The vanishing religious education teacher, the Turin Shroud, bare ...

Some people claim to teachers got a lot to answer for (in my humble opinion, so many parents, but that's another story). Maybe my memory has turned some of my teachers into caricatures of the characters that they really were, although this doesn't seem terribly likely. There are one or two individuals who are quite obviously a bit twisted. There was at least one that wouldn't have minded getting my pants off (but was old enough to be my granddad). I was too young to understand the significance of him wishing to reduce the number of strokes of the cane that I was due, in favour of applying this specially reduced penalty directly to my bare bottom! Despite having the surname of Hoffman, this teacher appeared to be as British as kippers for breakfast and had a sibilant overly posh voice and the most frightening limp that made him look as it was about to fall over with each forward step. It was supposed to be Mr Hoffman's job to teach us all physics, but I cannot remember learning much about this whilst sat in the ancient laboratory in which he taught. Instead, Mr Hoffman has elected to teach successive years of impressionable young boys about various kinds of tortures that we used throughout the history of humankind. The lasting impression that I was left with, was that it was likely that only a tiny percentage of the anecdotes and stories told by Mr Hoffman were likely to be true and the rest of them were not very entertaining. I had never been sure whether the senior staff at the school were awake to the fact that Mr Hoffman never taught physics, but tortures instead, but I can tell you that all of the boys in school were perfectly well aware of this going on. Mr Hoffman's wish to cane me, for some reason or the other was, at best, heavily contrived and more than slightly implausible? but this was in an age when one day had said nothing that contradicted a teacher.

Mr Taylor was unique amongst the staff teaching at the school, as he drove around in a classic Jaguar, smoked cigars and obviously had a source of income that was nothing to do with the school ? strangely enough he taught music and so managed to teach me almost nothing? saving just one thing concerning something he referred to as the 'tonic sulphur' (deliberately mispronounced by me, because I cannot be bothered to go on Google and find out, even after all this time, what the silly sod was talking about). The tonic sulphur was, explained Mr Taylor "like schoolboy' s definition of salt" in that it "made potatoes taste funny if you DIDN'T put it in." And to illustrate this he would play something on the piano and this would sound all wrong and Mr Taylor would characterise this as being "full of Eastern promise" a direct reference to a long-running TV advertisement for Fry's Turkish Delight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4v0Bd63Y4

Mr Davis, on the other hand was as maladjusted as most Welshman living in England at the time and compounded this by teaching French (about which he was so obsessive that he had managed to persuade the school to hold its Friday religious service entirely in French) Mr Davis was single-handedly responsible for convincing me that I would never learn a foreign language (French being the only language worth learning, in his opinion). Mr Davis did not help the way in which he presented at this school, because he seemed to be singularly unaware that the very thin covering of skin on his face made his features more skull like the normal and he made matters worse (far worse) by wearing owl eye shaped spectacles and plastering his remaining hair flat against his head using either Brylcreem or one of its equivalents. At the time I quite fancied myself as a bit of a cartoonist and at the same time is not learning French drew a picture of Mr Davis in all of his death's head glory, with the notation 'Frogoi' underneath. Unfortunately, my lack of attention directed towards Mr Davis also included his location in the classroom, whilst he was moving around and the bastard crept up on me and espied my handiwork! It is fair to say that Mr Davis had in for me for the rest of the time I was at this particular school and I could properly characterise him as harbouring something of a grudge (something that I was to learn, much later on, that Welshman were quite expert at). The woodwork teacher was also Welsh and the complete maniac. I wouldn't say I've never seen anybody lose their temper quite like it, but they didn't usually have an entire arsenal of potentially lethal weapons at their disposal. I forget this guy's name but, like my father, he saw no reason whatsoever why should be quite so incompetent at working with wood and believe that he could surely as this by getting annoyed with me. Needless to say this did not work. However, I did manage to cut myself (accidentally) whilst in one of his classes and the idiot would have no truck with the idea that I might be allergic to sticking plaster and stuck one of those horrible fabric backed gooey things on my thumb and I was unable to remove this until I was well clear of the workshops, by this time I had a final flourish of an allergic reaction spreading over most of the rest of my hand and up my arm! On the lookout the territory complaint it teaches about anything, it seemed to me, as my parents didn't seem to care what happened to me until and unless it might reflect on them socially, THEN they were concerned and would take it out on me from putting them in this position. In fact, there was almost a thing that I could do that didn't inevitably result in me getting hurt in some way and so I learned to accept this philosophically? never once dreaming that I have every right to be pissed off and upset. You just didn't do that in the late 1950s and early 60s (or if you did, then I didn't see any of it). Is it any wonder that I had a lengthy history of poor bladder control!

In the past, I have made many references to the fact that growing up left me with some very mixed messages concerning my spirituality? not least amongst these malevolent influences was orthodox Christianity, which not only did things that I didn't understand, but I couldn't reconcile with some of the things that I read in the Bible. It may not surprise you to learn that I haven't greatly change this point of view in the ensuing years, I have just got better at expressive myself in more eloquent terms! Nonetheless, this was an age when there were certain members of society who were held above others, as a matter of course and two of these were doctors and priests. At the time, the general public's attitude to these men (yes, even the doctors were nearly all men) was downright deferential. Times have certainly changed since then and I have contended, on many occasions, that clerics were the architects of their own oppression, by alienating people during the years that they had any real power in society. Of course, now they're getting it back, they don't really like it and what makes it worse is that an entirely different generation was responsible for sowing the seeds that ultimately led to the aggressive secularism of England's post-Christian society!

The daily newspaper taken by my parents published a photograph of the Turin Shroud and I was quite taken by this, being the first time I had ever heard of this allegedly holy relic. There are various reasons why the Turin Shroud is a fake and a fraud and although these are well-known today, they were not well-known then and the newspaper could get away with publishing this photograph with the rhetorical question of 'is this the face of Christ?' Industriously, I cut the size of the newspaper and took it into school with the intention of showing it to my Religious Education teacher (a man of the cloth of some sort or another). Thinking back, as I have just done, I can recall this guy having an attitude problem that was downright petulant
and, at the time, I would not have readily identified him as homosexual? but he almost certainly was. I would certainly have been unaware of the difficulties being homosexual and a member of the clergy at one and the same time could have caused. I was, however, conscious of the threat that this particular clergymen have become increasingly unstable and given to what seemed to be quite unreasonable outbursts of temper! The stories and I thought that this photograph of the Turin Shroud would please my Religious Education teacher and I was more than a little abashed when the guy became red-faced and almost incandescent when I produce this photograph? but never favoured me with an explanation as to quite why I had done something that was only a little short of widdling in the communion cup. This incident came, according to my memory, only a few weeks before this particular teacher appeared to vanish mysteriously from the staff of the school. I have to assume that it was difficult to recruit religious education teachers as RE soon to be unofficially dropped from the school curriculum for about three years.

The successor in the post, at this Clapham school, was also a clergymen? but a far younger years and milder manners. The man would regularly take to the stage at the front of the school assembly hall and tell us all about the counselling that we had on offer. At the time, I had no real idea what counselling was, despite the fact that my parents were concerned enough about my aberrant behaviour to attack the off to weekly appointments with a psychiatrist at the Belgravia hospital for children. I would attend these appointments on my own and my parents will take no interest in these sessions or any progress I might make. If, indeed, I did make any progress that I was certainly unaware of it and it was disproportionately concerned about the amount of attention that my psychiatrist would lavish upon his Ronson pipe during the time I was sat there tried desperately to think of something to think of something new to say to this man. I would watch as my psychiatrist would take this pipe apart and clean the tarry goo out of it, whilst paying apparently no attention to me whatsoever. My parents finally did take interested in my progress at the Belgravia hospital and this came about when I summarily stopped going to these appointments and refused to attend any further sessions. As there was nothing that could be done to physically force me to resume my attendance at these appointments, nothing more was said about it.

With the benefit of hindsight I probably would have benefited from some less orthodox psychiatric care? whether this would be okay if delivered by a member of the Anglican clergy, this something that will be forever a mystery. However, based on context alone, I did manage to work out what counselling was (at least in part) and regarded anything which tried to genuinely understand me as threatening? probably because I wasn't sure what they were going to do with the information and that most of my other formative experiences that led me to believe that it was almost unheard of for anything good to come of this kind of thing. So it was, but I managed to successfully avoid this clergymen for some several months? but he had clearly identified they have as the troubled individual and decided to try to get me into his office on some flimsy pretext or other. I cooperated on the strict understanding that the man wasn't going to try to counsel me (maybe I've managed to confuse this with some of the few things I could remember from Mr Hoffman's physics lessons). I can remember the clergymen attempting to playfully laugh off my paranoia concerning counselling and really wasn't at all phased by the fact that I had not only managed to evade Confirmation, but I've managed to persuade myself of the pointlessness of most things in life and had come to the conclusion that I ought to be an atheist? this had the unexpected bonus of upsetting my mother (and quite surprisingly because I don't idea whatsoever that she was the least bit spiritual or indeed interested in anything at all about me including my spirituality). Anyway, this Anglican priest and RE teacher didn't quite given up trying to talk to me about matters spiritual and seemed quite interested in the fact that I could totally blank my mind at will (for the most part, I still can). It seemed to me that it was a rather desperate thing for him to try to claim that closing down my mind in this way might be considered to be a form of prayer (there would certainly be some people who would consider it to be meditation ? though I would never have known about this at the time). Having grown up with the disturbing background of both of my parents being hypocrites, I developed a healthy dislike for double standards and anything that leaned in that direction. To have a sky pilot characterise anything I did as prayer was enough to make me reappraise this aspect of my lifestyle. We all change as we get older and the teenage years are, by their very nature, that time of life when we first work out we have any kind of right to object of things and this usually gets over exercised in various acts of rebellion. I did grow my hair long, but so did a lot of other men at that time (the difference being the mine has remained long all my life). My problem was that I wasn't mature enough to be able to put this cleric's opinion on one side and carry on life as though it wasn't important. If you read a lot of my postings then you will probably naturally assume that I came to the conclusion that there was some kind of spiritual link and that I ought to somehow take this further. I was about 15 years old and not equal to anything as complicated as that? instead I decided to give up those periods of time in the day that I set aside to think of nothing (on the premise that this was something I ought not to do if I considered myself to be a card-carrying atheist). I dropped the RE teacher a note to tell him that I had done this and didn't get so much as an acknowledgement. With the benefit of hindsight I have wondered whether he considered that he had done quite enough damage and that he ought to leave me alone. Veteran readers of this blog will know that this was by no means anything but a clause in my spiritual life and that it would come back, quite literally, to hold me during my mid 20s. That, as they say, is another story and this is pretty much where I came in.

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