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A Back To School Nightmare
We ascended into Third Standard. Sir received us on high with a lengthy booming speech, clearing his throat and pacing grandly to and fro with his hands joined behind his back or tapping the whip against his leg, rocking on his heels, now and then half-sitting on a corner of the table as he twirled his moustache, pausing for long seconds at a time with his head cocked on one side as if to savour the echo of what he had said before. We were further overwhelmed, as well as vaguely flattered, by the inability to understand what he was saying. This performance proved to be a regular feature. Sir loved talking on things called - 'Seemliness' and 'Constancy' and 'Veracity' and others. We had to sit as immobile as furniture, for a falling pencil, a sneeze or a fidgeting child made him forget what it was he was going to say, and by the time he had finished roaring with anger he had also forgotten where it was he had broken off, so that he was obliged to begin several paragraphs back or sometimes from the beginning. Across the top of the blackboard was a permanent inscription in multicoloured chalk: THE DISCIPLE IS NOT GREATER THAN THE MASTER. It was written in flowery letters which Sir spent ages repairing when they became the slightest bit faded, stepping back and holding his head on one side to admire each curl he performed. Offenders were sentenced to writing out this row of words a hundred times, an exercise which did not add to any-one's enlightenment as to their significance. The inscription was also our model text when we had Penmanship. Painfully we copied letter by letter - necks strained upward to their absolute limit, and eyes narrowed, then a nervous pencil gripped with such intensity that often the letter appeared on the following page, and finger-joints were sore for a long time afterwards. Sir moved about among us with his hands clasped behind-his back, wagging the whip. Often the whip descended with terrible suddenness upon a back hunched tensely over its copy book; Sir did not brook 'upstartedness' in the young, nor letters that did not bear a suitable likeness to the model script. Sir called his whip 'fire and brimstone' or 'The wrath of God'. He and the whip were inseparable - he used it to point things out on the blackboard; he waved it in the air or tapped on the table with it during his speeches; it lay across the table in front of him as he sat and read to us tales of unvanquished knights with valiant swords and trusty steeds; with it he freely brought down the wrath of God and fire and brimstone. But there were times when he put out the fire. From time to time there blew a silence across the whole floor. Sometimes it started out of a commotion of one kind or another in a class. Often it was purely accidental and not accounted for, 'an angel passing'. But sometimes it spread from one of the two doors at either end of the floor, where Mr. Thomas had suddenly appeared, or the Reverend had come to smile on us and pat random heads. Then it was that Sir edged backwards and eased the whip onto his chair or slid it under papers on his table, or on a few desperate occasions it slithered to the floor. |
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This intel was contributed by SAHM30
SAHM30
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May, 2012
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