by John Cleese
In the summer, I played cricket, and even got the great England player Denis Compton out twice in one innings. He’d come to play because his son was at Clifton. The first time I got him out, nobody appealed because everybody in the team wanted to watch him bat; the second time, he hit a catch to a boy playing his first match in the First XI. Anyone else would have dropped it deliberately. The score: D. C. S. Compton, caught Whitty, bowled Cleese 27.
Cricket at Clifton. I’m the one that looks like me.
I also high-jumped 5'6" and took part in a memorable sixth-form entertainment which took place in an open courtyard, right beneath the East Tower. I had decided nonsense-German was funny, so I dressed up as Hitler and harangued the audience. After a time, someone in the audience (a plant) objected, and two stormtroopers (the guys who were to become professors in America) arrested him, frogmarched him into the East Tower and disappeared. I continued my mock-Deutsch (my accent was quite good), and then suddenly the plant appeared at the parapet at the very top of the tower, screaming, ‘No! No!! For God’s sake, NO!!’ as the stormtroopers prepared to throw him off. A moment later, a life-size dummy, dressed exactly like the plant, was tossed over the parapet and sailed through the air five storeys down (while the plant screamed), landing with a huge, dull thump in the courtyard right next to the audience. There was a moment of utter, utter HORROR! I had achieved something that I signally failed to do as Lucifer: there were at least two brown-trouser jobs. Then, as they realised they’d been had, the biggest laugh that I’d get till I appeared at the Hollywood Bowl. (Incidentally, this is the only major jape I arranged at Clifton. Similar other pranks which are now attributed to me I’d heard about when I first arrived in 1953.)
Around about this time I got an unexpected call from Mr Tolson at St Peter’s, inviting me to come down to Weston-super-Mare for a chat. He’d heard I had two years to kill before going to Cambridge. Was I interested in teaching at St Peter’s? Sitting in his study a few days later, I felt very tempted. There was, however, a problem.
‘But, Mr Tolson, what do you want me to teach?’
‘I want you to teach the second and third forms English, history and geography.’
My heart sank.
‘But . . . I don’t know anything about them, Mr Tolson! For three years I’ve done nothing but science . . .’
Mr Tolson patted my arm.
‘John, they’re ten-year-olds. Just stay a page ahead.’
Then he offered me £5 a week. It was a no-brainer.
Back at Clifton, it was the last day of term and, by tradition, ‘leavers’ were allowed to walk out of the chapel first, even before the masters. When this had happened in the past, I had watched them walk down the aisle with a deep feeling of empathetic sadness. How awful they must feel, I thought, leaving their home, their life at Clifton, their very existence . . . for the last time. My heart would go out to them, in their bereavement. Really . . .
But now that it was my turn, I felt cheerful and optimistic. It was perfect! I’d got really bored with the place about six weeks before, and I was delighted to be out of there. And many times since I’ve thought, ‘What a really great frame of mind in which to die. I’m bored. I’m out of here!’ Here’s hoping . . .
I wasn’t exactly gone, though. A week later I was still a member of the Clifton College XI at Lord’s, when I was out, first ball. It didn’t matter though: the team won!
And after playing cricket through the whole summer holidays . . . I was going back to Weston-super-Mare.
* * *
fn1 The final piece in this jigsaw was provided by Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. When I finished this, I tried to imagine what a traditional public-school emotional education curriculum would have looked like: thirty-one out of thirty-six lessons per week on ‘How to Tune Out Your Feelings’, presumably.
Chapter 5
AND SO IN late September 1958 I arrived back at St Peter’s School, to take up my first job. It was immensely comforting to find that everything felt so familiar: the grounds, the main building, the trees, the school dogs, and above all the friendly, beaming face of Mr Tolson. He still exuded an air of easy authority, even though he seemed a lot smaller than he had been when I was a boy. I had always liked and trusted him; and it was reassuring to realise that he was no longer allowed to cane me. I suddenly felt so much at home that my transition from pupil to teacher now seemed like a routine promotion.
In addition, I had a priceless advantage in my new role because a mere two months had elapsed since I had ceased to be a schoolboy and I therefore had an absolutely clear-sighted perception of the realpolitik of my situation. I did not need to consult Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh or Lao Tzu to know that all new teachers are subjected to guerrilla warfare and that if they do not stamp their authority from the start, they are ‘goners’, as they say in the teaching trade. I vividly recall, sixty years after the event, what one particular Clifton class perpetrated on a sweet-natured but naive chemistry teacher called Baynes. The poor creature lasted only three weeks before a nervous collapse saved him from further punishment. I can still visualise him being driven away in an unmarked van to the sound of cheers . . .
So I knew that the next few days were not for the squeamish. I expected no quarter. But I was up for the fight, and I had chosen my weapon. The black mark!
The St Peter’s black mark was purely metaphorical. It could be awarded to any boy who was guilty of a breach of discipline. To impose it the teacher need only inform the boy, listen for a few seconds to his complaint (‘Oh, sir! That’s not fair, sir. I thought I saw a warthog, sir!’), confirm his crime, and then go to the staff common room and write down the boy’s name, plus a brief description of his offence – talking when ‘on silence’, fighting, impertinence, arson and so forth.
Now to those of you who might scoff at the potential effectiveness of ‘black marks’ in, for example, checking the surge in the number of armed robberies in South London, I have this to say: it was very effective at St Peter’s in 1958.
Every Saturday morning, at school assembly, after prayers, Mr Tolson would announce the names of all the boys who had received black marks that week, and, believe it or not, those boys were definitely discomfited. So I ask you to imagine the effect on the whole school when, on the first Saturday of term, Mr Tolson began reading out the details of sixteen black marks, and twelve of them turned out to have been awarded by this parvenu apprentice called Cleese. The boys, who had started assembly by eyeing me as their legitimate prey, now registered first surprise, then disbelief, and finally a growing, watchful apprehension, as they had it brought home to them that this particular newcomer was not going to be taken alive.
I sat there, pretending this sort of thing happened to me every Saturday morning, and trying to conceal the wave of smug satisfaction that was passing through me, very similar to the one Himmler must have experienced just after the successful completion of the Night of the Long Knives. Even some of the other teachers seemed rather impressed.
Now I know that some of my readers will suspect that I am exaggerating the warlike nature of the relationship between schoolmaster and pupils. I accept that there are two major differences. The first, of course, is in armaments. The second is that in most wars both sides want to win. In schoolroom wars, however, both sides want the teacher to win, because when he or she has, life can settle into a predictable pattern, allowing everyone to relax.
I came to this realisation because I was puzzled by the blatant unpopularity of one of the other young masters, who seemed to me rather an amiable fellow. He left after a single term, and so I was able to seek guidance from one of the forms that he used to take. They were unexpectedly clear about their reason for detesting him. ‘You never knew where you were with him, sir,’ they told me. ‘One day he was really strict, and the next we could do what we liked, and suddenly he’d get really angry.’
To my surprise, they were telling me exactly what they wanted from me: consistency. It
was fine to be strict like Captain Lancaster, because he was always strict; nevertheless all the boys were fond of him. It was also fine to be easy-going if you were always like that. But if a teacher imposed one set of rules one day, and another set the next, the boys hated it. And him.
There was only one drawback to my ‘black mark’ strategy: I had to wait until Saturday for the full force of the headmaster’s authority to be stamped on my decisions. Meanwhile I learned that the first lesson in ‘How to keep order’ is: learn the pupils’ names. Otherwise:
John Cleese: So basically the king had to keep order without either having police . . . stop talking!
Boy 1: Me, sir?
JC: No, not you. You!
Boy 2: I wasn’t talking, sir.
JC: I’m not talking to you.
Boy 3: I wasn’t talking, sir!
JC: I’m not talking to you either, I’m talking to you!
Boy 4: . . . What, sir?
JC: . . . What do you mean, ‘What, sir?’?
Boy 4: Sorry, sir, but what’s the question?
JC: Er . . . the question is . . . er . . . why are you talking?
Boy 1: I’m not, sir.
JC: Not you, him!
And so your control of the class seeps away, like guava juice through a semi-permeable membrane.
No, the first thing you do is to get a piece of paper, do a rough sketch of where the desks are, and then ask each boy for his name, writing it down in the right place.
The second thing is: never tell a boy, ‘Stop talking’, because he will always claim he wasn’t. You must say, ‘Don’t talk.’ Then, when he denies that he was talking, you can say, ‘I didn’t say you were, I said, “Don’t!”’ This leaves him with nowhere to go.
The third thing is: when you ask a question, always formulate it in full before you give the name of the boy who is to answer it, because if you start with his name, everyone else will immediately stop paying attention (except for the swots and toadies).
The fourth thing is: if you catch a whiff of impending insurrection, use sarcasm. They just can’t handle it. It’s wonderful. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, or making fun of Donald Trump. It’s so easy, it’s embarrassing. But don’t overuse it: keep it for . . . that special occasion.
I began my career as a schoolmaster with one considerable disadvantage: as I had confessed to Mr Tolson, I knew nothing about the subjects I was supposed to teach. This is no exaggeration. I had once passed a history exam, but God knows how – I still got confused about how dates with 16 on the front could occur in the seventeenth century. That’s about as basic as history gets . . . So far as geography was concerned, I had to look the word up, to see what it comprised other than looking at maps. I was less clueless about the basics of English, though I didn’t realise at the time that I was assuming that English grammar was the same as the Latin grammar I had been taught so well. (I remember that the first week I was there, a boy asked me during prep whether ager was second or third declension and I was able to tell him without pausing for thought that ager – a field – was second declension, so it went like annus, but that it dropped the ‘e’, as opposed to agger – a rampart – which was third declension, and retained the ‘e’. ‘My God,’ I thought as he walked away, ‘Captain Lancaster did a good job.’ My next thought was, ‘Lucky the boy didn’t ask me what a rampart was . . .’)
The St Peter’s sixth-form room. Note the waste-paper basket.
But given that I was teaching ten-year-olds, Geoffrey Tolson’s advice to ‘stay a page ahead’ seemed perfectly sound. So I had no reason to believe, as I strode purposefully into the classroom to teach Form III their first history lesson, that I was walking into an ambush.
After getting all their names down on a floor plan, I started ‘teaching’ them some stuff about William the Conqueror which I had carefully memorised the previous evening. Things were going uneventfully when a small boy with very white hair in the second row put up his hand and asked, ‘Sir, what are the dates of Henry the Eighth?’ I immediately countered that we were not discussing Henry VIII, and that the date of the Battle of Hastings was 1066, but that I was prepared to talk to him about Henry VIII at the end of the lesson (by which time I would have had a chance to pay a quick visit to the masters’ common room to look up the dates in question).
So at the end of the lesson he comes up to me, and I pretend I’ve just noticed him and say, very casually, ‘1509 to 1547’, and he says, ‘I know, sir, but what are the dates of Charles the First?’ and I feel a flash of panic and nearly say, ‘That’s not fair’, and then think twice about saying, ‘I’ll tell you in a moment but first I have to get another piece of chalk from the masters’ common room’, and in the end settle for ‘Well, what do you think they are?’ and when he replies, without batting an eyelid, ‘1625 to 1649’, I smile inscrutably and say, ‘The most interesting thing about Charles the First is that he was a foot shorter at the end of his reign than he was at the beginning’, thinking this might get a laugh and take the pressure off, but the little bastard now tells me he has memorised all the dates of the kings and queens of England, and he challenges me to ask him one, and I venture, ‘Richard the Fourth?’, and he blurts out, ‘There wasn’t one!’, thinking that I am trying to catch him out, and then he says he knows all the capitals of all the countries in the world as well, and of course I have to teach him geography the next day.
I can’t recall how the conversation ended but the next thing I can remember is hiding up in my garret and cramming the dates of all the kings and queens of England (carefully excluding Anne II, William V and Darren I), and then all the world’s capital cities (or hamlets).
I would like to take this chance to thank the little white-haired bastard, because knowing those dates enabled me for the first time to enjoy learning about history. Before then I never seemed to be able to ‘get into’ the subject, but now I had a framework on which I could hang odd bits of information, and slowly the whole thing began to make sense in a post hoc, ergo propter hoc sort of way.
I am not striking a rhetorical attitude when I say that I genuinely don’t understand why the skill of memorising (‘learning by rote’ as its detractors always refer to it) has got itself such a bad name. True, it was overdone in the past; but that doesn’t make it bad in itself. I’m grateful that one of the compensations of acting is discovering how to learn lines. I enjoy it when friends more literate than I can quote an apt passage of prose or poetry, and I enjoy it even more when I can remember a snippet myself. It can be fun to learn a short poem:
I really rather care for fish,
In fact they are my favourite dish.
I love the sole,
I value dabs,
I prize all carp,
I lust for crabs,
I like to take small bits of dace
And put them right into my face.
This didn’t take me more than a couple of weeks to learn, yet I enjoy knowing it. When I can persuade a real actor like Kevin Kline to do a bit of Hamlet over dinner it can be quite thrilling.
Once I had negotiated my first few days, and learned all the boys’ names, I was able to settle into a very comfortable routine. There had been very few changes since 1953: the Reverend Dolman had taken a parish in the Midlands, so Mr Bartlett had resumed teaching senior Classics; competitive boxing had been abolished, much to everyone’s relief; and one of Mrs Tolson’s corgis had died, also much to everyone’s relief; but otherwise things were much as they had been when I was a schoolboy.
There are great advantages to being in an institution. Everything is predictable: you know exactly what you have to do; everything else is done for you. I woke up at 7.30, and made myself presentable before joining the school at breakfast; then I sat in the masters’ common room, where Mr Bartlett was masterminding the Times crossword; trooped (last in line) into assembly for prayers, where all the masters were seated, facing the boys, while Mr Tolson read out some prayers and an extract from the New Testa
ment; stood to join in the hymn, a high-pitched cacophony which to the ears of a neutral observer must have sounded like a deliberate attempt to annoy the Almighty; seated myself to receive Mr Tolson’s blessing, followed by a few words about what was on his mind that particular morning; and then taught form lessons roughly resembling English, history and geography before retiring to the common room half an hour before lunch, to get my breath back, exchange the morning’s howlers with my colleagues and watch Mr Bartlett continue with the crossword.
Then off to lunch where, in accordance with my status, I sat at the end of a long table of nine- and ten-year-olds. It took a little time to learn how to converse with them. I once sponsored some research into the intelligence of cats, as I had been irritated by my vet’s derogatory assessment of one of mine. After a few months I received back from the Sussex University professor whose palm I had greased, ‘Cats are very intelligent at all the things that cats need to be intelligent about’, which was only slightly less irksome than the original veterinary put-down. Be that as it may . . . a nine-year-old schoolboy is as intelligent as he needs to be. But not more. For example, at my first meal I asked one of the boys how old he was, and he asked me the same question. I suggested he should try and guess. ‘Forty?’ he ventured (this was before I grew a beard). Another time I showed some boys the old optical illusion by which you look as though you have removed the top joint of your thumb. When they tried, some of them became rather upset that they couldn’t do it. They hadn’t realised it was a trick . . .
