I used to think I would never again know fear the same way that I did when I attended Mr. Kilter’s third form poetry class. Ye gods, he was a cruel man and child hater, an uninhibited Scotsman who tortured us by insisting that Robert Burns must be learned and recited on command. I am not sure if any of my loyal readers had to endure anything like that but if you did not, then fortune smiled upon you.
For instance every Thursday we would be required by old Kilter to rise from our desks and declaim a poem from our term syllabus, but suddenly he would veer off and insist that we also recite something from that madman Burns. That was insane from my point of view, for the man did not even write in the English language. I mean does this sound at all normal?
This truth fand honest Tam o’ Shanter
As he frae Ayr ae night did canter
(Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses,
For honest men and bonie lasses)
Now all this had to be done in the sort of dialect only heard by mentally incapacitated highlanders with a penchant for inbreeding. I recall it sounded not unlike someone gargling and possibly drowning. It was in short, impossible.
One Thursday I had studied a stanza or two of The Raven, coincidentally by another madman, Poe, but one who at least wrote in English.
When I was called upon to stand, I rose and started in on those well-known lines:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping- rapping at my chamber door
‘’Tis some visitor,‘ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door
— Only this and nothing more‘
I am sure we all understand and love this wonderful piece, and I pull it out to this day at parties to great applause. Only on New Year’s Eve and Robbie Burns Day, when some are forced to eat sheep stomachs, does anyone try to emulate what Mr. Kilter insisted upon in the upper third form of my day. The threat hung over us like a sword of Damocles every Thursday.
He shouted at me as I completed my Raven with: “Smythe-Brown, what comes into your tiny brain when you hear the name Robbie Burns?”
“A deeply disturbed, immoral, and bankrupt man, Sir,” I replied sullenly. I knew I was for it, and it was not long in coming. He leapt at me with a speed not surprising from the top-notch rugby player that he was. He pummeled me to the classroom floor, saying in his usually hidden brogue: “Ya naw say that aboot our dear Robbie.”
The enraged 12-year-old that I was at that moment shouted back lines from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.
The bulging-eyed teacher breathed heavily like King Lear as his hands tightened around my schoolboy neck. I squawked weakly.
Can one imagine that today in a classroom? And yet there were characters like that all the way through my lengthy school career and I am glad there were now.
I started this column saying I thought I would never know fear like that in Mr. Kilter’s class again, that is until I broke a vase yesterday that was a particular favourite of my wife’s.
What is worse, after a martini or two a few years ago, I happened to mention to her that I found the now smashed container frightful, and thought it should be done away with. I fear she will not believe that it was an inadvertent act brought on by one of her cats, Bertram.
The bloody cat was sitting on the mantle staring at me. Who amongst us would not make a sweeping gesture to clear the aforementioned mantle? The cat, I feel, deliberately clung to the vase in an attempt to stay, thus causing said vase to be destroyed. Now this was even after I had warned it.
I am doomed.
Robbie Burns has his revenge.
Copyright Major’s Corner 2014
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