Two Memories of Gunner Wright
Peter Douglas writes.
1. Differing Philosophies, or I Confront Gunner!
 Given the nature of the man, I should have more memories than
I do of “Gunner” Wright, but only a couple stand out. I saw his face for
the first time in many years when I discovered the Trinity High School website.
There among the images of knobbly-kneed 3rd formers and almost-forgotten
teachers was the stern visage of Gunner Wright, the Deputy Head from 1956 until
his retirement in 1968. I later found out that he’d been teaching at the
school (in its various incarnations) since 1933, but his elevation to Deputy
Head Master coincided with my first year at the school in 1956. There he
was again, the high forehead and mouth set tight. I had not laid eyes on
the man since 1963, but still the steely glare from my computer screen was
enough to send an old familiar shiver down my spine.
Ironically, my most vivid memory of Gunner was an incident that I created for
myself, and I am still rather proud of the nerve it took, given the fact that I
deliberately took on Gunner over a school policy. The outcome was more than I
expected.
It was probably 1961 or 1962. At that time it was the custom to have 6th
formers take turns reading the lesson from the Bible in the daily assembly.
The whole school gathered in the Hall for morning prayers and any announcements
that Buzzer chose to make or allow. The school assembled in strict order,
the higher your form the farther back you were, and it was good to be at the
back and far from the teachers arranged on the stage. There was a hymn and
a prayer, and at the appropriate moment, the lesson reader would walk to the
lectern. The heavy, fat Bible was already open at the right page, left
like that, perhaps, from the previous day’s rehearsal before an empty Hall.
I read the lesson at least once; no big thing really as there were generally
only a few verses (I forget how they were chosen) and the ordeal was brief.
Nevertheless, I felt my knees shaking standing in front of the whole school, and
I resented it.
The embarrassment and discomfort was not, however, my main objection to this
routine. What bothered me was being made to mouth the tenets of a religion
that I did not subscribe too. (I think this was around my Wordsworth
phase, and in studying “The Prelude” with Mr. Crick I had developed more
pantheistic ideas of how the world worked.) And to be frank, I also
objected to being made to do anything that was irksome to me, and if I thought I
could get out of it, I was prepared to give it a try.
I remember grumbling to another pupil one day about reading the lesson. I
think my turn was approaching again and I was going on about how we shouldn’t
have to read the Bible if we didn’t believe what it said. “Well why don’t you
tell Gunner you don’t want to do it, then?” came the suggestion - the challenge
really. It was not proposed with any seriousness, for the idea was mad!
Tell Gunner! Out of the question! Why make trouble for yourself?
He’d never agree, and surely some punishment would follow such audacity.
Still, why not at least try? I thought. Never being smart enough to keep
my mouth shut, and ever challenged by mindless authority, I decided to put
forward my case.
Some time later, I don’t remember when, following my nervous tapping, Gunner
admitted me into his office with a sharp command. I stepped inside and
closed the door. He was seated behind his desk, a position from which he
never shifted throughout the interview, his black gown wrapped around his
shoulders, his eyes narrowed behind glasses. At the sight of him I felt my
bravado waver. It was only human to do so. Gunner had a reputation
for sternness and discipline, and his looks sure fit the part, and so severe and
formidable were his looks that he would not have looked out of place, I remember
thinking, in a group portrait of Third Reich warlords. There was a
ludicrous legend going around that he had once caned someone with a whippy metal
tank aerial; no one really believed that, but at the same time you thought that
if anyone had done, it was surely Gunner Wright. Yet some said that for all his
strictness he could be fair, but whoever said that was not known to me.
I remember that he steepled his fingers and looked at me from above them, those
grey eyes seeming to penetrate and make my guts roil. He asked me what I
wanted and I just blurted out that I didn’t want to read the lesson in assembly
any more. A short silence ensued in which his hard stare and my thumping
heart was all that I was aware of. What was in that look, disbelief, rage,
curiosity?
 “Really? And why is that? “He sounded no more than mildly inquisitive.
Because I don’t believe in what I’m reading,” I told him.
“You don’t believe in God or what the Bible says?” he wanted to know.
“No,” I told him, “not really.” I said that I felt uncomfortable for being
a hypocrite when I read the lesson.
There was another pause, longer this time as he digested my impertinence,
decided on my fate. When he was angry you knew it from his voice,
witnessed many times over the years, roaring down a corridor to stun some
hapless boy into rigidity. This silence was something new, something
sinister. Then his lips twisted into what seemed a thin smile. It
was nothing encouraging. It seemed the smile of a raptor considering its
still-living supper. Suddenly he shifted in his chair and leaned back,
almost casually, and moved his swivel chair so that he was looking through the
window that looked out on to Trinity Avenue. Green blazers were coming and
going, shouts muffled by glass.
Not turning around he asked, “Do you know Hamlet?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard
him correctly, but I said that I was sort of familiar with the play, wondering
what head games I was about to be made to play.
Turning to face me and raising a finger in emphasis, he quoted, “There are more
things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Yes sir,” I said. Always best to agree.
“All right, I’m releasing you from reading the lesson,” he said, indicating that
I should make that clear to someone, I forget who, probably some prefect or
master. “You may want to change your mind, and you can if you want.”
“Thank you, sir,” I stammered, shocked and grateful. He made some gesture
that told me we were finished, and I turned to leave. When I’d reached the
door, he stopped me with those same words: “There are more things in heaven and
earth that are dreamed of in your philosophy, Douglas, remember that.” I said I
would, went into the corridor, and thankfully closed the door behind me.
I was flushed with triumph, of course. I had confronted Gunner in his own
office, and won! That was my story then, and for years afterwards. I
suppose I embellished the tale for my curious audience, now impressed by my
daring, how I defied Gunner and refused to read the lesson and he gave in.
Perhaps that became a minor legend, who knows? But looking back on it now,
I see a timorous 16-year-old pushed into the dangerous spotlight of his own
making, rebelling for the sake of it, challenging on a whim the most formidable
person in his orbit.
I can see now the wisdom that Gunner used in coming to his decision. In
his expected refusal I would have resented his inflexible and authoritarian
attitude. As it was, he relented, and in a novel and even imaginative
literary fashion. And in doing so, he gave me a challenge of my own - the
challenge to think, to wonder about those other philosophies. It was more
of a lesson, really, than standing up there before the school and reading from
that book, and through it I got my first and only look at that legendary
fairness.
 2. The Haircut, or Gunner Confronts Me!
This must have happened around 1959 or 1960. I hated
games at school and had worked out all sorts of wangles that my equally
non-sporty friends and I could play in order to get out of loathsome rugby and
dodge working up a sweat in PE. In fact, I produced a limited (very)
edition pamphlet entitled “The Art of Getting Out of Games” that listed (along
with attendant hazards) the several ways I had worked out (many put into
practice, some not) of avoiding exposure to the dreaded Grimshaw.
On the occasion at hand I was experimenting with one of the methods for avoiding
this torture. It consisted of not reporting for games but getting hold of
bunch of papers, a clipboard, or a packet of some kind and moving purposefully
around the school as if on some distinct and vital mission - delivering
something was always good. There were two obvious defects to this strategy
of course, the main one being that it was all a lie, and exposure would not have
been difficult to arrange had anyone in authority taken the next easy and
logical step of checking. (I suppose we thought the teachers were so dim that we
could fool them so easily, little understanding their years of experience with
the younger generation!)
“I’m supposed to deliver this to Mr. Clements” is the sort of line that came to
mind, but such a pretence would have crumbled in an instant with the simplest of
verifications. The skill was in averting the check, first by evasion and
then by seeming innocent, and also by the knowledge that few authority figures
had bothered to memorise my timetable and didn’t know therefore that at that
very moment I should have been shivering in the frozen dirt of a rugby pitch or
breathlessly attempting chin-ups in the gym.
The other problem with this ruse was the sheer effort it took, and how boring it
was, to wander (somehow both aimlessly and purposefully) around the school.
Yes, it was tedious and could be exhausting, as well as a test for the nerves,
but that just goes to show how desperate we were to not play rugger.
Better to waste time and risk a detention than suffer the attentions of the PE masters.
Anyhow, we could always duck into the lavatory to rest in secret (another
method).
It was on one of these peregrinations of the school that I thought that my
number was up. It was somewhere in the science block I think, or the
workshops - anyway, somewhere far from conspicuous danger spots - when I heard
the dreaded and unmistakable voice of Gunner Wright behind me. Of all the
rotten luck!
“You, boy!”
There were no other boys around so I knew he meant me. I stopped and turned
around. I was carrying some prop, perhaps a handful of papers, that seemed
to give me a purpose, as opposed to just roaming around, which was very
suspicious. There were lots of rules to follow - when you could enter the
school, when you had to leave, and you had to walk (not run) inside the school,
no more than two abreast, and no hands in pockets. That sort of thing.
It didn’t take much to attract attention, and Gunner was superhumanly eagle-eyed
and was not to be tangled with at all costs.
“Yessir?”
He beckoned closer me with a hooked finger, all the more ominous for his
silence. His high brow shone and he fixed me in his falcon’s glare.
He looked pleased, and that wasn’t a good sign. It seemed a sort of
suppressed joy at having detected some failure or impropriety. With
Gunner, you could never be sure that he knew who you were; he gave little away,
but you had to assume his terrible omniscience. I remember vividly the set
look of his face that day, wearing nothing but suspicion, unless it was the
pleasure of closing the trap. He continued to observe me with his
pale-eyed and unnerving stare for longer than seemed natural, long enough to
make me decidedly uncomfortable - his customary, and very successful, tactic.
I mentally rehearsed my deception. Papers for Mr. Clarke, perhaps. It
didn’t matter - I was sunk. Gunner was far too astute to be taken in by
such idiotic subterfuge. Would it be better to come clean, to confess
amnesia, even to claim to be en route to the changing rooms? Eventually,
he spoke. It was mystifying and conversational.
“How old are you, boy?”
“Fifteen, sir,” I gulped. What was all this? Impossible to guess.
Some evil game, probably. Get me confused with amiable non-sequiturs and
then pounce. Then I hardly believed what I saw. Was that a smile on
his face? Perhaps so, or the closest equivalent, a crinkling of the thin slit of
his mouth, no more, signalling some cruel satisfaction in his impending punch
line.
“Well if you want to live to be sixteen, you’ll get your hair cut,” he snapped.
“Yessir.”
Without another word he swept on past me, his black gown billowing in the breeze
of his own passage, leaving me to contemplate my luck. Gunner cultivated
strict standards, those of a military college or the sort of Victorian public
school where Tom Brown suffered. Evidently my longish hair had caught his
attention and distracted him from pursuing the reason for my corridor wandering.
It could have been far worse. It was a relief that that was the only
reason he’d stopped me - not because I was not in the gym where I should have
been. I breathed again.
Not wishing to seem too compliant, three weeks later I did go to the barber.
Read more about Gunner Wright
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