7. The Junior School 3: Desmond Draper
After an uninspiring, if solid, year with Miss Watson, the prospect of Mr. Draper’s class was alluring. He had been headmaster of the Junior School for some years and knew how to endear himself to children without letting them run riot. During the mid-morning break, his passage around the playground was eagerly accompanied by a crowd of us, hanging onto every word of his latest joke. Corny old things of the radio comedian type, no doubt. Some examples:
(In a butcher’s shop) Customer: Do you keep dripping?
Butcher: Yes, Madam.
Customer: It’s a funny feeling, isn’t it?
Q: Do you like Kipling?
A: I’ve never kippled.
(In a butcher’s shop) Customer: Do you have kidleys?
Butcher: Do you mean kidneys?
Customer: Well, I said kidleys, diddle I?
I fired some of them at my mother during the holidays and was disappointed at how unfunny she found them. Half the humour was in the timing. Just as Mrs. Robson could have made the telephone directory sound exciting, I daresay Mr. Draper could have made it sound funny. He found his ideal match when Joe Marshall joined the Community. Fellow lovers of Music Hall comedy and fifties-style comic turns, they could convulse us at Talent Night. One of their skits was a rewriting of Coward’s “The Stately Homes of England” to incorporate a prominent role for Mersham le Hatch. Though Mr. Draper professed to cloth ears where music was concerned, to the frequent dismay of Betty Rayment, that depended on how liberal your view of what constitutes music. In the sort of songs he liked, he had perfect enunciation and timing. A classically trained voice was beside the point in this music anyway. He could throw off “Susanna’s a funny old cow” with all the sound effects beautifully in place, almost sounding professional.
Mr. Draper was great fun, then. Was he a good teacher? I remember little from his classes, except that he had a curious system for doing long division that he reckoned easier than the normal one. It left me permanently confused and held me back at the Grammar School, where the maths teachers expected us to know already how to do it “properly”. Congruent triangles may have caused him some difficulty, too. They were hardly primary school stuff, but during my year the class was joined by Cuthbert Claude, who was somewhat older than us and already grammar school material. For some reason, instead of going straight to Ashford Grammar School, he sat among us, working the AGS first year curriculum under Mr. Draper’s supervision, so that he could enter the Grammar School second year the following September. Cuthbert’s arguments with Mr. Draper about congruent triangles, meaningless to me at least, fascinated us and led us to recite the phrase “prove it!” on each and every occasion, however ridiculous, as in “The second bell’s rung” – “Prove it!” Cuthbert opined – he opined many things – that “Droopy’s a bit thick when it comes to maths”, but I cannot prove now – here we go again – that the thickness was not the other way. With or without Mr. Draper’s help, Cuthbert’s career at the Grammar School was excellent.
When Mr. Draper read us poems we had heard from Mrs. Robson, they sounded flat but, as you might expect, he was good with humorous verse. Lear’s “The dong with the luminous nose” was one of our favourites. There was certainly nothing of the romantic about Mr. Draper. Fired with a reading of “Treasure Island”, I wrote a poem about sailing to the South Sea Islands “where the golden apples grow”. I prided myself on capturing the Stevensonian tone of high adventure and felt somewhat deflated when Mr. Draper merely glanced at it and quipped, “Golden apples, eh! They sound pretty indigestible to me”. Not so many years later, the supermarket shelves were swamped with tasteless Golden Delicious apples. I wonder how Mr. Draper’s enzymes coped.
On the positive side, he also taught us some rudimentary woodwork – for a long time I kept as a souvenir a model steamship I made which had two funnels and just about floated lopsidedly.
Be all this as it may, I passed my 11-plus exam, along with several other contemporaries, so the combined teaching of Mrs. Robson, Miss Watson and Mr. Draper did its job. As for those who did not pass it, questions might be asked about the fairness of the 11-plus system itself.
I have seen elsewhere that Mr. Draper’s nickname was “Scrapes”. Maybe for some, but I remember “Droopy”. He was a man of his time, in his teaching as much as in his humour. He had difficulty in adapting his methods to the new world that was coming, but it does seem unreasonable that he was forced to take early pension when his natural retirement age was only a year or so off.
Mr. Draper’s wife, Ann, helped out in the office during my years, but later became secretary full time. She was unfailingly cheerful and efficient.