The Tutor

Looking back on my life, from where I am at this moment, sitting on a luxurious balcony, in a five-star hotel, looking out through countless coconut palms to the Indian Ocean, with white foam waves crashing on to a golden beach in Kerala, Southern India. At the age of seventy, it’s very difficult to analyse how events have come about to enable this to happen.

I’ve explained earlier how I was suddenly released from having to return to my so-called ‘educational establishment’, with such ease, with a throw-away line to my mother. I was left dumbfounded. The sense of elation didn’t hit me till much later. I can remember that feeling of excitement welling up from the pit of my stomach and bursting into my solar plexus, to this very day. It doesn’t happen very often and, unfortunately, is quickly dulled by the reality of oncoming events. What I really wanted most of all was to stay at home, live at home, work at home, work with my father, work on the ranch. If only I could have vocalised that wish then. I didn’t, I let events take control of me, rather than the other way round. Chances present themselves, to most people, regularly, but it’s only the entrepreneurial spirit that recognises them. I let myself be swept along by events I no longer wanted to be part of. I couldn’t say I didn’t need any further education because on paper I plainly did, but I wanted to get on living a life I knew I loved and understood. Instead, I was sent away, again, for further education.

There followed an extraordinarily strange, surreal year of being taught by a man who was so ‘different’ from anyone I’ve ever met before or since, I can’t really categorise him. There were only four of us who lived with him and his wife, in his home, an old vicarage, for that year, but he took it upon himself to teach us everything. When I say ‘everything’, I really do mean ‘everything’. Not just to pass exams, in all subjects, but even how to dress in different situations. Every evening we ‘dressed’ for supper and we had to make interesting conversation. We weren’t allowed to ask for the pepper or salt, we had to be offered it, and we had to know which wine to drink with which food. He gave the two of us, as we were slightly older than the other two, a glass of wine he and his wife were drinking. He talked about it, in ‘wine speak’, where it came from, the type of wine it was, everything you should know about wine if you like to drink it. He would test us the following evening. We then had to compare it to the present evening’s bottle. After supper, we’d troop through the cold hall, to his library to be given an ‘English spelling’ test. We then chose a book to read quietly before being sent to bed. We slept and did our schoolwork in the same room. Every morning before getting dressed, however cold it was, only wearing pyjama bottoms, we’d shiver our way downstairs to the hall, through the kitchen, to the scullery. There, next to the door leading to the yard, was an old, even for then, long-handled water pump. This drew, after frantic priming and pumping, freezing cold clear water, from the well below, half filling a square butler’s sink. The enormously fat gardener-cum-general-factotum was ordered to watch over us having this agonising, thorough wash. Watching us wail in agony, always made his revolting, swollen, close to bursting belly, wobble with mirth.

You would have thought our Tutor, with the rigid attention to detail he’d taken upon himself to distil education into us, would have liked us, or at least had some regard for us. Actually, I think he half hated us. He would, quite suddenly, fly into ferocious, bellowing tempers at any one of us. His face would swell purple with rage, his wide staring eyes, one of which was glass, looked as though they were about to pop out of his head. He’d bellow, at any one of us, ‘go to bed’, in the middle of any class; obviously we hadn’t had enough sleep to be so stupid. He’d get so angry he’d have to storm from the room.

At the weekends, we weren’t allowed to stay in our room and footle about being bored, as most teenagers. We had to do something with a purpose. It could be anything, but there had to be a purpose. The local landowner, had a large area of woodland nearby, with a picture-perfect river wending its way through the middle. It would form smallish pools then continue to squeeze its way through large boulders and rocks and waterfalls to the next pool. We were allowed to fish the pools, and we were allowed to make small fires to grill our fish. Catching fish couldn’t be relied upon, so we were given small loaves of bread and cheese, or pieces of steak to cook over our fires, or other titbits his wife had over in the pantry. In the telling, it all sounds rather ideal, but somehow it wasn’t. Everything was a test, and we had to pass the test, with his unnamed rules, in exactly the same way as if it were a written exam. So a failure might well provoke a torrent of derision which could work itself into a full-blown explosion of purple-faced fury. His expectations were far beyond everyday reality. He wanted us to be his ‘Famous Five’, all day, every day, it was very wearying. I now can understand how disappointed he must have been, but he was working with the wrong people, we were there because we’d failed elsewhere.

***

The day we were waiting for, the day we were working towards, the primary reason we were there, finally arrived. The local vicar was booked to invigilate. We were taking Maths, English, History and Geography. Early that morning, before six, he burst into our room, shouting, ‘Get up, get up, wake those stupid, inert brains of yours,’ then stormed out. No sooner than we were struggling to wake, he burst in again, ‘Come on, come on, what do you think you’re doing.’ he was winding himself up into a shouting fury, ‘Don’t you know what day this is, get washed, have breakfast, come on, come on.’ We were sitting waiting at our table in the middle of the room, ages before the vicar was due to arrive. ‘Don’t just sit there, do something.’ He was so nervous, he couldn’t stay still. Maths was first, it wasn’t too difficult. The Vicar quietly sat there reading, so unlike our ‘tutor’. I don’t know what to call him really, ‘our keeper’, ‘our headmaster’. He could be heard pacing about down stairs, around the sitting room, through the hall, into his study, in and out of the library, into the garden, slamming the patio doors, he was a caged tiger. At the end of the allocated time the vicar quietly said, ‘Please stop writing’, and collected our work. This was the cue for our caged tiger to burst in, grab one of the papers and immediately go through the whole thing question by question. ‘Oh no, you didn’t, you brainless idiot.’ No praise for correct answers, just a grunt, ‘About time too.’ This whole routine was replicated for every subject. He must have been exhausted, but as I said when I started to relate this episode in my life, he was a very ‘different’ man.

Anyway, the year, eventually, wound its expensive way to a satisfactory conclusion. With all exams passed, maybe not with flying colours, but acceptable enough to allow me back to where I always wanted to be in the first place, In my beautiful home in the Kedong Valley, on the cattle ranch, working for my father.

I’d started my schooling at the age of six and I’d now finished at the age of nineteen. Thirteen years. Thirteen long, long years. Did I really learn anything of any use for ‘this’? This is where my heart was, my being, my soul. I was complete here. Even though I knew this is where I should be, I never expressed it in those terms. I knew my father would have done anything I asked of him, but I never put it to him like that. I also knew he didn’t really believe farming was a viable way of life. He wasn’t ‘a farmer’, he was a businessman who farmed. It would never have occurred to him he was building something for the future, something to ‘hand on’ to his sons. If he could have sold everything for an enormous profit, he would have done so.