A Literary Introduction
Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence & Others
My discovery of Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas, came about as a result of a new English teacher — a fresh-faced young Welshman called Mr Jones — who, in 1960, had been parachuted into Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern School in Stratford-upon-Avon to teach the town’s ignorant young plebs the joys of literature.
Until the arrival of Mr Jones the teaching of English literature in what is now the High School revolved wholly around Shakespeare and was done very badly by an old grouch of a teacher who — once we’d started to read a play aloud, with each pupil reading half a page— would fill and ignite his pipe before settling down to read The Times spread out untidily across his desk.
On one now memorable occasion our enthusiasm for reading Shakespeare dipped into silence bringing a pipe-clenched fanatical rebuttal from the teacher which resulted in one brave fellow pupil throwing his copy of the Oxford Collected Plays and Poetry of Shakespeare at said teacher, which dislodged his pipe onto his newspaper which very quickly burst into flames. The commotion that followed brought the headmaster (a brave member of the SOE during WWII) running into the room, dousing the flames with the contents of a tea-cup he’d brought with him as if clutching a hand-grenade. After some garbled comments the…
