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LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU:
REMEMBERING IAN MELDRUM
By Peter A. Douglas
As the years advance, the thread of friendship and association
stretches, grows thin, and often snaps altogether. It’s a
pity, but inevitable really, as people move or forget to write, and
eventually drop off one’s personal radar screen. From among
all the people I knew at Trinity High School from 1956 to 1963, I’m
still in touch with only one, but until ten years ago, there was
another name in my address book, and, intriguingly, this was one of
my teachers: Ian Meldrum, my old French teacher.
Ian Meldrum joined the school for the autumn term of 1958. He
obviously doesn’t appear in the school photograph of the previous
July, but he is in the 1963 photograph (grid 3M6) squinting between
Grimshaw and Spike, his broad brow catching the sun, and in 1968
(4P6). His first comments on my French efforts appeared in my
report for the Christmas 1958 term, when I was in 3A, and he was my
form master in 6 Lower Arts, 1960-61. We all have memories of
our teachers, of course, and they bring back a broad range of
thoughts and emotions; usually aversion is more common than
admiration, dullness predominates over stimulation, and frustration
easily defeats satisfaction. With Mr. Meldrum the difference
is that I find that I haven’t got any bad memories of him.
This makes him unique to me, in the rogues’ gallery of our teachers,
that personal pantheon of peculiarities.
There were several things at school that made it relatively easy
to have a better than average relationship with Mr. Meldrum.
First, by the time we got to the 6th form there were only three of
us in his French class - Peter Drinkwater, John Wright, and me, so
an extra intimacy was natural, though sometimes we didn’t appreciate
the additional attention that such a small group assured each of us.
Second, Mr. Meldrum was what we would have called “a decent bloke
for a teacher;” he had a sense of humour, a light touch, and was
quick with his approbation. There was a sense of good-natured
bonhomie and even a mutual respect between teacher and pupil that
was markedly lacking in so many other teacher-pupil relationships.
Third, I enjoyed French and was good at it. I expect that much
of this can be put down to the other two reasons, for it was easier
to excel in a subject when you liked the teacher, and with such a
small class we had no option but to receive his full attention for
the entire period. It was exhausting, but beneficial.
Even now, in Montmartre or Montreal, as I get my rusty but trusty
French in gear again and do my best to limber up my irregular verbs
and dredge up from silted memory the French words for whatever I
need, it’s impossible for me not to hear Mr. Meldrum’s soft Scottish
voice in my head, encouraging or gently admonishing.
I remember on one occasion Mr. Meldrum invited the three of us in
his class to his house for tea. He and his family lived at 164
Kingsthorpe Grove, just up the hill a little way from The Romany,
and a short walk from school. The fog of time has dimmed all
but the barest of memories of that occasion, but I do have a
lingering mental picture of a winter sunset, encroaching darkness,
and a warm room with tea and sandwiches. I’m sure that Mr.
Meldrum and his wife Sonja were attentive hosts, and their youngest
child Philip was hanging around too. (He had three children,
Gillian being the middle one; I can’t remember anything about the
other.) I almost met Philip again in 1976 as Mr. Meldrum wrote
to tell me that Philip was planning to visit the USA and wondered if
we might meet up. It didn’t happen, and I regret it. I
have no memory of any feeling of discomfort or uneasiness at this
tea party, though I expect the three of us must have found it a
little strange to actually be in a teacher’s house, seeing the
normality and ordinariness of his life outside school - that he did,
in fact, have an actual life outside school! That he had
laundry, house slippers, a wife, children, and a garden to weed!
I suppose it’s unusual to have an enduring relationship, even a
postal one, with a teacher, but as the pupil becomes an adult, the
disparity in the original relationship is blurred and becomes
irrelevant. My correspondence with Ian didn’t develop
immediately after I left school, but more than a decade later when I
was going through my address book, alerting people about my
relocation to the USA. The relationship was simmering
silently, though, as Ian was acquainted with my mother who, at the
time, was an usherette at the Royal Theatre, and scraps of news were
swapped over programme and coffee sales.
Our communication became much the same as with any other friend,
though in the beginning we were both aware of how unlikely it was. In 1975 he wrote:
| “I do feel quite touched that any of those hundreds
of ex-pupils of mine should even bother to write to me,
especially after the long lapse of years.” |
We exchanged news of family and of current events, of our summer
activities and travel adventures. Ian and Sonja, for instance,
took holidays in the Greek islands, and spent some time in Provence,
north of Avignon, where his brother and sister-in-law had a holiday
cottage. They also went to Scotland, a visit that Ian
described as “a pilgrimage we make every five years or so".
Yes, at some point in the exchange of letters I started addressing
him as Ian. He signed his letters “Ian Meldrum,” and it seemed
quite natural to take that step towards informality now.
Initially, I did feel the odd residual spasm of incongruity in this
when I thought of “Ian” in professorial mode in one of the Tower
classrooms declaiming a passage from Baudelaire or Beaumarchais, or
about the funeral of Emma Bovary from our green Whitlock and Jukes
textbook. It was a remarkable privilege; the teacher I saw for
years in his stout shoes and black gown at the blackboard, drilling
the use of the subjunctive into our distracted brains, was now
writing to me as a friend and sharing his private thoughts.
Even the look of his letters, that very familiar neat hand, the way
he often joined one word to the next with a flourish of ink, and
known to me from numerous red comments in still extant exercise
books, looked distinctly weird and out of context in an affable
Christmas letter.
By the way, he was never “Jock” to us in those days, though this
natural designation for a Scotsman seems to have been widely applied
later on. As far as I can recall, we never gave him a nickname
at all. To us he was just “Meldrum,” or perhaps, with some
warmth, “old Meldrum.”
What is most relevant, however, to the school’s website and its
readers are Ian’s comments in his letters of the late 1970s about
life at the school as it had then become, and seen through his
expert and somewhat by then world-weary eyes. This was after
1973 when the school, in those grim words, “went comprehensive.”
It’s clear from Ian’s descriptions that this major change had a deep
and deleterious effect on the daily life of the school and all
associated with it, including Ian, and, not least, the quality of
the teaching that was even possible. Below is an excerpt from Ian’s
letter to me dated December 7, 1975, in which he unburdens himself
about what the school has become, and, incidentally, offers a small
picture of some of the physical changes that the school had
undergone by then. After explaining how teachers can’t get jobs
because of shortage of cash in local government coffers, he says:
| “We’re all right in our school: no less than 65
staff this year and about 900 pupils, but the vague
threat is that if anyone leaves he or she won’t be
replaced - I’m not sure if this applies to important
people like Heads, Deputy Heads, or caretakers however.
(By the way, your ‘T.H.S’ brands you as a very old boy.
We’ve changed the name at least 3 times since then:
we’re now ‘Northampton Trinity Upper School,’ for the
next couple of years at any rate. All educational
establishments go in for name-changing nowadays it
seems, to emphasize the upturn from the old system to
the Comprehensive one.
“A lot more than the name has changed however. The
atmosphere of the place, I mean, not the buildings -
except for a small ‘New Block’ with half a dozen small
rooms and a common room for the Sixth, we’re just the
same. With of course a cluster of Prefab ‘Mobile Class
Rooms’ around what remains of the playground. It’s
difficult to describe. Obviously there’s far more
yelling, noise, vandalism, truancy, uninhibited
swearing, and general indiscipline than in the past, and
most of the kids come from the poorer areas of the town,
but it’s not just that: after all, it’s only a mirror of
the society we live in anyway to be undisciplined and
couldn’t care less. I think it’s partly that hardly any
of the children seem prepared to do any real work; that
isn’t what school’s for. One somehow gets through the
day with a minimum of activity, physical or mental,
until 4 o’clock when the real life begins again.
“The other thing is that the teachers themselves
are confused in their aims, unsure of themselves,
knowing that what we try to teach is largely irrelevant
and unappreciated but not knowing what to put in its
place. That goes not only for ancients like me, but for
a great many of the younger ones too, I may say. Maybe
it’s being a teacher of languages that makes me view
things so pessimistically, because one’s obviously got
to do a lot of listening, learning, and drudgery in a
subject like that, and it’s easy to despair when the
kids come to us at 13 having done at least two years of
French, unable to read or understand simple sentences,
not having learnt that there’s a difference between ‘je’
and ‘vous’ and ‘ils,’ and imbued for the most part with
a heart-felt distaste for the French and their blasted
language.
“You can see that it’s time I gave up and retired.
I think about it a lot these days and wonder if I can
stick it out for one or two more years. I suppose I can,
but I’m a bit tired of fighting the younger generation,
and like Candide I’d be quite happy, having developed a
rather gloomy view of human existence, to be left alone
to cultivate my garden.” |
I like that reference to Candide, for we studied Voltaire’s
novel with him, and he brought the book to life. Ian adds an
interesting post script to this letter:
| “P.S. We nearly bought another house the other day
from a young chap called Martin Smith, ex-THS who says
he was at school with you. I didn’t remember him, though
he insists I taught him once - the old memory is
gradually collapsing!” |
Another letter, written on April 8, 1976, shows how teacher and
pupil alike rejoiced at the thought of time away from the grind of
school. The tone is gloomy and apocalyptic:
| “We’re crawling at a snail’s pace to the next break
at Easter. It’s something of a siege mentality amongst
the staff just now, if not actually despair, and at
times I visualize the whole system at Trinity collapsing
under the effects of rowdiness and indiscipline. I
certainly don’t teach much French nowadays!” |
Again, on February 27, 1978, we see his delight at the unusual
extension of the half-term holiday. A profound sense of hopelessness
has crept in and by now he is anticipating and welcoming the
prospect of retirement:
| “We’ve only just gone back to school after an
extended half-term of nearly a fortnight, since the oil
tanker drivers went on strike (bless their kind hearts)
and deprived the school of its central heating for a few
more days. None of the pupils seems convinced
however that the holiday is over, and not even the Fifth
Year candidates for examinations next term are showing
any signs of concern at the prospect of approaching
trials. I don’t think leaving examinations have
much importance any more in Trinity - which would
probably be a good thing if instead the kids
concentrated on making the most out of the education
they get. Which they don’t! And who am I to blame
them? We have two modest sized (15-20) French
classes in the Fifth Form this year and of those only
four pupils (girls of course) will manage to scrape a
pass at ‘O Level.’ My, what a brilliant lot of
French students we used to have ‘in the old days’ by
comparison!” |
I have to assume, with some pride and satisfaction, that Ian is
here referring to us, his dazzling trio in 6LA and 6UM! He
continues:
| “I shan’t be sorry to give up teaching at the end of
this year; not so much because of the changes in the
school - and it needed some changing - but because I’ve
got tired of the struggle, and realize too that I can’t
be doing much good to the kids I’m supposed to teach. I
doubt whether they will bother to replace me, since very
soon there will be only enough work in French for one
teacher anyway, and the school has somehow or other to
‘lose’ from 3 to 5 members of the staff next year, as a
result of economy cuts decreed by the authorities.” |
This letter from Ian also told me that a friend from Leeds
University had joined the staff of THS. It was quite a strange
feeling for me that a friend and contemporary now worked at my old
school, hanging around with my old teachers! It’s always odd,
when worlds collide. Ian’s description:
| “By the way, I discovered a mutual acquaintance on
our staff the other day - John Barker, who says he knew
you at college. He’s been with us only a year and
a bit, with a year’s training course thrown in in the
middle, and is our specialist in charge of the
‘Partially Hearing Unit,’ newly set up in the school.
He’s a very nice chap, with a properly ironical attitude
to the school and all its works-” |
This last is as much a flattering comment on Ian as it is on
John, for Ian too had that “properly ironical attitude to the
school,” something which I think we saw surface now and then back in
the 1960s, and it probably helped us like him. He was a
teacher so he wasn’t exactly a subversive, but he was broad-minded
and liberal, and had no liking for sanctimony and cant and all such
negative aspects of school life, including the official ones.
This was long before the changes of the 1970s made his outlook more
discouraged and his words more mordant.
In many ways, as you have seen, Ian contributed to his own place
on the school’s website by providing his own hard and eloquent words
to describe how life was at the old school in the late 1970s.
If any ex-pupils who were there at the time read his words they may
disagree and feel slighted, but this seems to have been the mood of
the place in his estimation. Ian’s words depict his own view,
and they derive from the long perspective of his experience in a
“pre-revolutionary” time when the school and methods of teaching
were different, and, in his view, had better success and brought
greater satisfaction to those on both sides of the educational
experience.
Ian retired at the end of 1978 after 20 years at THS and its
successors, and he and Sonja went to live in Winchester. In
1975 he told me that he had dreams of retiring to Provence:
| “....I shouldn’t mind settling down there in some
pleasant little village, with a few vines and peach
trees and a nice little white stone house, to spend my
undeserved retirement.” |
(Undeserved?
Hardly!) But Winchester it was, and his letters now, without
the dreadfulness of the school as topical subject matter, are
relaxed and lack the former pessimism and cynicism, whose powerful
source he had now fled. In Winchester he had a very large
garden that occupied much of his time, and he and Sonja went for a
lot of weekend rambles. Here’s a passage from his letter of
January 21, 1980, that outlines his new life and shows his restored
and gentle sense of humour that I remember:
| “It was very nice indeed to hear from you again; let
me say we don’t have much correspondence from past
acquaintance these days, and yours made very
entertaining and interesting reading. I don’t know if
we’re really settled down in Winchester yet, though we
do know a few people now - more difficult when you get
older. Our main reason for coming here is that Sonja got
herself a job in the Social Services in Winchester - I
still send her to work every day to keep the wolf from
the door while I stay at home and do the cooking and
give the housework a little desultory attention now and
again.
“I’ve got myself a very modest little job at the
local Registrar’s Office of Births and Deaths, standing
in for the regulars when they’re off sick or on leave.
Not a very thrilling job, but it doesn’t demand much of
one’s time, which appeals to me, and it does take one
out a bit now and then and gives the opportunity of
meeting other people... There are lots of
middle-class ladies with time on their hands for Oxfam
and bazaars and fêtes and the like. Sometimes it
feels a bit depressing in its middle-class
respectability, tweedy gentry and cathedral-centred C.
of E. activities - We’ve also managed to find a
local Labour Party hidden away amongst the solid Tory
masses and have actually started an Amnesty
International group, so we feel our liberal consciences
a teeny bit clearer.” |
Ian still entertained what was probably a wild and whimsical
notion of settling down elsewhere:
| “-the older you get the farther south you want to
go, where the sun’s warmer, and I shouldn’t be surprised
if we find our last resting place in the south of France
eventually!” |
And in case you were wondering if Ian had any lingering interest
in the world of education, he didn’t, except from a great distance:
| “I have managed steadfastly to avoid any connection
with teaching, and only continue to read the Guardian’s
weekly Education Section to see what dreadful problems
are besetting the profession these days. Mrs.
Thatcher’s government are certainly out to give the
state system some good hard knocks, it would seem.” |
Our old teacher Ian “Jock” Meldrum died on February 1, 1997.
I learned of his death when Sonja’s letter of March 18 reached me
with the sad news. She said that her husband had contracted a
blood infection followed by kidney failure. She added that he
was also suffering from leukaemia and a heart condition. She
writes:
| “During the last two to five years he had gradually
become less and less active, and for the last two months
had been virtually housebound. However he
continued to take a great interest in world events, read
widely, and I know he enjoyed hearing about your various
travels. We have only kept in touch with a handful
of people from Trinity but Ian always regarded you as
one of his best students and was always pleased to hear
about your current interests and activities. I
shall find it difficult managing on my own although the
family have been wonderfully supportive. We shall
all miss him very much for many years to come.” |
I haven't seen him for 43 years and I miss him, miss his
existence. I’m still disappointed that sheer distance, my own
inertia, and the muddle of life in general prevented Ian and I from
meeting again after I left THS in 1963, but for years we maintained
a satisfying exchange of news and ideas, and I think that that was
more than either of us expected in the beginning. It’s
gratifying to know that he enjoyed my contact with him, and I was
very pleased too to be able to extend our relationship so far beyond
the normal scope of the school years.
I’m sure it’s rare that anyone gets to know so much - if anything
at all - about what becomes of his old teachers in later years. We
leave school, we turn our back on those times, and we get on with
life, and our teachers live on in a barely noticed shadow world.
They inhabit a sort of timeless continuum where they are
miraculously frozen at the age they were when we knew them (usually
much younger than we are now), forever going through the same
imagined routines - a swirl of chalk dust and dreary lessons, and
class after class of inattentive little snots in green blazers - in
a school that doesn’t even exist any more. But now and then,
as with Ian Meldrum, a real connection will survive.
Some teachers should be forgotten, and others ought to be kept in
mind; I have wanted to write something about Ian Meldrum for some
time now, and this is my tribute to him for all who held him in high
esteem. He was the kind of teacher who deserves to be properly
remembered in such public words, and not solely in the scattered and
isolated recollections of those who knew him and whose lives he
helped shape.
Gustave Flaubert wrote: «Tout s’en va, tout passe, l’eau
coule, le coeur oublie. » Well for me, in this instance, it’s
all true but the last part.
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