Framlinghamian 2022 - Flipbook - Page 294
SOF | OBITUARIES
moment I arrived at Framlingham College
dashboard in order to get even a flicker
in 1990, it was Michael who set the
out of the fuel gauge. Anyway, because
benchmark for good ‘School-mastering’.
we were running late for our 7.30pm
For ‘School-mastering’ was his vocation
lecture, Cookie ignored my suggestion
and principal raison d’être. He whole-
that we dropped off to fill up at Haynings
heartedly believed that students should
on the way, assuring me that he had
be encouraged to re-discover in each
plenty more ‘jungle juice’ in a petrol can
generation the truth set out by Plato and
in the boot. We were all hugely amused,
Quintilian, that pleasure should lead
therefore, when I was shortly thereafter
them on into further education, and the
asked to empty the contents of that can
relationship between tutor and pupil
before we’d even hit the Norwich Road...
should be at the very heart of this journey.
‘just in case’. Sadly, due to the delay,
Michael was profoundly interested in
by the time we reached our destination
History and fortunately for me, he was
the lecture had already started. So, not
genuinely interested in anyone who was
wishing to interrupt, we felt obliged to
similarly inclined. So, we would tour
make a diplomatic retreat to a nearby
Suffolk’s exquisite local parish churches
hostelry for a ‘swift consolation half’ and
with young historians after school, run
a scholarly chat about what might have
our own gratuitously pretentious History
been discussed. (You could do such things
Society – sometimes featuring ambitious
in those days!) By the time we headed
student and staff talent (usually involving
for home, it was raining and pitch-
wilfully provocative alliterative titles),
black, which really didn’t bode well, as
and more occasionally starring the most
it necessitated sparing, but meticulously
eminent and distinguished intellectuals
co-ordinated use of the windscreen
that Oxford and Cambridge had to offer.
wipers. Moreover, to heighten the tension,
We would also travel to London History
Michael now started to discretely whisper
Conferences in the name of scholarship,
serious concerns about just how much
and more improbably, on one memorable
fuel we actually had left. (Remember,
occasion, to Culford, to listen to a lecture
you couldn’t get even a suggestion of
by Doctor Christopher Harper-Bill on the
a reading on the fuel gauge without
English Reformation.
applying due pressure to the mahogany
dashboard...and you couldn’t have the
We travelled with three Upper Sixth
lights and windscreen wipers on at the
formers (Carruthers, Dolan & Marr)
same time... So, even if you did apply
in the back of Cookie’s dilapidated
the requisite pressure, you still wouldn’t
vintage Wolseley. This was always a
be able to read what the fuel gauge
hoot because, like its owner, it was
said, as the panel lights weren’t on,
idiosyncratic in the extreme. You couldn’t
because the windscreen wipers were!).
have the headlights and windscreen
Anyway, having been on the A14 for about
wipers on at the same time and you had
ten minutes, while ever so cautiously
to press hard on the warped mahogany
climbing a small hill... we began to lose
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