I am still in contact with many of the people I was at school with. Back in February a few of us (seven, to be exact) met up for dinner at a pub in Hammersmith. I had hung out with four of them often in the last few years. (By “often” I mean “at least three times”.) The other two I had not seen for over 40 years. We all learnt, that very day, that our old History teacher had just died. He became head of department while we were there and we all had good memories of him, as a teacher and as a man. This is not true of all the teachers we discussed, and one specific German teacher came in for the kind of abuse we would not have directed towards him when we were teenagers.

Yesterday, coincidentally, and for reasons related to music, I met and chatted with two other former alumni. One of them left the school nearly 10 years before I started. The other started at the school over 10 years after I left. In both cases we established our connection to our alma mater because I had mentioned that I went to school in Hammersmith. “Which school?” was the immediate response and that got us started.

The younger of the two also had very happy memories of our old History teacher. I will refer to him by his initials, GB, which will be enough to identify him if you know me and know the name of the school. Other teachers we discussed had the initials JL, RO and GT. I kept in touch with JL and GT for many years after school, and still occasionally text JL. I have not kept in touch with RO. GT died some years ago.

I did not keep in touch with GB, but that seems to be true for most of us, even those of us that did History at A-Level, or for Oxbridge Entrance, or at university. It struck me, long ago, that he was one of those teachers whose work was complete when we moved on from school. He didn’t need to keep up-to-date with our careers beyond that.

I was fortunate enough to read History at the Oxbridge College of my choice, but before I got there it was clear that my academic progress was something of a disappointment to GB. He taught me in the first year of Sixth Form, but not in the second year. After A-Levels, dozens of us returned to school to try our luck and take exams for Oxford and Cambridge. GB was my teacher again. My contributions in class were minimal. My essays were mediocre. At one point he said, “What happened to you? You were doing so well, but you’ve gone backwards.” He checked which colleges I was applying to. “You won’t get in,” he said. I would like to tell you that I knuckled down, found a new level of focus and made up for lost time, but that would be a lie. I did get in, but not before I offered him further cause for disappointment.

One of the subjects we were studying was German History up to 1945. GB suggested that we go beyond the text books that we had already used, dig deeper into the subject with works like “The German Dictatorship” by Karl Dietrich Bracher. He left a selection of these books in a drawer in our form room for us to examine. One of them was the newly published brief biography of Hitler by Norman Stone. I never even looked in the drawer.

My university interview was with Norman Stone in mid-December. A week later there was a farewell party at GB’s house. Some of my schoolfriends had already heard that they had had offers from their first-choice colleges. I had not heard yet. Nobody there had received a rejection letter yet but as the evening progressed the feeling took hold that those of us who hadn’t heard (less than a week before Christmas) probably hadn’t got in.

GB asked me about my interview. Who was my interviewer? “Norman Stone,” I told him. He looked relieved and said something along the lines of, “Well, that’s great. You could talk to him about his book. You read his biography of Hitler, didn’t you?” I shook my head, feeling sheepish. It was all I could do not to say, “I’d never even heard of him”. Over 40 years later I still feel a flush of shame at the memory. “But you did look at all those books in the drawer?” As you know, I hadn’t. It was his turn to shake his head. Metaphorically, GB slapped his forehead. “I left all those books in the drawer for you to read, and …”

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. You can lead a student with ambitions of reading History at university to a drawer full of books that will deepen his understanding of the subject. But, like me, he might not even open that drawer.

I did meet GB again in the mid-1990s, many years after leaving school. We were on the same District Line train heading into town. I was meeting someone near Trafalgar Square and he was going that way too, meeting up with his wife (an Art teacher at our sister school) at the National Gallery. We chatted for maybe 30 minutes. It was a friendly exchange, and inevitably we discussed the alumnus from two years above me who had just become a Very Famous Film Actor. GB was kind enough not to allude to my less-than-glittering final term at school. Maybe he didn’t even remember it. But I do.

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