My English Lit teacher had a bit of a stunt he’d pull with each new Lower Sixth. We were studying The Metaphysical Poets in my year and Mr Cockerill had printed out a handful of poems for each of us - he was a man of firm beliefs, a New Critic, one of the strictest, and he firmly believed in the benefits of each student grappling with “the words on the page.” That meant a physical assault upon the text, scribbling, underlining, exclamation pointing. He had been in trouble with the school librarian for years. The headmaster had instructed him to desist from this practice, which had resulted in whole shelves of plays, poems and novels rendered useless for future students, and demanded that Mr Cockerill use duplicates.
“Where is Twickenham Gardens?” he asked, holding up the first inky sheet. Obviously we were a bunch of charmless adolescent boys. And we had geographers amongst us. “Is it in Kent, sir?” Mr Cockerill did not jest about literature. “Where is the poem!” he said, without even making so much as glancing eye contact with my class mate. “Where IS the poem?” he ontologised. Someone behind me shuffled some paper; “Is this it?” Mr Cockerill waved his own copy in a meditative fashion; “Then what’s this? . . . eh?” “That’s the poem too, sir” we all chimed, thinking we’d got it now, feeling flushed with relief and revelation. Mr Cockerill scrunched the sheet into a tidy ball and lobbed it over his head, scoring a direct hit in the green paper basket in the corner. Rumour was he once played cricket for Yorkshire. “So, boys, where is it now?” “Bin!” a couple of us shouted gleefully. “Hmm,” Mr Cockerill paused and surveyed each eager face in the class, “so you’re telling me that John Donne’s poem, Twickenham Gardens, is in the rubbish bin! This exceptional high point of the literature of our once great country ended up in a metal bucket in room 6AC, Parkside High School?” His tone of voice was enough to let us know that this could not be correct. “Well, sir, no sir . . . you threw your copy in the bin sir.” We sniggered. That was in fact the truth. “Aha!” said Mr Cockerill. By now I reckoned I had cottoned on to the gag and wanted to cement my position as clever dick of the class; “Obviously” I said, in my best caught-the-teacher-out voice, “we’ve all still got Twickenham Gardens; you gave us it this morning,” tapping the stack of sheets in front of me like a prosecution lawyer making a decisive summing up speech. “Yeah, we all got copies,” the lad behind me chimed in. He was always a prat. Mr Cockerill was having fun. “Well now, do you have the poem, or just a copy of the poem?” I thought I could answer that one easily enough, but he was on a roll; “Where is it? In the first edition in the University library? What about the handwritten version in Donne’s notebook, or is that just Donne’s private copy? I came to class today to teach you about metaphysical poetry, and you presumably came here to learn, yet none of us seem to know where the stuff really is!” I was gobsmacked. Twickenham Gardens wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, wasn’t in the bin, wasn’t in John Donne’s head or even in the British Museum Library . . . but we still managed to be reading it, talking about it, throwing it about the place. Mr Cockerill carried on. “If every copy were lost, what about that?” That seemed a thought too big to swallow right then, I mean, there were a lot of books around “Or what if the last person on earth had it memorized, and they died?” My thoughts ran aground on the idea of some kind of literary afterworld. I thought it best to keep my vision of a poetry Valhalla to myself. Teenage boys specialise in the mortification of sensitive souls. Mr Cockerill had a quizzical look. “How can we study Twickenham Gardens if we don’t know where it is?” He asked. “If you lose, erase, shred “Twickenham Gardens” or the Magna Carta or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, what exactly have you destroyed? Something? Nothing? Civilisation as we know it? Your very soul?” I looked toward the green bin for illumination. My brain churned. When was Mr Cockerill going to explain about “perverse sex” and the bit about not being able to judge a woman’s thoughts by tears any more than you could “tell by her shadow what she wears.” I went to an all boys school, that would have been useful information to pass on. But the bell rang and it was time for history. I wish Mr Cockerill had lived to own a Kindle. It would have made those English lessons a hell of a lot easier.
Going nowhere. Doing nothing.