But just once a week at this school, every Saturday morning, every beautiful and blessed Saturday morning, all the shivering horrors would disappear and for two glorious hours I would experience something that came very close to ecstasy.
Unfortunately, this did not happen until one was ten years old. But no matter. Let me try to tell you what it was.
At exactly ten-thirty on Saturday mornings, Mr Pople's infernal bell would go clangetty-clang-clang. This was a signal for the following to take place:
First, all boys of nine and under (about seventy all told) would proceed at once to the large outdoor asphalt playground behind the main building. Standing on the playground with legs apart and arms folded across her mountainous bosom was Miss Davis, the matron. If it was raining, the boys were expected to arrive in raincoats. If snowing or blowing a blizzard, then it was coats and scarves. And school caps, of course -- grey with a red badge on the front -- had always to be worn. But no Act of God, neither tornado nor hurricane nor volcanic eruption was ever allowed to stop those ghastly two-hour Saturday morning walks that the seven-, eight-and nine-year-old little boys had to take along the windy esplanades of Weston-super-Mare on Saturday mornings. They walked in crocodile formation, two by two, with Miss Davis striding alongside in tweed skirt and woollen stockings and a felt hat that must surely have been nibbled by rats.
The other thing that happened when Mr Pople's bell rang out on Saturday mornings was that the rest of the boys, all those of ten and over (about one hundred all told) would go immediately to the main Assembly Hall and sit down. A junior master called S. K. Jopp would then poke his head around the door and shout at us with such ferocity that specks of spit would fly from his mouth like bullets and splash against the window panes across the room. "All right!" he shouted. "No talking! No moving! Eyes front and hands on desks!" Then out he would pop again.
We sat still and waited. We were waiting for the lovely time we knew would be coming soon. Outside in the driveway we heard the motor-cars being started up. All were ancient. All had to be cranked by hand. (The year, don't forget, was around 1927/28.) This was a Saturday morning ritual. There were five cars in all, and into them would pile the entire staff of fourteen masters, including not only the headmaster himself but also the purple-faced Mr Pople. Then off they would roar in a cloud of blue smoke and come to rest outside a pub called, if I remember rightly, "The Bewhiskered Earl". There they would remain until just before lunch, drinking pint after pint of strong brown ale. And two and a half hours later, at one o'clock, we would watch them coming back, walking very carefully into the dining-room for lunch, holding on to things as they went.
So much for the masters. But what of us, the great mass of ten-, eleven-and twelve-year-olds left sitting in the Assembly Hall in a school that was suddenly without a single adult in the entire place? We knew, of course, exactly what was going to happen next. Within a minute of the departure of the masters, we would hear the front door opening, and footsteps outside, and then, with a flurry of loose clothes and jangling bracelets and flying hair, a woman would burst into the room shouting, "Hello, everybody! Cheer up! This isn't a burial service!" or words to that effect. And this was Mrs O'Connor.
Blessed beautiful Mrs O'Connor with her whacky clothes and her grey hair flying in all directions. She was about fifty years old, with a horsey face and long yellow teeth, but to us she was beautiful. She was not on the staff. She was hired from somewhere in the town to come up on Saturday mornings and be a sort of babysitter, to keep us quiet for two and a half hours while the masters went off boozing at the pub.
But Mrs O'Connor was no babysitter. She was nothing less than a great and gifted teacher, a scholar and a lover of English Literature. Each of us was with her every Saturday morning for three years (from the age of ten until we left the school) and during that time we spanned the entire history of English Literature from A.D. 597 to the early nineteenth century.
Newcomers to the class were given for keeps a slim blue book called simply The Chronological Table, and it contained only six pages. Those six pages were filled with a very long list in chronological order of all the great and not so great landmarks in English Literature, together with their dates. Exactly one hundred of these were chosen by Mrs O'Connor and we marked them in our books and learned them by heart. Here are a few that I still remember:
A.D. 597 St Augustine lands in Thanet and brings Christianity to Britain
731 Bede's Ecclesiastical History
1215 Signing of the Magna Carta
1399 Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman
1476 Caxton sets up first printing press at Westminster
1478 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
1485 Malory's Morte d'Arthur
1590 Spenser's Faerie Queene
1623 First Folio of Shakespeare
1667 Milton's Paradise Lost
1668 Dryden's Essays
1678 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress
1711 Addison's Spectator
1719 Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
1726 Swift's Gulliver's Travels
1733 Pope's Essay on Man
1755 Johnson's Dictionary
1791 Boswell 's Life of Johnson
1833 Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
1859 Darwin's Origin of Species