2.32 Poems that my Teacher Read Out Loud

More Poetry from a 1970s classroom.

Mr Johnson, RAF pilot, art teacher, and reader of poetry

All those old poetry collections might have seemed as dry as dust in those long ago seventies classrooms, but there were always pieces which could be brought to life in the hands of a capable teacher. One such teacher was Mr Johnson, who took art at Wilberforce Junior High School, which I attended between the ages of about 9 to 13.

Johnson was an ex-RAF man. I remember his art lessons well. We drew and painted many things under his guidance; horses, trains, a football crowd just after a goal had been scored, a street scene are the ones which I remember best. I was often criticised for going into too much detail, or incorporating text into my work.

I know that it probably says Lucas on the headlights of that van, O’Brien, he would say, but there is no need to show that in your work. There was also no need to render the eyeballs of a football fan at the match containing the figures 1 -0. Or another fan at the same match as wearing a top hat with a sign attached pointing the way to the toilets.

Johnson always noticed these things, he didn’t get angry about them, he just pointed out that they were unnecessary, after which I probably did a lot less of them. Respect trumps fear as a motivator, every time.

He was a good teacher, good at art, but where he excelled was in poetry. I have no idea why we had those poetry lessons with him. He possibly took us on a Friday afternoon and had either asked the head or been asked by the head if he could offer something other than art.

In those days there was no National Curriculum, and no 11+. It felt as though those middle school teachers just made lessons up, drawing resources from the private passions held in their very learned hearts. They would fill in whole afternoons with things that they seemed to enjoy, in the hope that some of that enjoyment would somehow be passed on to some of us. Some of it was. Maybe not immediately, but seeds were planted.

These days, with teachers working from a prescribed curriculum upon which they have had little or no input, it often seems as though they can be as disinterested in the subject as their pupils. Mugging it up the night before, they can easily view a lesson as something to be endured, a means to an end.

I don’t recall us having textbooks in Johnsons lessons. If we did, he didn’t make us read out loud, or write essays about the poems within. He just read to us, and then discussed the poems with us. He read so well, that he captured our imaginations and got us to listen We were pre-teens and we liked him, I don’t remember any behaviour problems. After a few sessions we were able to make requests from the ones we knew. Those afternoons seemed to fly by.

I can remember four poems in particular¹. The first is Boots by Rudyard Kipling and had us trampling the parquet classroom floor under our desks to the rhythm of it. Boots, boots, boots, boots moving up and down again! There are readings of it on YouTube, but none capture Mr Johnson’s Gilbert and Sullivan style delivery.

I imagined that it was a Second World War poem (impossible because Kipling died in 1936), or maybe first World War, but it turns out it was about the Boer War. These days, Kiplings association with the attitudes of Empire have made him a guilty secret to many, and yes, some of his work contains attitudes which should have been dismissed entirely long ago, but unlike the editors at the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, he at least has the excuse of coming from another age. And he could put together a memorable and rhythmic poem.

Another popular piece was much more controversial. It would be a brave teacher who decided to read Simon Legree by Vishal Lindsay these days. It told the story of the cruel and vicious plantation owner in the 1852 book Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Both book and poem were anti slavery, and set out to highlight the injustices of the practice, but they are both very controversial in their use of language. In the poem, one description of Legree states His fist was an enormous size - To mash poor niggers who told him lies. We had one black lad in the class, and Johnson was thoughtful enough to apologise to him for the use of the word.

We then had a discussion of language, and how words that might have been born as descriptive can become terms of abuse over time². We then got to discuss of slavery and racism, and were left in no doubt that these were bad things. We probably only read it the one time, but it was a memorable lesson, and gave us valuable insight.

A third Poem was Faithless Nelly Grey by Thomas Hood. The title sounds like it is definitely going to be a rowdy bawdy ballad, but it wasn’t really. It was more a collection of puns which began

Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war's alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.

Again, I mistakenly believed that it must have been from world War One at the earliest, and again I was wrong. Hood lived from 1799 to 1845, and the poem mentions the Siege of Badajoz which was a particularly bloody battle in the Napoleonic wars. It ends with the hero, having been spurned by Nellie, hanging himself, and being buried at four crossroads with a stake in his insides. A poem which dealt with mutilating injury and suicide - all with a jolly rhythm and lots of laughs along the way. I wonder why Palgrave rejected it for his Children’s Treasury of Morbid poems.

But our very favourite piece was a Scots dialect poem, the Twa Corbies. It is listed as being collected By Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders (1803), and dates from even further back, a version of it being in a book of Songs called Melismata which was compiled by the musician Thomas Ravenscroft in 1611. Palgrave had it in his Golden Treasury, and it was also in the W.M Smyth Book of Poetry which we used when we moved in to Senior School.

Maybe it was because Johnson had to put on a Scottish accent when he read it, maybe it was the delicious sounding Scots words that he had to pronounce in that accent. Maybe it was his patient explanation of the the meanings of those words, or maybe it was the grim and gruesome story of two crows planning to feast on a the corpse of a Dead Knight, but we couldn’t get enough of that poem. Through it, Johnson taught us that sometimes it is worth putting the work in to understand an old text in unfamiliar language. Twa Corbies provided me with the skills that I would later use to appreciate Burns, Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Our favourite verse was probably

‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair,
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

Which translates as 

You'll sit on his white neck bone
And I'll peck out his lovely blue eyes
And with a lock of his golden hair
We'll thatch our nest when it gets bare

Old Johnson packed a lot into those lessons. He is probably long departed this world now. Bless his mouldering bones. He was a great teacher.

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The Twa Corbies - anon

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t’other say,
‘Where sall we gang and dine the day?’

‘In behind yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

‘His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s ta’en another mate,
So we may make our dinner sweet.

‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair,
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

‘Mony an ane for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken whare he is gane;
Oer his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.’

1. This piece like the one before it, (and possibly next week’s) lists and discusses a small number of poems without going into the detail I might be tempted to if I concentrated on a single one. If readers would like me to write a longer article on any of them, featuring it separately one week, I could easily be persuaded to go for it.

2. It was fabulous when the NWA reclaimed the N word in the mid 1980s. What a fantastic in your face name for a group of poets from an oppressed community. I was never into hip hop at the time, but listening to it now, you can feel the anger, power and rebellion in every beat. I would love to have been able to watch the Straight Outta Compton film with Johnson and that old class.