The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More(73)

        So much for the masters. But what of us, the great mass of ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-olds left sitting in the Assembly Hall in a school that was suddenly without a single adult in the entire place? We knew, of course, exactly what was going to happen next. Within a minute of the departure of the masters, we would hear the front door opening, and footsteps outside, and then, with a flurry of loose clothes and jangling bracelets and flying hair, a woman would burst into the room shouting, ‘Hello, everybody! Cheer up! This isn’t a burial service!’ or words to that effect. And this was Mrs O’Connor.

        Blessed beautiful Mrs O’Connor with her whacky clothes and her grey hair flying in all directions. She was about fifty years old, with a horsey face and long yellow teeth, but to us she was beautiful. She was not on the staff. She was hired from somewhere in the town to come up on Saturday mornings and be a sort of baby-sitter, to keep us quiet for two and a half hours while the masters went off boozing at the pub.

        But Mrs O’Connor was no baby-sitter. She was nothing less than a great and gifted teacher, a scholar and a lover of English Literature. Each of us was with her every Saturday morning for three years (from the age of ten until we left the school) and during that time we spanned the entire history of English Literature from A.D. 597 to the early nineteenth century.

        Newcomers to the class were given for keeps a slim blue book called simply The Chronological Table, and it contained only six pages. Those six pages were filled with a very long list in chronological order of all the great and not so great landmarks in English Literature, together with their dates. Exactly one hundred of these were chosen by Mrs O’Connor and we marked them in our books and learned them by heart. Here are a few that I still remember:

                                       A.D. 597                                   St Augustine lands in Thanet and brings Christianity to Britain

                              731                                   Bede’s Ecclesiastical History

                              1215                                   Signing of the Magna Carta

                              1399                                   Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman

                              1476                                   Caxton sets up first printing press at Westminster

                              1478                                   Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

                              1485                                   Malory’s Morte d’Arthur

                              1590                                   Spenser’s Faërie Queene

                              1623                                   First Folio of Shakespeare