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| How poet Andrew drew the short
cane |
OUR Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (pictured), who lives in Tufnell
Park, has decided to go public about how he was badly beaten with
a slipper and a cane by his headmaster and that he lived a life
of fear at a ‘Dickensian-style’ prep school.
Fortunately, it emerges, he was rescued by the English master and
learned to love poetry.
“I struggled in school,” he says in an interview in the
column My Best Teacher in this week’s Time’s Educational
Supplement.
“I was not very smart and I was frightened most of the time.”
Sent off to a prep school at seven – a school he learned to
detest – he found he was being beaten for any kind of misdemeanour.
“There were two kinds of beating,” he said. “There
was beating at the end of the day in our dormitories when the head
came round and slippered people, and there was the ‘swish’
(a cane) administered in his study.”
Light shone into his life a few years later when he “scraped”
into a public school – and the man who changed his life was
his headmaster, Peter Way.
At first, he revealed, his “brain” was still “deeply
asleep” and he floundered at the bottom grade in all subjects
bar one, English.
Then came A’ Levels and his ‘road to Damascus.’
He got on extraordinarily well with the head Peter Way whom he still
writes to.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say I love him” he said.
“I liked his way of teaching and never felt threatened by him.
“I remember my first lesson in his pink classroom, which he’d
had specially decoarated because, he told us, pink is the colour
of concentration.
“We studied the poem by Thomas Hardy ‘I look into my glass
and view my wasting skin’, in which he regrets his young man’s
distress, fears and yearnings in an old man’s body.”
It was an odd poem for a group of “testosterone filled 15-years-olds’
and it went through Motion ‘like a spear.’
After that he won various school poetry prizes – and much later
became Britain’s Poet Laureate.
Theo gets the gig
THIS is a picture of Labour councillor Theo Blackwell (right)
with Dublin Castle publican Henry Conlon at the recent Madonna gig
at the Koko nightclub in Camden Town.
I’m sure he enjoyed the exclusive concert. But then Blackwell
had been asked to intervene to make sure a parking wrangle didn’t
sink the concert. Emails, a colleague obtained through new Freedom
of Information rules, reveal how Larry Seymour, one of the club’s
managers asked Blackwell for help with plans to park production
trucks near the venue.
In an email on November 2, Mr Seymour told Blackwell: “The
event is planned, confirmed, scheduled and in the bag but it will
not happen unless someone in authority steps in to tell Camden Council
that it is OK to allow some outside broadcast trucks to park in
the area for a couple of days. Instinctively, the council is declined
to say No as part of a default response.
“It (the gig) will surely bring a much needed influx of investment
and positive commercial activity into a needy corner of Mornington
Crescent.”
Later, Blackwell asked Alex Williams, the council’s streets
manager: “Is there a problem with this? Keen for Camden Town
businesses like Koko to get big gigs like this.”
Madonna hit the stage on November 15.
I’m sure the businesses on that “needy corner of Mornington
Crescent” are still reaping the benefits and its good to see
Blackwell is looking for more big concerts to be staged in Camden
Town.
You could have knocked Natalie down with
a feather
IPODS may be the latest hip techno-gadget but one West Hampstead
teenager prefers something a little more complex: a bird’s
feather.
Natalie Lawrence, 16, from Priory Road, West Hampstead, celebrated
the launch of her first book, Feathers and Eggshells, the bird journal
of a young London girl, at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel in Hampstead
on Friday.
The book includes sketches, photographs, prose and poetry by Natalie,
a student at St Paul’s Girls School in west London.
Two years ago, the young ornithologist won the Kate Springett award
for a children’s project about birds on the Heath.
She said: “My Dad used to take me on the Heath when I was very
young. Since the age of about five, it has been one of my favourite
places and I have spent many hours exploring it.
“Nowadays most people are more interested in man-made things
like iPods. For me the complexity and delicacy of a bird’s
feather cannot be matched by anything artificial.”
She added: “The most spectacular birds are water birds. I have
seen cormorants, grebes, shoveler ducks swans and a whole host of
other species on just a couple of ponds. It is one of the best things
about the Heath.”
Pictured: Natalie with her father John Lawrence.
Haw shortlisted for rights award
TO my delight, Brian Haw, that stalwart defender of the right
of an Englishman to air his grievances in public, has been nominated
for a human rights award.
Readers may recall that New Labour introduced a law to drive Haw
out of Parliament Square where he has demonstrated for three years
against the Iraq war.
However, on appeal our sensible judges ruled the law could not ban
him from the square.
Now Haw has been shortlisted for Liberty’s Human Rights Award
for his “tireless and passionate defence of freedom of speech.”
He also received other good news this week when his solicitors secured
legal aid to contest a Westminster Council ban against his using
a megaphone in the square.
Raj and Geethika
THEIR eyes first met on the 2002 council election campaign trail.
So it gives me great pleasure to send my hearty congratulations
to the leader of the council Raj Chada and his new bride Geethika
Jayatilaka, the head of social services.
The pair got hitched on Saturday at a private ceremony in Ireland
– where Raj hails from – and I am told it was a rather
jolly affair. Chada, 32, a criminal defence lawyer at the Hodge,
Jones and Allen firm in Camden Town, was promoted from housing chief
to council leader recently.
Jayatilaka, 30, who works for Alcohol Concern is highly regarded
for her stewardship of the social services department.
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Paris is still No.1 in the wine world
PARIS, sera toujours Paris, sang the French singer and Hollywood star
of the 1940s Maurice Chevalier.
FULL STORY
Give our school kids a sporting
chance
DON’T know about you but I hated sport at school. It was all that
prancing around in your knickers...
FULL STORY
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