All parents will have received a school report this summer depicting their offsprings’ achievements during the Summer term. From those achievements, they will extrapolate the next 10 years of the child’s life. My parents must have despaired when they received this report from the Spring Term of 1949 when I was 11 years old. How did it all turn out for me? The school reports I have seen in recent years are wordier and less direct.

Holy Scripture – Must put more energy into this important subject. The school was run by a religious fanatic, and we were forced to read and memorise parts of the bible. By this time, I would have read the Bible through once. In the next two years, we were forced to read it again. A few years later, I got a distinction in Divinity for GCSE. As a result, I am one of the best-informed atheists in the Christian religion. In recent years I have learned something about Buddhism also.
French – Tended to laziness. I tried but was it le, la or les: de, du or de la? I had a 33% chance of getting it right. When I needed to learn some French as an adult, I began to make progress only when I forgot all about school French.
Mathematics – There is a certain amount of room for improvement here. What a pompous statement. There is still room for improvement, but I’ve muddled along.
English – Concentration poor: too many grammatical errors: a passable result. I read a lot, mostly under the bedcovers at night. Biggles, Ballantyne and Defoe were big at the time for me, but Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare held no interest.
Spelling – Quite satisfactory. He must have confused me with someone else. My spelling was notoriously bad in all other reports.
Poetry – Does not appear to have a great zest for poetry. Well, I have married a poet and occasionally contribute to her poems. I recall a boring poem at the time, but the others in the book were more interesting, so I read them instead.
History – He would achieve more with greater effort. That applies to everything in life but committing dates to memory seemed less important than the football scores.
Geography – Should bestir himself. I did. I went to live in Sweden, Texas and Sri Lanka and travelled in eastern Europe at the time communism was collapsing.
Nature – Less interested in biology than in physics. Well, that changed as I read medicine. I think the comment came about because I argued strongly in class that Mars was nearer the Sun than Jupiter. The teacher held that against me.
Writing – Extremely careless and untidy at times. I dispute that. Here is an example of my writing at the time. We had to address our own envelopes for the school reports. Rather like a prisoner signing his own death sentence. But thanks to keyboards, no one has to struggle with my handwriting. Being a doctor, I can make it illegible if necessary.
Drawing – Fair, but seems to try. Miss Thompson was a lovely teacher, and I thought she would have written something kinder than that.

My Teacher
Our teacher, Mr Richardson, left suddenly in the middle of the next year. He was exasperated by his class of boys who engaged in a farting competition while he was trying to teach. He told them off and threatened them, but one boy let off the loudest trump. Richardson picked him up and dangled him out of the window. Unfortunately, the classroom was on the first floor, and the room beneath was the headmaster’s study. When the headmaster saw one of his fee-paying pupils dangling above his rose garden, he ran upstairs and fired Richardson on the spot. Some teachers inspire; Richardson didn’t.
The report is a poor one, and my parents expressed their disappointment. I pointed out that I was fifth in a class of fifteen, in the top third. I wish I could see the report of the fifteenth boy. I can’t remember who he was.
Nil desperandum. I turned out all right in the end – a university professor and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians etc.
Why was I so useless at school? I was not happy there. I had no aspirations; it was a matter of day-to-day survival. Times were hard, and we were often hungry and cold. Winterdyne was not a good school. Some of the things we had to endure would be considered child abuse these days.

Other Exams
Later I became good at passing exams. Except for French, I passed French GCSE on the fifth try. Latin, I never passed a Latin exam. Biology, I loved it and was graded scholarship level. Batchelor of Science exams were enjoyable. Chemistry was a doddle for me, I passed A level a year early and spent my time experimenting with explosives. Final MB ChB were an exhausting three weeks of exams. MD was by presenting a thesis. I was proud to let the world know I knew something no one else did about the Basal Ganglia (part of the brain involved in Parkinsons disease.) Then I swore never to take another exam, the Royal College of Physicians fellowship was an honourary award.
There were other exams, a driving test, revalidation for the General Medical Council and various flying tests up to flying basic aerobatics. Now, I am aware that people are examining me to see how many marbles I have left. So far, there are enough to avoid being short-changed or scammed. Long may it continue.
I guess taking exams has become so much of a habit that I have returned to it later in life. I enter writing competitions. Occasionally I win a prize, but the real prize is the inner satisfaction of creating something that is reasonably good.

Confess I have been known to browse the old school reports from John of Gaunt School in Trowbridge. While they might not make interesting reading for anyone other than me, it does make one vividly recall one’s youth, and those subjects which, paradoxically, you were bad at but made your career and those you enthused over but were pretty pointless… The wisdom of years.
I don’t have many school reports to look back on, but what I have reveal that I was consistently bottom in every subject, and losing interest took to truanting. My parents received warnings of prosecution until I was expelled aged 15. Thereupon I worked in a brickworks where my workmates were former Italian POWs and refugees from the 1956 Hungarian uprising. I had taught myself to read as we had a Bible and for some reason the Book of Revelations was my favourite. Later on I read Der junge Hegel by the Hungarian philosopher, György Lukács. It came in handy when I taught at Oxford where the current Hungarian PM, Victor Orban, attended my lectures. I also managed to pick up a bit of nuclear science and ethics from Prof Phillips who was a key figure in the development of the Hiroshima bomb. Next year I intend to help in organizing conferences across Europe and the US to mark the centenary of my mentor, P.K. Feyerabend, a leading German philosopher of science. No connections at all with school or my reports.
A couple of favourites from my reports are:
“he works well when he is serious; not so well when he is not serious. This term he has been fairly serious”
and (when my spectacles fell into a greater and greater state of disrepair as the term went on)
“His progress in class has been in inverse proportion to the state of his spectacles”
Throwing children out of windows must have been standard punishment in the 1960s. When I was at school (a decade or so later), one of the English masters still had a reputation for having done this. Apparently the boy had not done his homework and couldn’t couldn’t come up with anything when asked “is there any reason why I shouldn’t throw you out of the window”.
Luckily it was a ground-floor room, and the only penalty the teacher suffered was having to pay for a new pair of trousers, as the boy’s were torn in the escapade. Oh, and from then on every pupil knew the word “defenestration”.
I maintain that the most important lessons are learned outside the classroom. A good teacher will inspire you to learn after the lesson.
Our daughter toyed with returning to school to see her drama teacher who said she was no good at drama. She was going to ask if he had seen ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ where she starred with Tom Cruise, but she decided that would be unkind.
I like the correlation between the spectacles and academic progress.
David will be interested that my wife, who taught in Winchester prison, read revelations to them one day and sked what they thought.
‘What drugs was he on, Miss?’ they asked.
Congrats Mike. Just goes to show that schooling is only part of it.
I remember doing a software MSc in the University of Sheffield as a mature student without any prior experience in software!
A lecturer told me my assignment was not brilliant. I was very happy because I thought ‘not brilliant’ was a grade below brilliant.
Having lived 30 years in the U.K. I’m more familiar with the nuances of the language. So, I understood it when someone on BBC said that Liz Truss is ideologically dexterous.