I was fortunate in my teachers at Kingston Grammar School. I am not alone in identifying 'Bunter' Brown (Latin and Greek) and Ken 'Crippo' Cripps (English) as among our most distinguished mentors. Between them they occupied over half my timetable, and contributed greatly to the person I am today. Yet the fact that I ended up as a Modern Linguist was due to a series of chances that, unless one looks to Divine Providence, seem inexplicable. I grew up assuming that I would be an engineer like my father. An indefatigable builder of Meccano and constructor of electronic apparatus from my early years, it was natural that I should anticipate selection for the (majority) science option on entering 2A. Yet inexplicably I was put down for the (minority) Greek option. My parents protested, to no avail, and time seemed to prove the school right in its allocation. Having successfully started Latin with 'Froggy' Forge (another brilliant teacher) in 1A I took to Greek immediately under the guidance of the gifted and urbanely erudite 'Bunter' Brown. I stagnated a while under the outwardly friendly (but inwardly insecure) 'Cec' Richardson in 3A, then blossomed again under Mr Brown in 4A and 5A, achieving excellent, even brilliant marks at O Level. It was natural, therefore, that I should opt for Classics at A level but fate, again it seemed, dealt a savage blow. The Headmaster told me he was unable to timetable Greek in the Sixth Form the next year, and what was worse, Mr Brown told me he was glad that I would not be able to continue for he feared that although I was brilliant at Latin and Greek grammar (largely due to an extremely retentive memory) he felt that I would find the other demands of A Level too much. His words on the subject were to me a bitter blow, redolent almost of betrayal. He probably recognised that my extremely wide range of other interests (Rowing, Music, the Christian Union, and Debating) would deprive me of the time that ought to have been devoted to Classical Studies.

This brought me into the orbit of the formidable Doctor Nicholls. 'Doc' had been a somewhat frightening figure to the nervous child I was aged eleven and twelve. Having contracted polio as a child, 'Doc' grew up physically handicapped and with a severe speech impediment. He had progressed to a PhD at Queens' College Cambridge and was fluent in (apart from English which he spoke rather incoherently) French, Spanish, and German (plus a little Russian and Italian), as well as retaining his school Latin and Greek. I had also come under his influence lower down the school through his annual musical extravaganzas put on in the French German and Spanish languages. These demanded junior boys to act as crowd fillers and a musical chorus into which many of us were drafted. He himself always took a cameo walk-on part, usually as a somewhat shifty-looking townsperson in the rear rank of the crowd.

Despite his severe handicaps 'Doc' was a formidable classroom presence. With him and Mr Thurlow (who never to my knowledge acquired a nickname) I began Spanish from scratch in the Lower Sixth, and progressed rapidly through O Level to A Level in two years. Doc's lessons were weighty on grammar and vocabulary, but deadly when it came to the (heavy) Literature content of the A Level syllabus. We learnt that certain authors were deemed 'good' but given no tools to assess their content or merit. We were given acres of quotations to learn, but little guidance on how to use them aptly in our essays. We could recite lists of authors of both French and Spanish Literature but given few clues as to how to understand why they were deemed 'good'. We had learnt with Crippo how to write a clear appreciation of a poem for English Literature O Level, but with Doc any poem in French or Spanish which we were given for written analysis came with the understanding that because it was by, e.g. Hugo, it must be 'good' and we had to say so. I recall that one piece I wrote on a poem by Lamartine in which I described the author as 'painfully sentimental and lacking serious purpose', giving good reasons why; I was awarded a gamma minus by Doc with the threat of a 'det' (detention) unless I bucked up my ideas. It took me nearly three years at Oxford to regain any independent critical thinking.

So you may wonder how I managed to gain a place at Balliol College Oxford to read Modern Languages. My A Level results were only good average, and I failed to impress in the Cambridge Scholarship exam I took in November 1960. Again, it seemed that an unseen hand was at work. Doc gave us the impression that he knew the Admissions Tutors at all the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges (which I doubt, but he certainly knew quite a few). Before attempting the Cambridge 'Schol' exam I had been to an interview at Balliol. Doc had claimed to know the French tutor there (which it turned out he didn't), and he gave me a one-to-one tutorial before I went up for the interview. Together we looked at Art Poétique by Verlaine. By some miracle, in my interview I was given the very same poem to comment on, which I was able to do quite well, it seemed. It also turned out that my qualifications as an oarsman (two years in the KGS 1st VIII) also helped, since the wise and genial Master of Balliol, Sir David Lindsey Keir, had promised the Captain of Boats that he would endeavour to recruit some much need talent for the river. These 'sporting' admissions were only given to men doing minority subjects like Modern Languages or Theology or Geography and were regarded as pro bono places unlikely to besmirch the college's formidable reputation in Classics and History. The college admissions panel also held onto the policy that O Level marks were a better guide to potential than A Level, which undoubtedly helped me. I did not shine academically at Balliol, though kindly and wise tutors propelled me to a fairly respectable Second-Class degree.

But I digress rather from the extravagant world of Doc Nicholls. Whenever one of his pupils reported news of a place at Oxford or Cambridge (usually the latter) the glad tidings were always greeted in class by a spirited rendition of gaudeamus igitur. I failed to receive this lyric accolade because I had already reported my news to Doc in the school quad after morning assembly.

The annual show he produced was something to behold, quite literally. It always contained a contingent of soldiers (normally French Foreign Legionnaires) provided by the school CCF, sometimes with marching band. There was also, normally, a pantomime animal, sometimes a horse, or bull (corridas regularly featured), or once a camel. The 'plots' (so-called) were either dragged kicking and screaming from some little-known French farce, and once from a third-rate tragedy by Voltaire, or else the product of the Doc's lively imagination. Easily the best was that of 1956, just after the Suez crisis, entitled La Fable de Suez. In it the Egyptian dictator, named Nasserfred, and played by a senior boy who bore a remarkable resemblance to the real Col. Nasser, nationalises the Suez Canal. A contingent of Spanish troops and French Legionnaires is dispatched (cue the CCF) to capture the waterway. Once in Egypt the French captain rescues Nasserfred's daughter from brigands in the desert (cue the pantomime camel), and in gratitude the dictator declares his canal open to all. All this peppered generously with French and Spanish dialogue, and songs supplied by assorted peasantry. A later memorable production was hijacked by some of the cast who turned the central action into a series of TV commercials, leading to Doc spending a whole evening phoning round apologising for the way the show had turned out. In fact, most people hadn't realised the show had not been performed as intended, and said how much they enjoyed it!

I had a small walk on part in one of the earlier shows, playing an aged crone who succumbs to a bribe to allow the king (the Spanish Charles V, I think) into a damsel's bedroom. A year before I left, I took the lead in a totally bowdlerised version of Le Voyage de M. Perrichon, a rather tame production by comparison with others. In my last year I shared the piano accompaniment, made all the more scary by the last minute loss of some of the piano music forcing us to play some pieces from memory, all adding to the usual chaos. The same show featured a visiting accordionist who contributed to the customary peasant dancing in the town square, but who just would not stop playing. The Doc was heard clearly from the wings gesturing and muttering 'Get him off!'

Speaking of the piano accompaniment, 'Ron' McIver, the much ill-used music master, never allowed the school grand piano to be used for Doc's entertainments, forcing the use of a rather out-of-tune Bechstein upright. On one occasion one of Doc's rehearsals clashed with a choir rehearsal (Ron totally disapproved of Doc's vaudevilles). My fellow pianist and I were asked by Ron to take an upright to the dining hall for the choir rehearsal, so we took a third even more decrepit upright to Ron who greeted us with “I don't know where you think you are taking that piano, but you can take it right back again”. Being both fully involved with Ron McIver's much more serious music making, and sensing his feeling of betrayal at our involvement with Doc's farrago, we were rather caught between two stools.

Doc was forced by ill health to retire a year after I left KGS, and I almost entirely lost touch with him. He seemed of indeterminate age – some said he was over 70, but he was in fact about 60, having been born in 1901. His activities were numerous. At Christmas he always gathered together a small orchestra and put on musical evenings for local old people's homes, assisted by some of his pupils who acted as a small carol choir, one of whom played the compère as necessary. Doc despite his handicaps played the double bass (joined by his brother on cello and sister on violin). For two years while at Oxford I would receive a postcard in November written in a combination of French, Spanish, and German, asking me to join him once again as compère for his charity evenings, and it was in fact after one of these evenings in 1977 that he died after a heart attack. Doc was also an enthusiastic tennis player, his physical disabilities notwithstanding, and his pupils were sometimes dragooned into joining him and his brother at the local park for a game. He usually managed to win by insisting that his shots were always 'in' and that our returns were always 'out'.

Life was never dull with the Doc; indeed, life was rarely ever dull all the time I was at KGS. And the title of this piece? Rehearsals for the annual extravaganza took place at break-time around the upright piano. All songs were scheduled to be repeated in performance, and gaudeamus igitur, which was always shoe-horned into the show somehow, was repeated twice. As the good Doc put it: “All songs twice; gaudeamus three times”.