Many years ago I learned English. I don't mean mother's-knee English—although I'm told that I learned that quite quickly, and grew a vocabulary from the Sunday broadsheets at an age that I'd rather keep to myself—I mean learning proper English.
I was taught for five years by a man who took it all very seriously. He had even written a book. He would plan the week's work on a Monday. (“Monday, my book. Tuesday, Keats. Wednesday, my book. Thursday, Shakespeare. Friday. Hmm. My book.”) We spent a lot of time with his book: learning figures of speech (from aposiopesis to zeugma, as I recall); practising such arts as essay and précis writing; and working through exercises that consisted of dismantling increasingly complicated sentences into their basic grammatical elements—a process known as general analysis.
I rather enjoyed it. The rules were complex, but quite clear once you'd got them; and the satisfaction of taking apart in detail a 300-word sentence by Thomas Babington Macaulay is one that only devotees can know. Now, I suspect, there are few left.
Not long after I left school, my teacher died—suddenly at a second year Christmas dance, forever spoiling the St Bernard's waltz for some poor girl—and 40 years on there are, I am told, no surviving teachers remotely resembling him.
I still think of him from time to time. He stood as a ghostly presence at my shoulder through many hundreds of hours of writing. When I joined an academic department and disagreed with its head about an arcane point of grammar, I was delighted to discover that he too had been taught—at another school and before the war—by the late great author of Interpretation and Language Exercises, who is still not far off as I write this now.
Even in his time he was old fashioned. I could not have made that judgment then, because there was no one to compare him with. But once, I happened to meet at a party a retired school inspector whose subject was English. We talked a bit and I mentioned my late teacher. “Him.” He clutched his brow and groaned. “That man held up the progress of teaching English in Scotland for 25 years . . . Singlehandedly.” Suddenly, I felt even more privileged than before.