Last updated 10:15, Friday, 11 July 2008

AT the risk of attracting squeals of outrage from the chalk face, don’t you feel sorry for Tynedale’s school teachers?

Here they are, about to embark on six weeks’ much-needed holiday, after cramming in as many as six weeks of 9am to 4pm working days since their last fortnight’s break.

I don’t know how they stand the pace, especially as so many of them have opted out of inconveniences such as lunch time dinner duty, and weekend sports supervision, in recent years.

Teaching has one of the highest stress levels known to man, I’m assured by many friends who happen to be teachers; one of my mild-mannered mates eventually opted out of the profession because he was unable to perfect his “teacher’s shout,” a manly bellow he was supposed to use to subdue unruly classes of 12-year-old girls.

These were of course the days before SATS and school league tables, and the weighty responsibility of taking children on educational trips to Barbados or the ski slopes of Norway every couple of years.

Teaching has doubtless moved on since I was a lad, for my only recollection of a school outing was in my last year at grammar school, when three pedagogues were assigned to shepherd 16 or so 16-year-old boys on a trip to the Oxford Rugby Sevens at Banbury.

We behaved ourselves reasonably well – except for a future England scrum half dropping a television set out of a window, and some mild pilfering of ashtrays and the like from hotel rooms. The staff, on the other hand, spent much of the time beastly drunk, swearing like troopers and teaching us the words of Eskimo Nell.

I reckon I could have made a reasonably good teacher in the pre-politically correct days of schooling.

I had a Harris Tweed jacket of lavishly hairy design, and I’m sure I could have found a couple of leather elbow patches from somewhere, plus a scattering of dandruff to go with it.

I had a fine line in insults for the less robust members of the form, and was more than capable of cracking a few heads, before fishing out a few Very Hard Sums for my class to attempt while I had a doze behind a book.

And I would certainly not have had any of this nonsense of calling children by their Christian names, and horror of horrors, letting them call me by mine.

I’m sure I would have been a stern and unbending teacher, flapping round school in a dusty gown, the epitome of moral rectitude, capable of quelling an entire class with a gimlet glare.

I would have modelled myself on Mr Quelch, the martinet of Greyfriars School, who as well as pondering the finer points of Latin verbs, fought a constant battle with the Fat Owl of the Remove, William George Bunter.

Many of my formative years were spent with nose buried in the delightful outpourings of Frank Richards, before the politically correct police banned the thick yellow volumes from the library shelves.

The dorms and tuck shops of Greyfriars were a world away from my primary school, and my Famous Five were not the insipid do-gooders of Enid Blyton, but the manly quintet of Greyfriars.

Were there ever a more upright bunch than Harry Wharton, Bob Cheery, Johnny Bull, Frank Nugent and the delightful Nabob of Bhanipur, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh?

They mercilessly bullied Bunter, forever whacking him with a fives bat, calling him a benighted bandersnatch, or castigating him for his corpulence or kleptomania in equal measure.

Thrashings with canes, gym shoes and other implements were a daily occurrence at Greyfriars, and much as ASBOs are seen as a badge of honour by some children today, my slightly deranged brother took it upon himself one week to see how many times he could get the cane.

I believe the total he proudly entered in his diary was 108 strokes, shared out between all seven teachers at the school, with the head also weighing in with some lusty blows.

He did not count the cuffs round the head he received from dinner ladies in his list of battle honours.

The punishments were not given for theft, dishonesty, violence or bad language, but merely for cheek, dumb insolence or talking in assembly.

Nowadays, he would probably be sent for counselling or on an anger management course, while the teachers would all have been facing assault charges, and the school closed down!