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How Do You Spell Distinguished?
| Article
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18036 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
4,687 Words |
| Author
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Peter Arnott
Peter Arnott is professor of drama at Tufts University. He is
the author of numerous books on ancient civilizations and on
the history of the theater including the Romans and Their
World, The Theatres of Japan, The Theatre in its Time, and
Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre. He has also been,
for forty years, a director and performer of Greek drama in
various media. |
When I heard that N.T. Stonex was dead, my first thought was that I had once nearly killed him myself - not out of malice, though this easily could have been true; rather, out of inadvertence. In the beleaguered, attenuated world of the English private school in wartime, he was my form-master, my housemaster, my Latin master, and my scoutmaster, in which diversity of functions he dominated most of my waking hours and not a few of my nightmares. It was in the last capacity that in nearly dispatched him to join his forefathers. He had been teaching bicycle repair and maintenance to the scout troop and foolishly offered his own machine to be experimented on. I disassembled it capably and reassembled it somewhat less capably. Next morning he called me to his study and informed me, more in anger than in sorrow, that on his way home it had fallen to pieces beneath him. He had been coasting down a steep hill at the time. He was compelled, he told me, "to leap into the gushes to avoid oncoming traffic."
He had given names, of course, not merely initials. I knew what they were, and I still do. But after more than forty yeas, I can no more bring myself to utter them than would a devout Jew spell the true name of his Maker. Our paths first crossed in 1942. I was a new boy, elevated to the glory of my first long trousers, fresh from a parochial school - a brooding, sullen building with an outside lavatory so festering and malodorous that it would have been worth half a chapter to Dickens in one of his grimmer moods. Huddled in air raid shelters dug deep beneath the playground and lit by minimal blue bulbs, we had scribbled the examinations on which the rest of our lives depended. By some miracle of concentration, I had achieved a scholarship; and here I was, rescued to nothing, adrift in an ocean of strange faces, a flyspeck in the history of a school that went back at least to Cardinal Wolsey and, some claimed, to King Alfred. In the true English tradition of inculcating self-reliance through terror, I had been given no orientation, no instructions. Everyone else knew where he was going, but not I. I did not know which class I was in, or where it met, or what I was supposed to be doing when I got there. I wished I were dead.
An Unexpected Teacher
What led me to Stonex, and created a bond of sympathy even when I had cause to hate him most, was that he was an odd man out himself. His oddity began with the fact that he was there at all. In a world at war, he was a conscientious objector. Rumor said his brother had been killed in the fighting, and this had turned him against it. Whether this was true or not, I never discovered. But
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