Old school memories stay in our heads many, many years later. Their ordinariness sometimes belies the effect that small events had on our thinking in later life when we, hopefully, became the wise ones. Christine entertains us with a couple of such stories.
A lot of people who remember the 1960s will also remember the big political scandal of that decade, the Keeler/Ward/Profumo affair. We were about thirteen at the time, and naturally very interested in all the sordid details we gleaned from the papers and news bulletins.
One day, a group of us girls were having a discussion in the cloakroom, mulling over the various salacious titbits on offer. Back then, thirteen-year-olds were perhaps not quite as worldly-wise as their present-day counterparts. I don't think the word 'gay' - in its newest incarnation - was in use then, but the term 'homosexual' sounded much more impressive anyway. We had gathered roughly what this meant from our eager forays into the media, but there was one unspoken question: what did they actually do? As someone helpfully pointed out 'they don't have the right bits'.
It was then that one girl told us she knew just how it worked. Agog for the details, we listened in silence to her explanation (which, incidentally, was correct). It wasn't the sort of information that was readily available in those days, so of course, we wondered how she came to know all this. We were all quite shocked - not so much by her revelations of sexual practices, but by how she had learned about them. She had asked her mother.
As I remember, Latin was not overly popular, so perhaps that is why pupils were glad to have a classics teacher who enjoyed digressing. One day he got onto the theme of committing the perfect murder (don't ask!) He explained that the best way to do this was not to be too fussy about your victim - it needed to be a stranger chosen at random, so there would be no obvious connection or motive. Better still to travel to an unfamiliar place, to further throw the police off the scent. He never did tell us whether he was speaking from experience - if he was, then presumably his theory worked! It probably wouldn't hold in these days of DNA and CCTV.
On another occasion, he got onto the subject of right- and left-handedness - as you do. He suggested that we should try doing things using the 'wrong' hand. I dutifully gave it a go, and to this day, I still use the 'wrong' hand when it comes to cutlery, though I decided writing with my left hand really was a step too far.
I guess he was quite unconventional at heart: on a sunny day, he would occasionally move the class outside, onto the grass near the Park Road side of the school - why sit in a hot and stuffy classroom? And when the A-Level timetable was arranged in such a way that English and Latin classes coincided, so you couldn't do both subjects, even though they complement each other, he gave up some of his free time to teach us off-timetable. That was when, in the interests of equality, grammar schools were being phased out, and Latin all but disappeared. Ironic that 'equality' can mean bringing standards down and limiting options, but at least it makes everyone equal!
I am grateful that I had the opportunity to study Latin. It has enriched my appreciation and understanding of the English language, and it seems a pity that nowadays most of the grammar schools, which gave that opportunity to children from 'ordinary' families, are no longer around to do so.