Low life
The learning process
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihave just been made more than usually aware of what a lousy education I had by the presence in my flat of two of my landlady's nieces who are both at Oxford University and who have brains that have been steeped in nitro-glycerine. That is to say they sparkle a little and I by compari- son am a damp squib. I learned only two things at school, how to bowl inswingers and that the Great Reform Bill was passed in 1832. To hear them talk about schools nowadays, let alone university, makes my heart bleed. What a pathetic lazy little rotter I was, what with my hay fever and bed-wetting and home-sickness. Looking back on it all, the bad but expensive education, what I find so ridiculous about school is that it doesn't teach you anything whatsoever about how to make a living when you've done with it. I did actually learn more than two things at school. I had a mad history master who made us learn no less than 50 history dates per term. The headmaster at my prep school went by the slightly Dickensian name of Reverend Walpole E. Sealy. He spent most of his time in the vegetable garden picking gooseberries while listening to Mozart on his portable radio and when he wasn't doing that he taught latin and caned me. He caned me once for taking too much marmalade at breakfast. He got into quite a tizzy and screamed at me, 'Do you know how many merchant seamen gave their lives in crossing the Atlantic to provide you with that marmalade?' I told him no and found consolation in the arms of a certain Norma King, the only day girl at the school, who promptly gave me my first kiss on the lips. Anyway the marmalade inci- dent has stuck with me and to this day I simply can't bear to throw food away.
Having got slung out of that establish- ment I went to a terrible school with the fairly high-sounding name of the New Beacon, which was established at Seven- oaks. How odd that the headmaster should have been called Major Frank Norman, considering that Fings Aint Wot They Used to Be Frank Norman turned out to be my best friend years later. He, the Major, was convinced that my bed- wetting was sheer laziness and he was quite fond of thumping me too. I explained to him that wetting the bed was uncomfort- able, humiliating and smelly but he wouldn't have any of it and made me walk through the assembly room every morning in front of all the other boys with my wet sheets in my arms. The Major taught maths and I had an absolute blank about fractions and he beat me nigh unto death for a year until I learnt how to multiply one third by three quarters. What we did have, though, at the New Beacon was a music mistress who aroused my interest in Bach and sex. She played a piano arrangement of Bach's third Bran- denburg Concerto and she played it with her legs so wide apart that I listened to the performances sitting on the floor slightly to the right of the piano and in front of it. I still find Bach stimulating. And there was a beautiful mistress who taught botany. Whenever she passed my desk I would drop a pencil on the floor and bend down to pick it up so that I could look up her skirt. Her name was Miss Burt and she taught me more about things like chloro- phyll than you'll ever know.
But no wonder my landlady's nieces are so clever and me so daft. What distractions could they have ever had? No wet sheets and excesses of marmalade. It really annoys me that had it not been for such distractions like looking up Miss Burt's skirt I too could be an MA. And what would I do with that degree? Laura and Eleanor are swanning their next three years away at Oxford at Sir Keith Joseph's expense (or yours and mine, the tax- payers'). They say it is something to do 'twixt leaving school and getting married to a rich twit. As I've said before in this column they could do just as well reading Tolstoy in the kitchen as at Oxford. At least the Reverend Walpole E. Sealy, Miss Burt and Major Frank Norman never cost the tax-payer a cent.
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