The secret lives of disciplinarians
My school had a system (probably not that uncommon) whereby the headmaster was responsible for the overall running of the school, and the deputy headmaster was in charge of discipline. It was the deputy head who called us to attention before morning assembly, and it was to his office that you'd get sent if you'd been naughty. He was a very tall man, lean and muscular-looking. He dressed in dark, sober colours and neither spoke nor smiled very often. Everything about him exuded quiet menace, and he inspired a decent amount of fear in most of the younger classes.

When I was fourteen or so I was told that the Religious Studies lesson that day was to be replaced by a special assembly, led by the deputy headmaster. The entire year had been pulled out of lessons to hear the man speak so there were about a hundred of us in the hall. Pretty much all of us were wondering exactly what was so special that regular programming had been interrupted, and rumours began to hum that we were in for a massive collective bollocking.

The deputy head strode onto the stage with his black gown and his chilly brown eyes, and began to speak about...his son. His son, who had just been born very premature and in a very bad way, and who had passed away while still in the maternity ward. He spoke for about half an hour and went into a lot of detail about exactly which health problems caused his son's death. He showed us photos, blown up to giant-size on the overhead projector. He told us how he was coping with the whole experience, and how his wife was coping.

We were all utterly stunned. For most of us, teachers didn't really exist outside the classroom and probably went into some sort of stasis when school closed for the day. For the deputy headmaster, this man who ruled the school with a never-seen-but-strongly-hinted-at rod of iron, to stand up and speak about something so astonishingly intimate to a hundred fourteen-year-old schoolboys was as great a jolt to our perception as any of us could have imagined. I think if he had admitted to us that he was going to become a woman and leave the school to work as a circus acrobat, we would have been less surprised.

Mr. Humphries, if you're out there reading this somewhere, you are a very courageous man.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 18 Mar 2011, 10:25, 2 replies)

*Stunned*
In a good way.
( number5 has been fighting tramps and losing., Fri 18 Mar 2011, 13:54, closed)

I'd click a hundred times if I could
He sounds amazing. My daughter was still-born almost a year ago to the day, and I can't imagine being able to talk "in public" in this way about the experience even now, let alone soon afterwards.
(How soon is now?, Fri 18 Mar 2011, 14:49, closed)