The David Gribble Archive : Talks

My Apprenticeship

Leipzig , 2006
Page 1

I will try to speak without reading, because that is always more interesting, but in case my German suddenly collapses, I have got my whole talk written out here. Even this first sentence is written on this piece of paper.

I will start with a quotation from Virginia Woolf:

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial . . . one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.”

My ideas about education may not be controversial here, but I hope it will interest you to hear how they originated. To make my task as simple as possible, I have divided my life into chapters.

First Chapter: Before I knew that I wanted to be a teacher

I start very early. My parents were divorced when I was about two yeas old. After that I was brought up by women, and my mother did actually tell me that my father had never held me in his arms. I lived in a house full of women – my mother, my elder sister, our nanny, the cook and the maids. The only man who worked for us was the gardener. My life, as you see, was gentle, privileged and rather lonely. It must have had a great influence on me.

Then, all at once, when I was eight years old, I was sent to a boarding school, where there were only men and boys, and if you broke a rule, you were caned. I still remember the first time I was caned. I had to stand by a table and then bend forwards until my face rested on the hard wood. Then I had to stretch out my arms and hold on to the edge of the table with my hands. And then the head master started. I probably only got three strokes, but it hurt more than anything I had ever experienced in my whole life. My skin was not broken, the strokes didn’t even leave bruises, but the pain astonished me.

There are two important aspects to this event; firstly, I was a particularly good boy, who always wanted to please the grown-ups and everybody else, and secondly I can no longer remember why I was being caned. Think for a moment what that means. And remember too, that other boys sometimes did get bruises, which stayed for weeks. The system did not make any difference: the naughty boys went on being naughty.

At this school there was also another punishment: you had to do some kind of useful job with the headmaster in the school grounds. This opportunity to do something that was practical and useful, and what’s more to work with the headmaster as a colleague, was so much fun that sometimes boys who were not being punished came to join in.

And one more story from my time at this school. One evening we found a thermometer in our dormitory, and we had a box of matches. We wanted to see what would happen when the mercury reached the end of the thermometer. Two things happened: the thermometer broke and the headmaster came in.

We were of course terribly frightened: we had broken something that belonged to the school, and we expected a severe punishment. However, the headmaster was in a good mood; he said he understood that we were doing a scientific experiment and had learnt something, and he congratulated us.

In my description of this school I have not said anything at all about lessons. Of course there were lessons, on every day except Sunday, but in my memory they are not as important as these stories about punishing and not punishing. When I was thirteen years old I had to go to Eton College, where once again there were only boys and what is more we all had to wear tail coats. At Eton we were caned in a different way. Firstly, it was the older boys who beat us, and secondly we had to bend over the back of a chair and hold on to the struts under the seat. The first thing the caner did was to lift the tails of the victim’s coat with his cane and lay them on his back.

At Eton I learnt once again that a punishment, even a cruel punishment like caning, didn’t have the desired result. For example, in my boarding-house there was a rule that you couldn’t leave your books on the table near the entrance in the evening. For every book you had to pay a fine of tuppence, and when you had been fined half-a-crown, that is to say thirty pennies, you were caned by the prefects. We all often left books behind, even when we had already paid two shillings and fourpence. The punishment didn’t work.

At Eton I learnt a lot that was not true. For example, I learnt that I was not musical and could neither sing nor play the piano. I learnt that I was not worth much, because I was no good at sport. I learnt that it is more important to obey the boys’ unwritten rules than the school’s written ones. I learnt that if you have power, you do not need to act fairly.

A little story about that. A teacher called Mr. Rowe – it is significant, that I can remember his name – crumpled up a large drawing that I had done in a science lesson and threw it into the waste-paper basket. He said there was no name on it. I protested, and told him that my name was on the drawing. I had to go out in front of the class, pick my drawing out of the bin and spread it out on a desk. There was my name, in the top right-hand corner. “Too small,” said the teacher, and I had to go back to my place.

And one more story. In another science lesson, taken by Mr. Morris, I felt sick and I put up my hand. Mr. Morris just went on talking, and I stood up and went out in front of the class and stood in front of him, with my hand up. He paid no attention and went on talking. “Sir,” I said, “I think I am going to be sick.” No reaction. I ran to the door and I was sick. Mr. Morris looked at me, turned to the class and said, “That was a perfect example of reverse peristalsis.” I still remember the term.

Eton was of course an old-fashioned school, and we had to spend as much time on Latin and Greek as all the other subjects put together. I have forgotten almost everything. I also studied German. “Aha, that was a success,” I hope you will think, but no, it was not a success. Although I passed my exams, the first time I went to Austria I didn’t dare say a word in German. I could read a little bit, and translate, and I knew how to say “liegen, liegt, lag, gelegen,” and “schwimmen, schwimmt, schwamm, geschwommen,” but that was not the kind of thing I needed to say.

I also learnt a few lists, such as, for example, "Durch, für, ohne, gegen, wider, um," the prepositions which take the accusative, and also "The spirit of god and the body of man and the worm in the place at the edge of the wood". When these words are translated into German you have a list of the masculine nouns which form the plural with umlaut and er. If I hesitate later on, you will understand that I am just quickly running through one of these lists in my head, so that I don’t make a mistake.

After Eton, you may well understand, I didn’t want any more education, I wanted to go out into the real, wide world. For that reason I learnt shorthand and typing and my first job was in a tobacco business that belonged to my father. I copied numbers from one book into another and I typed out hundreds of copies of a letter that began, “Dear Sir, the first shipment of Havana cigars to the United Kingdom has just arrived and is in bond at London.” The real, wide world was just as bad as school.

And then, all at once, it occurred to me that I would rather work with children than with grown-ups.