School Photo

Unscrolling the thumb-marked photo,

I hold down each reluctant end,

Remember the swivelling camera,

Astraddle in the old school yard,

The shabby man beneath the hood

Who slow-panned each September

The elevated Fourth and Fifth,

Prefects sitting with masters, gowned,

A smirking Third Form perched behind,

New boys cross-legged on the ground.

Among them my brother, head-cocked,

Pale, wearing his new school blazer,

Behind - what was his name? - the lad

Whose father’s trade in frying fish

Greased him with its odour?

Far left is Adamson, the joker,

Who made his little wager

To run behind five hundred boys

Faster than the camera turned

And ... yes, grins double at each end.

Beside him muses Bradbury - he ‘went on’,

Adorned the music scene in London,

And then Chappell, who looks much older:

Actor, artist, cornet player,

He went his way, arousing envy,

Married, sank from sight. How many

Names I’ve lost of faces I recall

Of boys who stuck around, or went away

And found the leaving painful,

But knew they could not stay.

Yet I remember every teacher,

Who served his time or taught with care,

Eccentric, idle, skilful, kind,

They carved graffiti on my mind.

Bill Breeze, Jim Winn, the Beak and Drip,

The ingenuous Latin teacher Gregg,

Who ignored the smoke from Booth’s clay-pipe,

The lines of desks we rearranged,

And streams of boys who exited

To chat or snatch a drag.

Then, surging from the fading print,

A man who gave me more than any,

Athletic, high-shouldered, stocky,

Wavy-haired, slightly jowled,

And thickening at thirty-eight,

He smiles as ever caustically.

On this long photo of the many

I remember, one man especially

Marked the practice of my life -

Old Rawlinson, whom we called Rawly.

Ex bomber-pilot, cricketer,

He gave to scholarship boys like me,

His time and energy and humour

And a sense of things that matter.

Later he broke some rule, it seemed,

Offended some bureaucracy, resigned

As Head, became an ordinary

Teacher once again. He would be

Too proud to want my pity

And despised all sentimentality.

But I recall his quiet pride

And pleasure that he’d ‘got me in’.

He brushed my awkward thanks aside:

Don’t thank me, thank Breeze,

He said in the corridor.

I thanked Big Bill at the staff-room door

(He wanted recognition

Of a reference he’d written)

But the gratitude was all for you,

Rawly, because you ‘got me through’.

You left on bombing sorties in the war

Determined to come home. So too,

You live on still in what I do,

Touch down once more

On the uncoiled print I sit before.

I know these words cannot convey

The sense I have of what you gave,

You’d underline or score them through.

Avoid such sentiment, you’d say,

If you are still alive today.

©Terry Hodgson2025