‘The boy tried to hide his secret but it stuck out a mile/ said Robin.
‘Good. I can see that I am going to get on well with this class.’
He seemed to have but one method of teaching, which could be termed ‘reading round the class’, for he rarely attempted any explanation or exposition. The method might have worked had it not been for the farting noises and the snorting sounds of suppressed laughter which accompanied every reading. Titch found particular difficulty, as he was a giggler and the slightest suggestion of a snort was enough to set him off.
‘Enter certain niffs,’ announced Billy, substituting his word for ‘nymphs’ in the stage directions of The Tempest.
Titch, reading the part of Ariel, was unable to continue - much to Baldy’s perplexity and annoyance.
But it was the attempts to read the poetry in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury which were the real test of strength and character. Billy found himself having to tackle those lines in Gray’s ‘Ode to Vicissitude’:
See the wretch that long has tost On the thorny bed of pain.
He could get no further, however, for all round him the snorts and the snuffles started up. And poor Titch, as luck would have it, landed up with the poem ‘Willy Drowned in the Yarrow’ and was completely stymied and unable to read beyond ‘Willy’ before the stage-whispers of‘Willy? Willy ’Eck!’ were being called all about him.
Pottsy was not normally a provoker of laughter in the form, since he did not altogether understand the subtle allusions or the clever innuendo - the pace was too fast for him. But came the occasion when the naive Pottsy
was an occasion of loud guffaws. During a reading of The Tempest he was due to say the line: 4 Are we to he cheated of our lives by drunkards?’ Instead he confounded Baldy and the whole class by reading: 4 Are we to be cheated of our lives by seventy drunkards?’
‘Yes, Potts,’ said Baldy. ‘But how do you come to the conclusion that there were seventy of these inebriates?’
‘Because it says so in my book,’ said Pottsy.
It was Oscar who saw it first.
‘The number seventy is the number of the line on the left-hand side of the page!’
A great guffaw went up from the class at this stupidity, and Baldy himself almost smiled. Pottsy wasn’t the only one to make a faux pas. One afternoon, during a poetryreading exercise, Billy was disconcerted when his answer to a sudden question fired at him from Baldy was greeted with great howls of mirth and derision.
The class was reading ‘The Bard’ by Thomas Gray and had reached the lines:
Hark, how each giant-oak ,
O’er thee , oh King!
their hundred arms they wave.
Billy was preoccupied thinking about Adele and their next dancing date when Baldy suddenly asked:
‘Hopkins, what’s got a hundred arms?’
Billy was nonplussed for a moment, then answered:
‘Why, a centipede, sir.’
Even Baldy joined in the laughter.
But the finest hour in the Baldy saga belonged to Oscar, who agreed, on payment of threepence per head from everyone in the class - giving a total prize of over six shillings - to faint during the lesson. Billy was elected