4 min readSep 5, 2022 05:45 AM IST
First published on: Sep 5, 2022 at 05:45 AM IST
I went to a boarding school up in the hills — Bishop Cotton in Shimla. Most of the teachers there were men, there were very few lady teachers in those days, except in the junior school, since the bigger boys were sometimes difficult to handle. The teacher that I really liked and influenced me was called Mr Jones. He was a Welshman and so he was called ‘Taffy’ Jones – I don’t know why Welshmen are called Taffy. He was a little eccentric because he had a pet pigeon and wherever he went, the pigeon went with him, even to the classroom. The pigeon would perch either on his shoulder or on his bald head. While he taught us Shakespeare or whatever it was on our English course, the pigeon would sit on the window ledge and behave itself quite well and even take an interest in the proceedings. Mr Jones was not very well qualified; he was just a trained teacher. He didn’t have degrees, with the result that he never got a promotion or became a housemaster or had any ambitions to be a headmaster. But he was, in those days, what you called, a devoted teacher. It is something that maybe is rare now, someone who really gives up his life trying to put some sense in the heads of schoolboys.
Mr Jones was popular with the boys because he had a rule – he would never cane them. In those days, corporal punishment was common – if you got into trouble, you got flogged. But Taffy Jones refused to cane or flog a boy, which was one of the reasons why he didn’t get any promotions and so he stayed a junior master right through.
He taught us English and when he saw that I was interested in books and that I wrote quite well, he would discuss books with me and even lend me books from his own personal library. He was a great fan of Charles Dickens, with the result that I almost read the complete works of Dickens in the couple of years that he was there. He was a bit of a socialist so he loved Dickens but hated PJ Wodehouse. We had lots of arguments because I used to read a lot of Woodhouse and he would say that Wodehouse only wrote about aristocrats, earls and lords. So, we had lots of discussions, which was a good thing because most of the teachers were not interested in books or literature; they just kept to their subjects.
He was from an Army family. He had been to the army school in Sanawar. In fact, he had been there at the same time my father had studied there. He was one of the old-school and disciplined teachers. He taught me to swim too, I should mention that. I was afraid of water as a small boy and he got me over that fear by giving me a rubber buoy to hang on to while I floated around in the swimming pool.
When I left school in 1950, Mr Jones, who was quite elderly, was forced to retire. But he didn’t retire. He left our school and taught in small, private schools in different parts of the country because he couldn’t give up teaching. After I left school, my mother shipped me off to England but I came back after about four years when I got my first book accepted. And who did I find in Dehradun but Mr Jones! He was working in a small school there and I went over to see him and we had long chats and I took him out for a beer — actually, he didn’t drink the beer, he drank coffee and I drank the beer. He was pleased I’d got published, although, he thought the book could have been much better.
Later, he was put in charge of a home for old people in Calcutta. Actually, he was older than some of the inmates but he ran the place very well. So, he was doing something or the other right to the end.
As told to Devyani Onial
Author Ruskin Bond (Express Archive) 
Share
