The man of mystery.
Fourth form, they called it, or Sub-Junior. Our class was called 4A2CD.

We turned up for English class on the first afternoon at high school and it was taken by Mr. X. The book we had was called Essays and Adventures, a prose anthology of Australian writers.

Mr X was a large gentleman of perhaps 45, dark trousers, white shirt, tie, standard issue. His only apparent oddities were that he was English and he rode a motorised bicycle.

Mr X insisted on absolute silence. We were told to read the first essay in the book and count all the words that began with the letter "n".

I thought it was peculiar, but it was our first day so who knew.

We had two classes with Mr. X. Then he disappeared. Never to be seen again.

Word eventually filtered through. He had fake credentials from some teacher's college in the United Kingdom and didn't know the first thing about teaching anything. That was the story we were told, the facts might have been otherwise.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Fri 18 Mar 2011, 13:02, Reply)