Over the past few
weeks I keep seeing my old German teacher Mr Hogg about the town – and what I
find most extraordinary about this is he doesn’t look a bit different.
I think I left secondary
school in about 1997. You’d would expected some sort of aging to have taken place with Mr Hogg in the intervening
years, but it hasn’t; he also taught my friend Steve’s father in the
mid-Sixties - and apparently looked exactly the same then too.
He must have made a deal with the Devil (or, as he'd say: “Der Teufel”). I guess some people
just start out looking middle-aged – and then their birthdate starts to catch
up with their looks.
Mr Hogg was an
excellent teacher, but one hell of a character. What you noticed first were his
eyebrows; they must have been modeled on Dennis Healey’s, as they stuck out a
good couple of inches from his face. If he’d walked into the classroom slow
enough, you would have seen them poking around the door frame for a good long
while before you saw the rest of him.
Not that he ever
entered slowly. He would burst into the classroom like the Tasmanian
Devil; yanking the revolving blackboard so violently that it spun upon its
rollers, before going at it with the board-rubber like a maniac. He’d then
throw the rubber in the direction of its little allotted shelf, missing every time – and turn to
address the class in a frighteningly severe manner.
He spoke in
German throughout the class. Even if someone knocked on the classroom door
during the lesson; he would shout “HEREIN” in response, obviously working on
the assumption that anyone who wished to visit him must have at least a basic
grasp of the language.
I sat next to my
friend Steve for all of our German lessons – and despite Mr Hogg’s strict
manner, we somehow managed to get away with chatting on most occasions. We once
spent the best part of a term compiling a list of 101 things you could do with
a turnip; scribbling alternating ideas into my school rough book, with a
little cartoon illustration accompanying each one.
There was one
particularly memorable occasion when Steve was on the receiving end of Mr Hogg’s
wrath; on failing to respond quick enough to whatever question was asked of him in German
(we obviously weren’t paying much attention), Mr Hogg shouted exasperatingly,
“Go, Steve. RUN AROUND THE BLOCK.”
It made for an
extremely surreal punishment – one that seemingly only the two of us were aware
of; the class continued as if nothing untoward had happened, whilst I looked
out of the first floor window, watching Steve as he circled around the building.
Despite our turnip-drawing and lap-running, we both came out the other side of our GCSE
German classes pretty favourably: I managed to scrape by with a B. I have Mr
Hogg to thank for that.
The last time I
saw him was a couple of days ago, when he was walking his dog across a playing field at the back of my
flat with his wife. The dog wasn’t behaving – and Mr Hogg was shouting at him to sit in the exactly the same manner that he used to address our class.
Perhaps he should
have tried “setzen” instead.