Free The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt Page B

responsibility was to oversee the weekly beating of insubordinate small boys by sixth-form prefects), the master of the lower school, and my first English master. The latter, who had arrived in 1920 but whose pedagogical techniques were unmistakably Dickensian, spent most of his time furiously twisting and tweaking the ears of his twelve-year-old pupils. I cannot recall a single thing that he said or that we read in the course of that year; just pain.
    The younger teachers were better. Over the years I was reasonably well taught in English literature and mathematics, satisfactorily instructed in history, French, and Latin, and monotonously drilled in nineteenth-century science (if someone had only exposed us to modern biological and physical theories I might have been hungry for the experience). Physical education was neglected, at least by American standards: we took one PE class per week, much of it spent awaiting our turn on the vaulting horse or the wrestling mat. I boxed a little (to please my father, who had boxed a lot and rather successfully); was a passable sprinter; and—to everyone’s surprise—turned out to be a better-than-average rugby player. But none of these activities ever caught my imagination or lifted my spirit.
    Least of all was I attracted to the absurd “Combined Cadet Force” (CCF), in which small boys were instructed in basic military drill and the use of the Lee Enfield rifle (already obsolete when it was issued to British servicemen in 1916). For nearly five years I went to school each Tuesday in a cut-down World War I British army uniform, enduring the amused stares of fellow commuters and the suppressed giggles of girls on the street. All day we would sit sweltering in our battle dress, only to parade pointlessly around the cricket pitch at the end of classes, harried and bullied by our “sergeants” (older boys) and barked at by “officers” (teachers in uniform enthusiastically reliving their military service at our expense). The whole experience would have put me in mind of Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk , had anyone had the wit to point me in that direction.
    I was sent to Emanuel because my elementary school headmistress had neglected to prepare me for the entrance examination to St. Paul’s, the truly first-rate “public” day school to which my most promising contemporaries were admitted. I don’t believe I ever told my mother or father just how unhappy I was at school, except once or twice to relate the endemic anti-Semitism: in those days there were very few “ethnic” minorities in London and Jews were the most visible outsiders. We numbered only ten or so in a school of well over one thousand pupils, and frequent low-level anti-Jewish slurs and name-calling were not particularly frowned upon.
     
     
    I escaped thanks to King’s. In my Cambridge entrance examinations I took not just history but also French and German and was deemed by my future teachers to have performed beyond the level of the high school leaving exams. Upon learning this I wrote immediately to King’s to ask whether I might be excused from sitting my A Levels; “yes,” they replied. That very day I walked into the school office to announce that I was dropping out. I recall few happier moments and no regrets.
    Except perhaps one. At the start of my fourth year at Emanuel, having opted for the “Arts” stream, I was required to choose between German and ancient Greek. Along with everyone else I had been studying French and Latin since my first year; but at the age of fourteen I was deemed ready for “serious” language study. Without giving the matter too much thought I opted for German.
    At Emanuel in those days the German language was taught by Paul Craddock: “Joe” to three generations of schoolboys. A gaunt, misanthropic survivor of some unspecified wartime experience—or at least, this was how we accounted for his unpredictable temper and apparent lack of humor. As it happened, Joe had a