The Good Boy by John Fiennes

Prejudice
, listens to Elizabeth Bennett playing the pianoforte and opines that ‘If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient,’ I may have been a great football player had I ever been taught!
    All but four of my teachers during twelve years at school were Brothers or nuns, all of whom were, I think, competent. I say this now at the end of my life after having trained as a teacher myself and after working with many competent and many incompetent teachers in Australia, England and France. One of the disadvantages of attending Catholic schools, at least in the 1950s, was that as there was no government funding at all and schools had to be self-supporting, class sizes were large and equipment was often poor. This lack of financial support was, however, usually compensated for by the skill, commitment and hard work of the teachers. Moreover, the stability and continuity of the teaching staff in the Catholic schools gave them an immense advantage: children could quickly feel personally secure and almost ‘with family’ when they realised that some of their teachers had taught their elder siblings or cousins or even parents, if not in that particular school then in one of the other schools run by the same order of Brothers or nuns … and security is a vital component in the personal growth and development of the child. My twelve years passed without any hint or rumour of any form of sexual misconduct on the part of teachers with their pupils and I was amazed and saddened to learn, many years later, what had been going on in other schools.
    In Form IV I had a wonderfully enthusiastic young Brother teaching me French and English. In those days English was taught as two subjects, English Expression and English Literature, and a pass in English Expression was essential to obtain an end-of-secondary-school certificate … and university entrance (Matriculation). While English Literature, at least in the form of popular novels and plays, interested most of the class, ‘Mac’ (Brother McCarthy) skilfully convinced us that without an understanding of the mechanics, i.e. of English Expression, we would be severely disadvantaged in understanding what we read and even in expressing verbally or in writing our own thoughts. Hence the seeming trivia of spelling and parsing, the mastering of tenses and of punctuation and even the correct use of the apostrophe all took on new importance … and weekly exercises in composition, precis-writing and clear thinking became an intriguing challenge. This approach to English was also a sensible and easily understood explanation of the importance of mastering the mechanics of French. Until then, studying French had consisted of little more than every night learning ten words of French vocabulary plus one of the seemingly endless list of irregular verbs, and struggling during the day to put together, or to decipher, tricky sentences. Mac stressed that French was a living language just like English, that a hundred million people in the world spoke it effortlessly every day, and that there was a whole, new literature and culture out there waiting to be discovered … if we would only master the basics! He invited native French speakers to the school (I had never seen a real live Frenchman until then), had us listen each week to ‘French for Schools’ on the radio, encouraged us to become involved in the Alliance Française in Melbourne and even introduced us to the worlds of French cuisine and French cinema. I cannot swear that he urged us to go to the touring version of the
Folies Bergères
which played at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne that year (with tenor Jean Sablon and his hit song ‘Le Fiacre’) but he certainly enlivened French classes as no other teacher ever did. I was hooked, and remain a Francophile into my twilight years.
    Mac was transferred to another Brothers’ college the following year, to my regret, and a new