A funny thing happened on the way to the Academy (part 1) Recently I was watching the programme ’50 top comedy clips on TV’ when I suddenly thought ‘What were the funniest things that happened to me at the Academy?’ So here I am putting pen to paper. Being a retired teacher myself, I must emphasise that the Academy teachers of the sixties were a fantastic lot - far more pluses than minuses - I salute you all. You made me what I am today (gulp!). Anyway, (and in no particular order) here goes:
‘Boggles Winzer’ - now you see him, now you don’t The following incident was witnessed only by myself and two others. Boggles ran the bridge club and it was the first week back in January. No one seemed to notice that during the holidays, the floor had been waxed and polished. We each sat on two desks put together, north/south/east and west, with a desk in the middle for the cards. Boggles was my partner and I had just put him into a delicate four spade contract. You could hear a pin drop. He was just about to finesse the queen of hearts when, slowly and inexorably, the two desks that he was sitting on started to move apart. So did Boggles’ cheeks and in the twinkling of an eye, right through the middle, down went Boggles, crashing to the ground. I can still envisage his small podgy forearms, flailing about like windmills in a storm, but to no avail. Postscript: Boggles actually hurt himself and the game broke up in stony silence (although it was anything but stony when we got down the first flight of stairs). A real character - I’m still reminded of him when I see the sinister gestapo agent dressed in black whose face melts at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Lurch and the disappearing chalk Looking back, I was always amazed in Chemistry classes that lots of bottles of concentrated nasties were just lying about. Mr Watt’s nickname came, of course, from the maniacal, harpsichord-playing butler from The Addams Family (even his hands looked like ‘Thing’). I decided to conduct an experiment to see if the rate of chalk disintegration in concentrated sulphuric acid had anything to do with the colour of the chalk (what a pillock!). I had just 8
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concocted a bubbling brew that even Macbeth’s witches would have been proud of, and was merrily stirring the chalk in acid muttering ‘Well that’s the end of Lurch’s chalk’ when in walked Lurch. Postscript: I can’t remember getting punished for my misdemeanour - he really was a gentle giant. I once bumped into him in 1972, he was mooching about a very busy Rothesay pier. He told me that his pet hate was queuing - he hadn’t joined a queue in over 10 years. Mind you he probably didn’t need to.
Madame Faid’s Cinderella moment I was just a ten-year-old sproglet when I first encountered Madame. What an amazing woman! She was affectionately known as ‘Madam Mim’ after Disney’s The Sword in the Stone came out in 1963 (‘I have the power - to wither a flower’). I’ve no idea where she came from (country, not planet) but we soon found out that she had a fascination with shops, castles and salads (‘Ah, la belle charbouterie’ or whatever). However, we felt there was a lot more mileage in this, so, like satan’s imps, we set out to locate her weak spot. It didn’t take long. Stained glass windows! She went crazy over them. We took it in turns to research a historical building with stained glass windows, bring it up in conversation, and she would spend the rest of the period yattering about it. At the bell we would all file out grinning like Cheshire cats. Another period ‘sans travail’. Postscript: And her Cinderella moment? Madame was involved in a right rammy at 11.45 pm at a taxi rank on the Champs Elysees. She was refused entry into her carriage until the bells struck midnight (when the fares rocketed). Even the hardened Parisian taxi drivers were no match for Madame. The poor hapless driver had to suffer an earful all the way to Montmartre. Closer to home, we got French on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays but for some reason our calendars said French homework on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Every Monday and Wednesday she would say ‘Et maintenant, mes eleves, are we due a
homework tonight?’ We would sit there like doe-eyed innocent cherubs, chanting ‘No Madame” in unison. She never twigged.
Cliff Richards - ‘I know a young teacher who swallowed a fly’ I don’t know why he swallowed a fly, but he did! We were all sitting quietly as he was reading poetry to us when a fly flew into his mouth. We sat with bated breath waiting for it to fly back out. Nothing was forthcoming, however, so we could only assume that down the hatch it went. With typical nonchalance (and a polite cough), he continued reading as if nothing had happened. Postscript: Mr Richards was an excellent teacher, but his pernicketiness now enters folklore. I always thought that Alice Richards was his mother (the woman with the hearing aid in Fawlty Towers). He was certainly no admirer of the inventor Laszlo Biro -- in his classes it was a fountain pen or else. He had a penchant for tapping little boys on the forehead with an outlandishly large device used for opening windows (sounds better if you say it quickly).
Dodo - river deep mountain high No one passed through the Academy in the sixties without encountering Dodo’s rhythmical memoirs for anything Geographical (especially rivers). But even the great teachers sometimes have to admit defeat. There was a boy in our class called Rufus (due to his rustic royal appearance).The lesson was about the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Rufus was not very good at Geography. When questioned about the rivers, he always got the words in a fankle and he kept saying “Mississouri”. After many fruitless attempts at correction, the bell rang and, as we all filed out, an exasperated Dodo yelled back at him - ‘Tell Mrs Oori I was asking for her!’ Classic Dodo. Postscript: One Friday night, a tired and dishevelled Dodo was standing on a platform at Central station. His heart sank when a sprightly young man with a large microphone bounded up to him, obviously looking for an interview. How to get rid of him. Suddenly Dodo had a brainwave. Looking at him straight in the eye and with his fiercest face (not too