Life Imitating Art

One of my favourite books is To Serve Them All My Days by R. F. Delderfield. It is about a young man called David Powlett-Jones from a small mining community in Wales. After being injured in the First World War he is offered a post at a small public school in Devon called Bamfylde. The novel then follows his life over the next twenty years or so through happiness, tragedy, triumph and disaster. It is an incredible piece of writing that I first found as a teenager. It was the first long novel I ever read and I was completely lost in it for days on end. When I had read it for the first time I thought, quite hypothetically, that if I ever became a teacher I wanted to be like him, charismatic, caring, humorous and wise. At that point I had no hope of becoming a teacher. I was struggling at school with the bullying of 90% of the students and at least half of the teachers, and the last thing I wanted to do was go back to that as a career.

Well, life has a funny way of working out and I ended up back in the classroom but at the front of the class. I tried to model myself on David Powlett-Jones with all of his positive qualities and his chatty style in class. Real life being what it is, I fell a long way short, but I am certain that I became a better teacher because of that book and that character. So, not only did I want to become a character in a book, to all intents and purposes I did.