who told Inc that he had a wife in London, though the headmaster had employed him as a single man. He was very keen on the matron, whose room was immediately below our common room, and he used to let down the wastepaper basket on a string with a message in it for her to take from her window. After tea, he would sometimes pay her a visit and station me on the landing outside her door in case the headmaster's wife came up the stairs to consult the matron. If she came up, I was to knock on the door. Once she did come up and I knocked and this gave Mr. S the chance to get into the matron's cupboard. Every evening Mr. S and I would walk down the hill to what still bore the semblance of an old village and drink beer at the inn by the church, until closing time, when we would come back singing, making up Buckinghamshire calypsos about the staff, the boys and their parents. The headmaster and his wife were very kind to us. They had an open Morris and sometimes in the evening they would take Mr. S and me for a drive through country lanes, as yet free from the petrol scent of the cars of executives and smelling sweetly of lime blossom. It was always a dread with Mr. S and me that they would not get us back until it was too late to visit the public house. They were not themselves drinkers. At the end of the term I found I had spent all my salary of £30 and most of this had gone on beer. The headmaster kindly gave me a £5 bonus, which enabled me to pay the fare_ to a country house, where stayed until I found another job.
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