ARMA VIRUMQUE CANO
MEMORIES OF RICHARD BENNETT
Peter Douglas remembers how
Richard Bennett would often break his lessons in Latin to recount
his exploits during World War II, which took him to the Far East,
where his ship was sunk and he received the injuries that would
leave him struggling to breath at times, and how when captured by the
Japanese he worked on the notorious Burma Railway.
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| Richard Bennett in 1963 |
Arma virumque cano. Yes, "I sing of arms and a man." Quite
a special ordinary man, one whom many ex-Trinity people are sure to
remember. The other day I found a note I wrote on March 25,
1966, as follows: "I went for a ride on the scooter in the
country and visited Mr. Dick Bennett at Pury End." Richard
Bennett was my Latin teacher and quite a character. The
frustratingly brief note ends with my reaction to this visit: "Very
interesting and enjoyable - I'm glad I know him." It's not often
that an ex-pupil is moved to say as much about an old teacher, so it
got me remembering, or trying to.
On that day in March 1966 I was less than a week away from my
21st birthday and had been out of school for almost three years,
studying English at Leeds University. I had a turquoise 1959 Vespa
in those days, and on a spin in the country decided to stop by Mr
Bennett's house in Pury End, near Paulerspury, on the other side of
Towcester. I still have the full details in an ancient address
book. It's here that I have a sad lapsus memoriae, for my memory
lets me down, fogging up at the crucial time, and I am left with
faint impressions only of a couple of hours that should have stayed
with me. I retain the image of a rambling house full of
children, and cold winter sunlight streaming through the windows.
Memories of feelings seem, oddly, easier to hang on to than those of
physical experiences, and I recall the vague and idiotic shock of
realization that one of my teachers did actually have a real and
extensive life outside the classroom, and interests beyond the
uprising of Vercingetorix or Caesar's battle with the Nervii.
We'd been told that we'd need Latin if we wanted to study English
at university, and I had no objection to that, though the idea did
strike me as rather quaint and Billy Bunter-ish. It was the expected
grind to memorise the declensions but I enjoyed the history and
stories that struggled to emerge from behind the veil of the
language, Caesar's conquest of Gaul, the letters of Pliny, scraps
from the Aeneid, and more. And the fact is that I enjoyed it
all the more and tolerated the tedium better because of Mr Richard
Bennett.
As teachers went, I think anyone who had Mr Bennett would agree
that he was out of the ordinary, both in appearance and, more
importantly, personality. I remember his daily arrivals at
school, emerging, thin and gangly, from his dusty black early 1950s
Ford Consul, an aptly named vehicle for a Latin teacher. His
face was gaunt with a yellowish cast, and bore deep creases.
His hair was thinning but still black, and he had a wispy moustache.
You can see him in the school photograph taken in September 1963,
the only one he appears in. He was tall, but taller than he
seemed because he stooped as he stood and walked, and proceeded with
a gait where his legs never seemed to straighten. Yet he kept
up a fast pace, his black chalk-smudged gown billowing behind him,
giving the impression of a skinny raptor.
It seemed to us that every breath he took was audible, and his
pain became ours as we listened to him coughing and wheezing through
our lessons, wiping his mouth on a khaki handkerchief. Still,
this didn't stop him smoking, and it was his habit to roll a
home-made cigarette in readiness for his break, a mundane and
informal act that seemed to jar with the ancient authors' sonorous
words that he was pronouncing even as he licked the glued paper.
He was looking forward to his fag and a cup of tea, and told us,
referring to the other teachers, "You have to be there early or
they'll scoff the lot!" Mr Bennett looked sick because he was
sick. He told us that he only had one lung, and that the other
one wasn't working so well. Each breath was hard-won, and he
would cough and puff when he had to bend over to write something at
the bottom of the blackboard. Usually he would pull over a
chair and sit on it as he finished.
Over the course of our Latin education we received an education
of another sort too, and we discovered why he had only one lung.
Tiring of Caesar's conquests, he would stop and gaze through the
window, or lean back in his chair and put his feet on the desk,
unconcernedly showing worn soles and a few inches of his pale legs.
Into our ears, eager for any subject other than the struggles of the
10th Legion and the fate of the Helvetii, he poured tales of his own
war, more than 2,000 years later. He had spent some time in
India - the Punjab. He told of the Northwest Frontier, a name
straight out of the ripping yarns of boyhood adventure novels,
redolent of the blistering sun, sand, and flickering imperial might.
And it was topical too, for a film of that name had recently been
released starring Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall.
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| Prisoners were allowed
one postcard per year from the Japanese POW camps |
Through a series of wartime experiences that elude recapture, he
told us how he was on a ship that was attacked and sunk somewhere in
the Far East. He survived, but took in some paint that had
spilled from the wreck onto the surface of the ocean, and it was
this that forever damaged his lungs. A Japanese ship picked up
the survivors, and we heard about how they sat crowded together in
the ship's coal bunker, using a bucket for a lavatory, passed from
hand to hand, slopping and spilling, and how they eagerly shared the
meagre rice of one of their number who died. But Richard
Bennett's luck was still bad, for this ship was sunk by an American
aircraft. A companion was shot in the hip in this attack.
Mr. Bennett was taken prisoner by the Japanese and became, as he
euphemistically phrased it, with a twisted smile, "an unwilling
employee of Burma Railways." At the time, what little I knew
of Japanese POW camps came from watching The Bridge on the River
Kwai at the Plaza, but it was enough to let me see my Latin master
in a new light. Like everyone else there, his treatment in the camp
was poor, and his enfeebled health was a direct result of all his
terrible wartime experiences. These he conveyed in horrifying
vignettes of prison camp life - how he taught Latin and Greek to
fellow prisoners just to pass the time, the lack of food, the
personalities of the guards, stealing tomatoes, and, in extreme
hunger, catching and cooking a cat in a rusty can.
Mr. Bennett's memories of this could only have been little more
than 15 or so years old at that time; closer to it back then, we
were used to hearing such vivid stories of World War II. He
recounted these personal epics modestly, almost casually, as if with
a shrug, his smile and a dash of tart and self-deprecating humour
making him not so much the hero of his stories but just the teller
of simple, awful facts of war that he had experienced, and the grim
hand that fortune sometimes plays.
And then, in a breath, his feet were on the floor again and he
was pacing back and forth, back to reciting Virgil's Eclogues, or
Pliny the Younger's description of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD
and his uncle's death in the disaster (I recall the vivid
description of the people running with pillows tied on their heads
as protection against falling rocks). The Second World War was
back in its box for now. The transition was often shocking.
As if suddenly aware of his departure from the main subject of the
lesson, with surprising speed Mr. Bennett would jump up, abandoning
his yarn, and dish out some homework before heading off for his tea
and cigarette. As he put it, he was going "From the sublime to
the gor-blimey!"
In addition to these long digressions, we were often treated to
flashes of Mr. Bennett's Latin humour. "Fata extrema.
No, that's not what Wright just did!" "Re frumentaria, the
matter of the corn. Sounds like the name of one of your pals,
doesn't it? Good old Ray!" "Spesque salusque - Sounds like
someone flushed the toilet, ha ha !" Another example of his
classical humour is that he owned a goose that he named Horace.
Richard Bennett often injected his personal asides or returned to
his martial reminiscences when the weariness of the lesson was plain
on all our faces, and he was very easy to distract and set on this
other path when Latin grew burdensome to us. His stories
continued, spread over innumerable Latin periods, the prospect of
hearing more adventures from this unconventional teacher making us,
if not exactly great Latin scholars, certainly more willing ones.
My 1966 note ends, "Very cold on the bike. Snow and bright
sun, and very windy." Riding away that spring afternoon I
imagine myself thinking that that was the last time I would ever see
my old Latin teacher. And so it was. I never found out
what happened to Mr. Bennett, when he left school, or if he's still
alive. He doesn't appear in the 1968 school photograph, but he
might well have been out that day, but his fragile health leads me
to look for a more melancholy explanation. Nevertheless, I'm
sure he has survived in one way - as a significant figure in the
pantheon of old teachers living in the memories of his pupils.
Henry Adams wrote: "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell
where his influence stops," and I think Richard Bennett proves that.
As he might well have put it himself, quoting from Seneca: Non
scholae sed vitae discimus. We don't learn from school, but
from life.
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