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| The first world war in fiction Nearly a century on, the conflict continues to fascinate novelists. How well do you remember their efforts? feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Estonian argument for English translations The advantage of English's cultural dominance means that it can provide a means of opening up literary culture across EuropeThe Apollo Solaris bookstore in Tallinn is Estonia's largest bookseller: modern, including a coffee area, and by all appearances much like any good bookshop in the UK or US, with the significant difference that its shelves are filled with books that most of us can never hope to read, because they are written in Estonian. Until someone invents a special pair of translation goggles that will convert every foreign word we look at, English-language readers are stuck on the outside of this particular bookshop experience, left to admire the decor, lounge in the coffee area, but all the while self-conscious and, if you're anything like me, depressed, irkingly aware that these shelves represent an enormous number of intellectual and artistic experiences that you, sad sack, will never have. A small contingent from Dalkey Archive Press visited Apollo a few years ago while scouting for Estonian novels to publish, and met with Nele Hendrikson, the product manager at Apollo, who was somewhat surprised to learn that an English-language publisher had come to Estonia for any reason other than vacation. Estonians are proud of their own literary tradition, no doubt, but English-language publishers do not typically come looking for it. They did have a section of the store dedicated to books in foreign languages – including English – but what this section provided was simply something good to read. What it did not and could not provide was access to the enormous number of intellectual and artistic experiences the rest of the store – and, by extension, all of the Estonian culture – has to offer. So we discovered that Dalkey Archive had something to offer the country of Estonia, in return for the great literature that Estonia offered us. We worked out an arrangement with Apollo whereby they would bring in copies of our translations of renowned Estonian writer Mati Unt (1944-2005: novelist, playwright, journalist, and theatre director; renowned for his fiction and for his stage adaptations of works by Gombrowicz, Genet, Beckett ...) We reasoned that these would sell not only to tourists from predominantly English-speaking countries, but to anyone interested in Estonian literature who read English better than Estonian. The success of this experiment served to confirm our suspicion that English-language tourists are not simply interested in toting their own favorite English authors around in the their rucksacks, they are also interested, or are capable of becoming interested, in Mati Unt.There is a popular line on citizens of the English-speaking world, that we are not very interested in the cultures of other countries. In the business of literary publishing, this cliche manifests as the widespread misbelief that English and American readers have a "bias" against reading books in translation. Although I have seen a great deal made of this "bias" over the past few years, I have never seen any real evidence of it from readers. It is certainly harder to market translated authors, but that is because readers lack a context for picking up an unfamiliar book in the first place. To market a translated book, you have to somehow translate the market itself: you have to find ways to make the book as immediate and relevant and inviting to readers in your own culture and language as it is in the culture where it originally appeared. This is, strictly speaking, impossible to do, and so we come up with all sorts of surrogate strategies: blurbs from famous English-language authors, awards and prizes, comparisons to familiar English-language titles. We try to be creative. We do what we can. In fact, over the past few years we have seen a growth of interest in English-language translations throughout Europe, with long-established booksellers such as Athenaeum in Amsterdam; Shakespeare & Co, Red Wheelbarrow, and Village Voice in Paris; Norli in Oslo; and Hedengrens Bokhandel in Stockholm, being joined by new and more remote venues, such as Frost Bookshop in Bucharest, which stocks as wide a selection of Dalkey Archive titles as any bookseller in the world. I take this proliferation of interest in English-language translations as a sign of growing inter-cultural intellectual and artistic curiosity. In other words, while the hegemonic role English plays in homogenising culture is generally speaking a bad thing, nonetheless the fact that English can make the culture and ideas of non-English writers available to readers throughout the world seems to me an unquestionably good one. Of course in our own countries there remains this problem, the problem of marketing, of giving a reader some reason to pick a book up. Personally, I wish every reader could spend an afternoon in an Estonian bookshop. Let them sit with their strong coffee, walk up and down the aisles, imagining the intellectual energy of a culture that they will be forever outside of, the rows and rows of books they can never hope to read, and then offer them one that they can ... If only every translated book could be marketed so well.FictionPublishingMartin Rikerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'To us he was simply a father' The novelist, who died of prostate cancer on 19 April aged 78, is remembered by his daughter, whom he raised as a single parentIn 2009 the world lost one of its most original and brilliant authors, JG Ballard. But my siblings and I lost our father, our dearest Daddy. To the world he was this unique writer, with a huge international following, but to us he was simply a father, and the best you could ever hope for.He had raised three of us single-handedly following my mother's premature death when we were five, seven and nine. It was the 60s, when single fathers didn't do that sort of thing. Most of his friends were sceptical. But he did raise us, as father, mother and much more besides. Fortunately for him, and for us, his work as a writer meant he could work from home and juggle writing with the care of us. So in between school runs, ironing school ties and cooking sausages and mashed potato, he wrote his novels and short stories – one minute conjuring up wild dystopias, the next watching Blue Peter.It was a very liberating childhood – we were allowed to make many of the decisions, and my father let us run with our passions and our imaginations. There weren't many rules, except get homework done, eat well, stay warm, and go to bed at a decent time. The watching of television was not rationed (unlike most of my friends) and was welcomed as an interesting vehicle of information and popular culture. So in the school holidays I became a connoisseur of daytime TV. My father was an avid TV watcher, too, and we gathered round the set together in the evenings, after supper and homework, to watch a whole mass of TV, from US crime dramas like Hawaii Five-O to comedies like Steptoe and Son, Dad's Army, Monty Python. My father retained a lifelong passion for US crime dramas – he was a big fan of CSI. Meanwhile, I retained my passion for television and went on to make it my career.My father wrote in his memoir, Miracles of Life, a book he dedicated to us: "The years I spent as the parent of my young children were the richest and happiest I have ever known."Well, for us those years were supremely happy and laid the foundations for us to lead happy lives as adults. When we left for university it created a huge vacuum for my father, and one that was never really filled, but he took enormous pride in seeing us go into the world to forge successful careers and futures. Indeed, he was a devoted and adoring grandfather, often visiting my children, Pandora and Alice, and those of my sister Fay – Matthew and Isabella. By now he knew only too well how the minds of young children work and would always come laden with sweets. He even brought treats for our golden retriever – usually a large pork pie, which was demolished on the spot in one gulp.When my husband died unexpectedly and suddenly five years ago, leaving me with two small children (in the same way my father had been left), I knew that with Daddy as my inspiration I could summon the courage to forge on alone and to give my children a happy and stable upbringing despite their tragic loss. Like a closely knit team we would make it together, just as he had done with me, my sister and my brother.My father once said to me that seeing his grandchildren happily growing up was a huge satisfaction to him – he felt that his work was done. I like to think of him rather like Prospero – he had ruled over his kingdom with great benevolence and kindly paternalism, and had created the most brilliant art with his magic. But now that his work was done, it was time to break his staff and drown his magic book. His mission completed, it was time for him to leave his magic kingdom.Dear Daddy, to the world you are JG Ballard, celebrated and legendary author. But to us, your children, you are simply our own very dearest father, our best friend and our inspiration. We miss you so much.★JG Ballardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
I've discovered the virtues of idleness | Henry Porter Doing nothing, a good view, no stress – the best way to start a new year. But I know it won't lastIt took a few days for the news of the Detroit underpants bomber to reach me because I switch off during the Christmas holiday; read no newspapers, websites or email and avoid news bulletins. When someone mentioned the failed attack, my immediate reaction was that this remote piece of madness had nothing to do with me. "The world is not respectable," wrote the philosopher George Santayana. "It is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded for ever, but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter."If you accept the truth of this, you may find that the importance of knowing the news every hour of the waking day begins to recede. Stuff happens and will always happen and the best way of dealing with it is often to ignore it and go on staring into space or, in my case, at my bird-feeder. In the winter break, I discover the pleasures of lethargy and idleness and wish it could last much longer, particularly this blissful disengagement from news, which I never achieve so successfully at any other time of the year. It may seem eccentric for a journalist to avoid the news but this particular journalist has a suspicion that news can put you off the scent and that too much of it is like being brushed by the tentacles of mildly stinging jellyfish.My Buddhist mood probably won't last to the end of next week, but I hope to take with me into 2010 the strong conviction that being connected to the web and to the news throughout the day and concerning myself with what Janet Napolitano said about the failure of homeland security or Gordon Brown's latest idea for a summit on Yemen/Afghanistan/crime/bovine TB is a waste of time. Instead, I will consciously do a lot more of doing nothing – read late in bed, dawdle in museums, stare into rivers, lie in the grass.Ten years ago, I was with friends at dinner when the old question came up – which animal would you return to Earth as? After the predictable cheetahs, gibbons, dolphins, sharks, eagles and swallows had had their say, Tom confessed that all he wanted in a second life was to be a compost heap: it's warm, he explained, you don't have to go anywhere, you've got a garden view and no stress or predators. He had obviously thought about it in some detail.Last year, Compost Heap came to mind as I waited for a flight at Heathrow and watched the frantic daily migration of hundreds of businessmen and women, all of them emailing, texting and loudly rescheduling on their smartphones, clearly in the belief that this feverish activity somehow added up to life's purpose. It doesn't: our self-esteem is flattered by these devices, by being connected and seemingly needed, but the truth is that if our signal dies and we stop sending and receiving messages we will not be missed.Compost Heap figured that out before most of us at that dinner. He still hasn't found the need for a mobile phone, which is something I appreciate after walking in the Pyrenees last spring with two good friends, one who was glued to an iPhone, the other to his BlackBerry.If you do nothing and pay less attention to events, you can be sure of causing very little harm in the world. If bankers, a profession defined by self-important agitation, had been less active and grasping we would not have arrived at the situation that John Lanchester explores in his brilliant new book Whoops! where the cockamamie accounting of the banking "boom" suggested that the Royal Bank of Scotland was worth £1.9 trillion, larger than Britain's GDP and worth more than Apple. There is no profession more eminently in need of compulsory group sedation.Over the holiday, I read about two men who outwardly did very little in their lives. The first was my great-uncle Howard Sturgis, a close friend of Henry James and, as it happens, a cousin of George Santayana, who called Sturgis the "universal mother" and " host and hostess in one". According to Edith Wharton, he sat on a chaise longue, "his legs covered by a thick shawl, his hands occupied with knitting needles or embroidery silks". Sturgis did little but read and give people pleasure. He was loved as "a matchless friend, drollest, kindest and strangest of men" and died broke, yet not before producing a pretty creditable novel, Belchamber, in 1904.Doing nothing – "the insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour", as Washington Irving wrote of his indolent hero Rip Van Winkle – can be deceptive. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the last prince of an ancient Sicilian line, appeared to do nothing for most of his life, an impression supported by his reserve and profound melancholy. But he was one of the most knowledgeable scholars of European literature, which he read in five or six languages, and in the last three years of his life he wrote one of the great works of the 20th century, The Leopard.Lampedusa's biographer, David Gilmour, describes how no one attending a literary festival in northern Italy in his last years had the slightest hint that this rather sluggish, taciturn man was working on a novel that would put them all in the shade by "the sensibility and experience distilled in his writing" and the rendering of "the central problems of the human experience." His life's work over, Lampedusa expired before he saw the book published to huge acclaim.To do nothing is also to deliberate, to contemplate Santayana's list of the world's redeeming qualities in which he noted, "the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns." I appreciate that this sounds like the cheesy motto of a Californian self-help website, but if we are to save the Earth's atmosphere and stop the great extinction of species, it is clear that we should learn to do much less, and so more, with our lives.Edith WhartonHenry Porterguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The teacher who inspired me Sharon Horgan, Paddy Ashdown, Bonnie Greer and others on the teachers who meant most to them. Share your own memories of the teacher who inspired you below - and if one of these stars was your pupil or you know someone who taught them, tell us what they were likeAndrew Motion Former poet laureateMy background was very unbookish, and there was absolutely no expectation from my family of my ever reading very much or even writing anything. I wanted to birdwatch and be left alone. Then I was taught English by Peter Way (Mr Way to me), and it was as though he walked into my head and turned all the lights on.He manifested in everything he said and did that poems were not a strange addition to life, but a part of it. And that is one of the great lessons of my life. He didn't know he was doing this, but he gave me my life. He lent me poems he liked and I showed him poems I had written, which weren't really poems but more an explosion of words. But he took me completely seriously. He introduced me to Woods, ÂLarkin, Keats, Edward Thomas – all people who have meant more to me than anyone else. His way of teaching was very searching but also very passionate and scrupulous. When I left, he gave me the latest published edition of Moly by Thom Gunn, which had druggy poems in it. It was wonderful Âevidence of his broadmindedness – as if I needed any proof. He was an exemplary figure to me and now a dear friend. I don't doubt that if he hadn't taught me English, I would now be working for the RSPB.Sarah Waters, NovelistMy most inspiring teacher was Ed Tanguay; he taught me art A-level at Milford Haven grammar school, south-west Wales, in the early 1980s. He was a really brilliant guy – inspiring in the best possible way, not just because he had all sorts of technical expertise and was good at passing it on, but because he encouraged us to think. Until he came along, art classes had been about putting a few objects on the desk and drawing them; he got us to do all sorts of crazy exercises – things about perception and response. He was a bit of an iconoclast, I suppose. One day he arrived at school having forgotten to wear a tie; he got us to make him one out of painted cardboard. He was Âeverything a good teacher should be: stern at times, but good-Ânatured; clever, creative, and fun.Michael Morpurgo, AuthorI'm the proud owner of a third- class degree and have been teaching for 40 years, so I'm interested to learn that the Tories don't think I'd be up to the job now. The teacher who most inspired me was Edred Wright, director of music at the King's School, Canterbury. His great gift was being able to inspire children (like me) who weren't necessarily musically gifted – that's what we should require of teachers in all subjects. With Mr Wright it was never about improving the reputation of the school, just his intense love of music. What that man taught me aged 14 has Âenriched my entire life.Robert Peston, BBC business editorI went to a north London comprehensive in the 1970s. It was called Highgate Wood, and it had been created out of a secondary modern. The ethos of the school, created by the head, Eurof Walters, was that every kid deserved an equal chance to succeed. They were great at not writing off anyone – and lots of kids were given opportunities they wouldn't have had under a selective system.Two teachers had a particularly big impact on me: Ruby Galili who taught history, and Peter Hudgell, head of English. I have no idea what qualifications they had, but they loved their respective subjects, knew tonnes about them, and were brilliant at communicating their learning and their enthusiasm. I still keep in touch with Ruby. She has Âalways been supportive, then and now. She's like all great teachers – consistent.Deborah Moggach, AuthorMy most inspiring teacher was my English teacher at Camden school for girls. She was called Margot Heinemann and wasn't like a teacher at all, she was a hugely intelligent woman with large dark eyes and a Past. This included Âbeing the lover of John Cornford, a beautiful young poet who died in the Spanish civil war, and what could be more potent than that? I adored her, we all did, because she treated us as grownups. Camden girls were famously grownup anyway, alarmingly so, but she seemed to take that for granted even more than the other staff. She introduced us to The Waste Land, to books outside the curriculum, and somehow to life itself, with all its tragedy as well as its possibilities.Paddy Ashdown, PoliticianJohn Eyre really changed my life. He persuaded me to join the poetry society (which all rugby playing "hearties" resolutely despised) and gave me a lifetime love of poetry, even getting me to write some for the school magazine. Eyre lit in me a fire for literature, especially Shakespeare, which has never gone out. He persuaded me to act in the school play (I was a wordless monk in Auden and Isherwood's The ÂAscent of F6). He even, with the assistance of another master in my house, got me to join a group to sing in (and win!) a madrigal competition – which, to anyone who knows my totally tuneless voice and incapacity to hold a melody, was nothing short of a miracle.I went to see him for lunch in 2001, five years before he died. He had lost none of his old spark, or his impish and acerbic nature. He opened our last meeting with, "Ah yes, Ashdown – you were Âalways an interesting boy. But you were one of the few to surprise me – I never thought you would get as far as you have. Still, there's no Âaccounting for fate is there?"Kamila Shamsie, NovelistThrough much of my childhood in Karachi I was painfully insecure. In classrooms, when the teacher asked a question, I'd never raise my hand because I'd worry I was wrong. All this changed in class five when Mrs Rehman was my class teacher. I still don't know how she did it – but in the kindness of her manner, in a certain way she had of asking a question and then looking directly at me as though to say, "Go on, speak up: if you're wrong, that's OK," she made me feel confident. It's not that I started to believe I always had the right answers; instead I came to see that not knowing the right answers wasn't such a problem. From Mrs Rehman I learnt to feel more comfortable in my own skin.Michael ÂWinner, Director and criticWhen I was 17, I went to a private tutorial establishment that was based in Buckingham Gate and Guildford, and met the greatest educationalist I have ever met. Her name was KM Hobbs. She wrote to my parents and told them I was illiterate. She said, "If you think your son is Âgoing to get into Cambridge, you'll have a long wait." Within a year I had passed the Ânecessary exams and I was a student at Cambridge, still at the age of 17. She turned a moron into something close to a genius. That was a great achievement.Sharon Horgan, ComedianI didn't have great luck with my teachers. I remember a series of chinless wonders and impotent bullies. And that was just the nuns. The only one I ever think about was a lady from my primary school days called Eileen Daly. She was tough as a brick, scary, Âopinionated, a bit of a dark horse, she'd tell you to sit down and shut up if she felt like it, but she had the ability to make kids feel like they were individually important. And she had a sense of humour. I remember once Âcycling with my friend to the village where she lived and knocking on her door, hoping to sell her some tickets for a sponsored charity thing. She invited us into her home. We sat around, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze with her, like equals. It was so exciting. She bought a load of tickets and we left buzzing from all the caffeine. The thought of making her proud makes me happy.Bonnie Greer, Playwright and criticOne of my best teachers was my history professor, Dr Turner, at university at the beginning of the 1970s. He laid the facts down and was able to show how history moved in cycles. He predicted the disaster of Richard Nixon and Watergate, based on Nixon's activities in the 1950s. He let me see that history is written by the victors not the vanquished, and that it is always necessary to Âinvestigate – never to take Âanyone's word for anything.Alexei Sayle, Author and actorWhen I was at foundation art college in Southport there was a teacher there called Max Eden who had known ÂPicasso in the 1950s. He was wonderfully Âdismissive about things like art A-level. "Just draw the fingernails and you'll pass," he told me. He also showed me how the way you lived your life could be a work of art. Recently I opened a new wing of Southport college and they gave me one of his paintings, which I treasure.Kate Mosse, AuthorI went to a comprehensive school in Sussex in the 1970s, where one teacher stood out, my A-level English teacher, Henry Thomas. He was by way of being an eccentric – tall, patrician, often done up in a white suit and Panama – kind of a Jean Brodie, though young and English. He was passionate about writing, reading, talking too, always engaged and enthusiastic, and made each lesson unique, fun, exciting. He didn't suffer fools, but in return treated us as thinking people with opinions worth listening to. As a result, we all raised our game and, in his lessons, were students rather than schoolgirls. Most important – and even harder these days of league tables and inflexibility – he encouraged us to think not about passing exams and grades, but rather the books themselves and the writers behind them. An exceptional teacher.Rory Bremner, ComedianDerek Swift taught me French at Wellington College. He was Âunconventional, original and Âinspiring, constantly inventing his own teaching materials and covering the whiteboard with words and phrases in anything from German to Serbo-Croat. In his class of 24, 21 got A grades and 3 got Bs. He taught us Russian in his spare time – four got As and two got Bs. We were like Alan Bennett's History Boys. He always challenged us, setting sixth-formers Oxbridge Finals prose exams and using Asterix and other comic strips as Âlearning aids. He also introduced me to Voltaire's novel Candide – and therefore to satire.Shazia Mirza, ComedianMy drama teacher Mrs Fisher-Jones was a great teacher. She always told me I was really funny and that I should develop that. I didn't know what that meant – I hadn't even heard of stand-ups then. She would let us write our own plays and do improv. There were loads of us who didn't go into the arts but still remember what a brilliant teacher she was. I still get Christmas cards from her now. She says she always knew what I would do.Trevor Baylis, Inventor I failed my 11+ and went to Dormers Wells secondary modern in Southall after the second world war. We were considered to be inferior to those at grammar school and we were made to feel that as well. To start with, I didn't want to know. Teaching me must have been like trying to communicate with a slab of tripe. One teacher in particular encouraged me to get hands on. He taught woodwork and metalwork and showed me, literally, how to use a spanner. He would show you how to drill a bit of wood, how to sharpen your tools etc. He was a very bright type, a very intelligent chap but he was a very fatherly type too. This was before the days when health and safety came into the equation and we didn't have safety helmets but that helped me grow up as well. My teacher had to know about first aid because every lesson someone would cut their finger, so he was also a nurse as well.David Nicholls, Writer There was something of a double-act at my school (Toynbee Comprehensive, Eastleigh, 1977-1983); music teacher Mary Granger, and drama teacher David Dalton. Both showed incredible tolerance and enthusiasm, given that I had no discernible talent in either subject.Miss Granger, in particular, was obliged to hear me alternate Imagine and In The Air Tonight on the rehearsal room piano, often for hours at a time. Both teachers gave a great deal of their own time to pursuing out-of-hours projects. "Strict but fair" is an awful cliche, but both managed to combine passion for their subjects with discipline and rigour. They also managed to conquer the suspicion and indifference of the (male) students. I sometimes wish that I'd had the same inspiration in more "sensible" vocational subjects. Instead I spent far too much of my adult life pursuing a career as an actor, without ever really having the ability to act.Glyn Maxwell, PoetIn the old days there was a "seventh-term" set aside for Oxbridge candidates. There were only two or three of us going for it at my school, so we'd wander round, in and out of the building as we pleased, beholden to no one, a vaguely celestial "upper-upper-sixth".One of my Oxbridge tutors was a man called Peter Gardiner. What was odd about Mr Gardiner was that he'd come from a glittering career in various top private schools – headmaster at one of the best – and, for his own reasons, had decided to finish his career as deputy head at our Welwyn Garden comprehensive. It seemed to me like this chap had walked right out of Greyfriars into Grange Hill. We made fun of his accent and his two posh middle names.I went to him for one-to-one coaching in English. I'd shamble into his office reeking of smoke from the toilets, I'd not have read anything he recommended, I had all the miserable self-pity of the fortunate and promising. And this fiftysomething old gentleman – I didn't know any gentlemen – looked at me with the face of a passionate boy whose love of books and stories had filled his life to the brim.We were different generations: I was the old at their worst: mind made up, black-or-white, full of myself, bad habits. He was the young at their best: open, innocent, self-effacing, eager to share. I think a great teacher isn't talking to you: he's talking to someone he can see inside you, so that in time you shed who you think you are, like an old skin, and walk out into the sun again as young as you can be.Shami Chakrabarti, Director of LibertyI don't think it's enough that teachers just need to be an elite graduate – you have to like children and be skilled at communicating with them, so I would challenge the idea that you have to be an academic genius to be a good teacher. It is more about opening up children to the possibilities that come from learning. Many of my best teachers taught music. I was never going to be a professional musician, but that didn't matter – to have a teacher who took an interest in me, and shared their passion was hugely valuable.I couldn't pick out a single teacher, I had many who inspired me. The difference between the teachers I loved and those I didn't was whether they treated me as a person, engaged in a debate. You may find this hard to believe, but I was probably quite a challenging, argumentative kid. The teachers who were best were the ones who realised how important intelligent dissent is, rather than churning out people who become cogs in the wheel. Not all were like this, but enough of my teachers respected me, encouraged my curiosity and dissenting nature.Lynne Truss, Author and journalist I went to Tiffin Girls in Kingston from 1966 to 1973, and my recollection is that it never occurred to any of us to criticise the teachers, or appreciate them very much either. In the run-up to my history O-level, I did realise I wasn't learning enough, but I blamed the period, not the teacher. To save the situation, I asked her whether I could look at some exam papers, to see what else I could answer questions on. Then I just mugged up this other stuff by myself. The best teacher I had taught religious knowledge, so I took it to A-level, despite being a non-believer. His name was Levi Dawson, and I'm pretty sure, now I come to think of it, that I looked up to him mainly because he was the first person I'd ever met who had written a book. Dinos Chapman, ArtistI hated every single one of my teachers and if any one of them are still alive, I hope they read this. They were horrible old fascists, convinced you could beat education into kids, and they threatened to cut my hair because I had lovely locks back then. It obviously traumatised me because now I'm completely bald.TeachingTeacher trainingSarah WatersAndrew MotionAlexei SayleShazia MirzaBonnie GreerKamila ShamsiePaddy AshdownDeborah MoggachMichael MorpurgoAndrew MotionNicole Jacksonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |