I was the only person flown out from London for the interview at the school in St Peter Port.   I appeared to be the best candidate on paper,  and I’m not sure what I would have had to do not to get the job; sit on

the headmaster’s lap, perhaps.  Certainly they wouldn’t have been happy having to pay for somebody else to be brought over.

They actually put me up for the night, and I had time before my flight the next day to stroll around town and visit an estate agent to find out about possible accommodation for the September.

I liked the look of a holiday cottage a few miles out, which would come vacant a few days before the start of term. It was much cheaper than anything in St Peter Port, and I would be able to get to school on my Lambretta. 

The cottage turned out to be rather on the flimsy side, with no central heating; just a couple of small open fires, in the living room and the larger of the two bedrooms. But no problem; Guernsey was much warmer than mainland Britain, with no winter to speak of.

Not, however, the winter of 1962-3, which was the coldest in the British Isles since 1740.

   (click here to read about the two coldest winters in my lifetime)

That apart, life in Guernsey was pretty good. The school was a pleasant place to work in, with smallish classes, friendly colleagues and no problems with discipline in the classes.

There were just two of us teaching French.  Tom, the head of this tiny department, kept all the 6th form and O level teaching to himself, leaving me with lower level and what were called CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) classes.  That was ok, because the emphasis was more on oral communication, which meant that there was no problem about taking the classes out occasionally, to use the outside world as a learning resource.

To my delight, the top grade at CSE being considered equivalent to an O level pass,  I managed to get more of my lads to reach that level than Tom did in his class, which caused a bit of a stir all round.  At the end of my first (probationary) year the headmaster congratulated me on my teaching, only raising one small matter which was causing me concern.

“I was wondering”, he said, “why you turned out for the staff cricket match in grey flannels, yet have worn white trousers for teaching now and again”. “Oh”, I replied. “I wouldn’t have risked falling down and getting grass stains all over my best linen trousers”, to which there was nothing to be said.

In fact, at one of the staff meetings, the deputy head raised the point that some of the younger staff members (me) were failing to set a good example about dress to the pupils.  Now, don’t imagine that I turned up for work dressed as in the photo above.  I always wore a jacket, collar and tie, though not usually similar to what my colleagues would wear. On this occasion I responded by saying that I was a mere five years older than most of the sixth-formers, while being a good thirty years younger than he (the deputy head) was. “So who am I going to look more like?”

This was taken on the chin, which is not what had happened during my teaching practice at St Clement Danes school in west London (very close to Wormwood Scrubs prison, with which it was often compared unfavourably).  On one day I was summoned to the office of the Head,  always turned out impeccably in one of a number of hand-made suits, to be told that - unless I changed the way I dressed - I would not be allowed in the school. (Not that they were aware of what I was actually teaching the kids; I could have had them singing the Horst Wessel Brownshirt anthem in German, for all they knew).

“What precisely is wrong with the way I am dressed, Headmaster?” I asked, standing there wearing a dark brown collarless corduroy jacket (based on a design by Pierre Cardin, bought in Cannes the previous year), narrow, lighter brown cord trousers, a white shirt, a black silk knitted tie, and impeccably polished black boots with cuban heels (jacket and boots identical to those worn by the Beatles two years later). 

(Note that the head of History, who had been the one to comment openly on my clothes in the staffroom, invariably wore a checked suit which had never seen the inside of a dry-cleaners, a clashing check tie, a striped shirt and scuffed, unpolished brown brogues.)

“I think you know very well what I mean”, he replied. “I fear I do, Headmaster”, I retorted, before turning round and leaving his office.

Next morning I drove up on my Lambretta, wearing my only dark suit, a white shirt with high, separate collar and my St John’s College, Cambridge tie, crowned with a carefully brushed bowler hat purchased from the Notting Hill market for a couple of quid a few weeks earlier.  I parked the scooter, unstrapped my tightly furled black umbrella and marched through the school, bowler in my left hand, umbrella in my right - the very picture of a guards’ officer in mufti - knocked on the door of the Head’s office and, when he opened the door, said “Mr Vaughan-Rees reporting for duty, sir!” to which, to do him credit, the Head responded with a quickly hidden smile.

(part three to follow)