Old schoolmasters, old truths

You know these things

Image: a Triumph 2000 motor car.

William Edward Harper Windle was a schoolteacher of mine. He taught Physics to me, and coached the First XV rugby team, of which I was never a member. He was short, stocky, probably built like a brick shithouse, had a cropped, balding pate, the face of a wind-exposed farmer, a sharp wit, but a very blunt hobnailed boot, which it was his wont to, playfully or otherwise, apply to boys’ behinds when they deserved it.

His name was only officially ever known by the intials W.E.H.W. and, for all they meant what they meant, for some obscure reason that nobody had decided to chronicle anywhere, his nickname was Freddy, though it was one that only the most foolhardly would dare use within his earshot. Of course, a nickname need not per se be disparaging, unless one is conscious of the disparaging intention of him who uses it.

His primary activity was, indeed, farming, however. He reared turkeys up on an exposed stretch of bleak terrain that separates the ruggedly beautiful county of North Yorkshire from its more industrial cousin, West Yorkshire: Blubberhouses Moor. For many years, this titbit of information did not escape the ears of my mother unnoticed, and she would order well in advance her Christmas bird, which always surpassed already high expectations, so wonderfully succulent and tender they were. Christmas Eve in the morning, he’d be at our front door with the bird in a box under his arm, and he would bide a short time for a seasonal drink and a chat, before he sped off again in his little blue Vauxhall van.

Well, I say sped, but Mr Windle was not the fastest of drivers, not ever. For his less commercial outings, he drove a saloon car. Day pupils at our school were used to masters who lived off the premises emerging from the school’s driveway and, if you were on your own, they would often stop and give you a friendly lift up the hill to Rawdon, or further, depending on the extent to which your journeys coincided. Mr Windle drove at such a leisurely pace that his nought-to-sixty acceleration would be likely something in the region of half an hour. He didn’t believe in tiring his engine, pushing it to its mechanical limits. For, thrilling driving costs in the workshop and, if Mr Windle knew one thing, it was where to save a penny.

One day, a lonely schoolboy waiting forlorn for the bus to Rawdon noticed Mr Windle emerge from the driveway and was so far as grasping the handle of the passenger door before it occurred to him that Windle was not in fact intending to stop his car, but was merely pausing the gear stick on its journey from second to third gears. He required, therefore, to relinquish said grasp, Windle remaining unaware of the lift that he was not in fact offering. He reputedly installed a wooden block beneath the accelerator pedal of his British racing green Triumph 2000, a smart car in its day, but which under Windle’s ownership hardly deserved the racing description of the colour. Flooring it wasn’t in any case really an option that was within the driver’s remit.

The road that passes the school is a bit of a switchback: it descends from Bradford, crosses the River Aire on a wide bridge, and then starts its ascent of the north bank up a slightly narrower section of road at the school itself, which is clouded by overhanging trees. It then opens out again over the railway bridge and, after a couple of pretty sharp bends, embarks upon a steep ascent of, in places, one in seven as it climbs to Rawdon. With the narrowing of the way just before the school, one would think motorists might be wary of what could be hidden beyond the slight curve in the road. Needless to say, one aspect of the slow-moving convoy of one that Mr Windle invariably presented as he attacked the rising heights of Apperley Lane rarely failed to evince a sudden reaction from them, much like that evinced from the schoolboy waiting for the bus: his speed.

I remember in one particular physics class his habitual introductory talk, which rambled a little (I think he should only ever had taught single, and not double periods), in which he had the habit of asking, sometimes pointed, questions, at which one learned to hesitate in giving a response, since it was always possible that he had in fact asked the question with the sole purpose of answering it himself. One question he tended to add to statements that might well have seemed obvious twenty years previously, and had receded from topicality in the interim, was, “You know these things?”

On the day in question, the subject he had broached was the unreliability of—you guessed it—motor car engines. Since, at 13, none of us was actually yet driving a car, his information came as something of an epiphany, although my own father’s car had blown a gasket on the Derbyshire moors whilst we were hastening to Shugborough Hall, in Staffordshire, where my Uncle Bob (the Earl of Lichfield’s gamekeeper) had suddenly passed away, so I did know that at least the Singer Gazelle wasn’t that reliable. The strange comparison that Windle drew that morning was between a regular, run-of-the-mill motor car breaking down, whereupon the bonnet is raised and one pores over the engine in a bid to discover where the problem lies (at least we did back in the 60s), and when a Rolls-Royce breaks down, in which case the driver will instead pull gracefully over to the side of the road and make as though the vehicle is intended to be parked, whilst hailing a mechanic of adequate skill to repair the machine. I think that, for the rest of that day, our attention was directed towards Worcestor boards,¹ but the information regarding broken-down Rolls-Royces never subsequently quit me. After all, he’d appended his habitual “You know these things?” and I did want to be prepared for the event that, the next time the question was asked, I was indeed expected to give a response.

I want to say two more things about William Edward Harper Windle: he was a shrewd man, with sharp character insight, and he reacted appropriately: to the wheedler, he rendered contempt; to the well-intended, he rendered grace. He was a hard-headed Yorkshireman for whom physical hardship was but a mild inconvenience, if that. One winter term in the 1960s, it snowed so hard that even a tractor could not have escaped Blubberhouses Moor. Undaunted, Windle donned stout walking shoes and set forth to trudge the 13 miles to the school, such was his sense of duty. The astonishing aspect to that feat, which he had achieved just before lunchtime on the day in question, was the nonchalence with which he embarked upon it, and the lack of pride it ever occupied in his vocabulary: it was not as though Windle had a mental ranking of things that would impress and things that would not, but he was extremely matter-of-fact about pretty much everything. Forrest Gump might be an appropriate comparison.

Physics is the study of the physical world and its laws and properties, and was probably the ideal subject for him to teach. He had been drafted in to the school after the Second World War, when there was a dire dearth of teachers, and I doubt whether he had ever studied teaching as a professional skills set. That is the first of these two things: he did what he did and never made a great story of it. He’d be most dismissive if, from his grave, he knew I am writing this right now.

The second thing is that Freddy Windle (he’s well out of earshot) may well have applied a boot to a bum, and may well have clipped an ear or two in his time, but he was a man of impeccable character and honesty. If he had that to teach to the pupils of any school, then that is a worthy thing to have taught, regardless of how much waffling one did in Physics class. You know these things.