Daily Mail, October 24, 2012
Following the letter that Michael Gove, the Minister of State For Education, wrote to a former teacher whom he had sorely aggravated during his school days, the Daily Mail asked me and three other writers if we had a letter of apology we would send to one of our teachers. This is the one I wrote.
Dear Mr Begley
It was only when I visited you in hospital last year, when you reminded me of what I’d always considered the single heroic moment of my school days, that I realised what a thoughtless idiot I’d been all those decades ago.
When you (my history teacher at West Park Catholic Grammar School in St Helens) and the Bopper took me with a party of sixteen year olds camping on the shores of Coniston Water for a week in 1957 I was a bit unsure, to be honest. And when I found myself sharing a tent with a lot of big, rough, schoolboy rugby players, three of whom would play for Lancashire, I knew I was in the wrong place.
Every day these great hulking brutes would stare out at the mile wide Coniston and boast, “I’m going to swim that”. And you and the Bopper would smile to yourself, safe in the knowledge that they’d never even try. You were right about them.
But me? Well, every wimp must have his day. So, when you weren’t there, I waded into the water, and, with two classmates in a rowing boat for company, set off with my feeble breast stroke – head always above the water so as not to get my hair wet.
It never occurred to me that, in the absence of parents, you were responsible for me, or that you might worry. Apparently I was half way across before you spotted me, and by then out of earshot. My rowing companions said you seemed to be waving me on. They were wrong. I was later told that you were white with anxiety, standing on the edge of the lake frantically trying to get me to come back, terrified that I was about to disappear under the water.
I was white, too, with virtual frostbite. It was freezing! I’d never swum more than a length in Southport’s open air pool before and hadn’t realised how far a mile was. But I couldn’t give up. Not with those rugby Neanderthals watching.
Somehow I made it. Too frozen to stand, half an hour later I could only crawl out of the water at the other side, before being rowed back to what I thought would be a hero’s welcome.
Wrong. You were incandescent with fury, covering me in blankets and hot water bottles, making me stay in my tent all day and forbidding me from going anywhere near the water again.
The fact that you remembered that day, 54 years later, and not having seen me since I left school, suggests to me you were more than a bit worried. It must be murder being a teacher in charge of children.
Sorry, sir.
Yours
Ray Connolly
