It is half-term. I cast my mind back over half a century and remember collecting horse chestnuts for 'conkers', fallen acorns, autumn leaves and bringing them for the nature table that stood at the back of our classroom.
We had an old-fashioned state primary school and an old fashioned fourth year juniors teacher. Calculating his age I would guess that he could have been born any time between the end of the Nineteenth Century and the First World War. Strict discipline was enforced. Forty two of us sat pair by pair in a room divided into the girls' area and the boys' area (our playgrounds were similarly segregated) behind desks with hinged lids and inkwells into which we dipped our nibbed pens. We did not move. We wrote in sloping Victorian copperplate script. I have the recollection that he came from one of the Pottery towns of Staffordshire, Burslem, I think.
Did he communicate enthusiasm for nature study? To my mind, no. His passions were for British History, English Composition, Geometry and Perspective Drawing and I failed badly in the latter two. My inspiration came from home. We were fortunate.
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