Following on from my post of earlier, talking at lunch with Noreen has helped recall a few more things I read at school.

As plays we read Pygmalion and I think Toad of Toad Hall .

The poetry selections also included Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman, Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, Kipling’s A Smuggler’s Song and William Cowper’s The Diverting History of John Gilpin. Doubtless Wordsworth (those bloody daffodils!), Tennyson and Christina Rossetti crept in too.

In I think the second year we had a single “reading lesson” each week with Bob Roberts who was the Deputy Head. In this we read a set book and there was some discussion of it. The books tended to be slightly lighter weight than in mainstream English lessons and I know this is where we read The Thirty-Nine Steps. This may also have included some Sherlock Holmes, but I’m not at all certain about that.

Somewhere along the way I think we must have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm because I can’t think I would have read it otherwise, although I do remember reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at my father’s suggestion.

I also remember that in the third year (so age 13-14), we had a weekly reading lesson in the school library where (when we weren’t being taught to use a library; boring; I’d know this for several years!) we could read anything we liked from the shelves. I tried reading War and Peace. Needless to say I didn’t get very far.

There was, of course, other stuff one was exposed to via the school play, house plays and the choir. One of the pieces we regularly sang in the choir was Benjamin Britten’s setting of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno which is something else I still love.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
…
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
…
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

In my final year the school play was The Insect Play by the Brothers Čapek. A very curious beast, but actually quite entertaining and single acts from this were also quite a favourite of the house plays. Maybe the house plays (each of the four houses put on a single act play for two nights each December; all four on the same evening) was where I came across Toad of Toad Hall.

There must have been more that is now far beyond recall. Sadly so much of it was, as Katy observed, so unutterably miserable. And she was doing school English 20-some years after me when one would have hoped things might have improved.