To Sir with Love
Sunday was an unordinary evening for us. We headed into Glasgow to see the Ukulele Orchestra, and it was quite incredible to hear the sound seven ukuleles could make when played well. If you’re asking, it was Zombie by The Cranberries that did it for me, although I was a little disappointed, they never played Bowie’s Heroes, another favourite of mine.
But it was on the train home that the evening became rather less ordinary.
We had found ourselves sharing a carriage with a bunch of badly behaved teenagers and, eventually having had enough, moved a few carriages along. And there, as so often happens in Glasgow, we began to talk to strangers. I’ve always liked that about us. We talk. And sometimes, if you listen long enough, talk reveals the richness hidden inside ordinary human beings.
During the conversation, a lady said something that stayed with me. Although she had been brought up in Scotland, she had always felt that, somehow, she was Swedish.
I knew exactly what she meant.
Let me explain.
To Sir with Love
It was 1971, and I wasn’t in the mood for two periods of music.
You glanced around the classroom, taking the measure of this new collection of first-year boys, and even at that age I could see you wondering what life had done to you. This probably wasn’t the career you had imagined. Teaching the sacred mysteries of classical music to a roomful of Clydeside kids, whose musical horizons stretched little further than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, was perhaps not what you had in mind during all those years at university.
Maybe you had imagined something grander. You could have been the 1970s André Rieu, standing before your own glamorous orchestra, travelling the concert halls of Europe while adoring audiences applauded. Instead, here you were, in flannels with turn-ups and a Harris Tweed jacket, looking at us and apparently deciding that you might as well make the best of things.
I’m sorry, sir. I don’t remember your name.
But I remember what you did.
You walked over to the record player and carefully removed a record from its sleeve.
“Let’s go on a journey, boys,” you said.
A journey?
That caught my attention.
You began to tell us what we were about to hear. This was Allegretto pastorale, you explained, music that carried within it the countryside itself. You wanted us to hear the flutes and clarinets meeting one another in fluid harmony, as though they were saluting the rising sun. You told us to listen for the flute and oboe singing like two birds greeting the morning, and for the bassoon announcing that the darkness had gone and a new day had begun.
Then you lowered the needle.
Grieg’s Morning Mood began to play.
You didn’t say anything more. You simply stood there and watched us.
And something happened in that classroom.
One by one, a collection of restless Clydeside boys became still. Apart from the gentle music gathering and rising around us, there was silence—the kind of silence I had never heard in a classroom before. I don’t think I had words for what I felt then, but I have them now.
It was spiritual.
Somehow, through that battered classroom record player, Edvard Grieg had opened a window, and on the other side of it was Norway. I could almost see the morning light spreading across mountains and water, hear birds calling somewhere beyond the trees, and sense a landscape utterly unlike the streets waiting for me outside the school gates.
Something had shifted inside me.
When the bell rang, I carried Norway out of that classroom.
After school I scampered to the library and began searching for anything I could find: Norway, trolls, Peer Gynt, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Edvard Grieg. One piece of music had become a country, and that country had somehow become part of me.
More than half a century later, on an ordinary Sunday evening aboard a train home from Glasgow, a woman told me that although she had grown up in Scotland, somewhere deep inside she had always felt Swedish.
I understood her.
Because once, in 1971, a teacher whose name I cannot remember placed a record on a turntable and took a classroom full of Clydeside boys on a journey.
And one of us never entirely came home.
You made me believe I had been born in the wrong place. To Sir with Love