School portraits / A GCSE spring at Cranleigh, remembered from a riverbank
Permission to Bring the Rod, and Then to Cast It
A Cranleigh old boy remembers an English teacher who said yes twice. I tried the same approach with my son’s school, by email, at length, at night.
Will Collier, an old boy of Cranleigh in Surrey, told Tes in 2018 about a show-and-tell in GCSE English for which he asked his teacher, Paul Leggitt, whether he could bring in his fishing rod. Mr Leggitt said yes. Then Collier asked the better question. Could he cast it? Mr Leggitt laughed, and said yes again.
That is the whole story, and I have been carrying it round for a fortnight like a signed permission slip.
Our eldest, Digby, is fifteen and has a GCSE English speaking presentation this term. His subject is skateboarding, a sport I support from a distance of several streets. On Sunday he mentioned that he would quite like to bring his board in. I saw my opening. If Cranleigh could take a fishing line over the heads of an English set, a Year 10 classroom in our town could survive one ollie.
I drafted an email. Draft one asked whether he might bring the board. Draft two asked whether he might also stand on it. Draft three cited Cranleigh, linked the article and offered, in a postscript, to come in on the day with a dust sheet and a packet of those felt pads you stick under chair legs. My husband read it over my shoulder and asked whether Digby knew. Digby did not know. I sent it at 11.48pm, which is the hour at which all my best parenting is done.
Cranleigh, to its credit, kept the joke going. When it opened its new humanities building in April 2019 it named the library after Paul Leggitt, with a plaque and a seat, and quoted former pupils describing a “brilliant teacher who inspired both the brightest and the more flickering”. I have read that line about thirty times. I was flickering at GCSE. I was flickering at 11.48pm, on the school’s general enquiries address, with a postscript about felt pads.
The reply came at 8.15 the next morning from one of the English teachers, and ran to three lines. Digby had asked her himself, on Monday. She had said yes to the board, and yes, to his visible surprise, to one short demonstration on the carpet by the window.
In light of my email, she was now reconsidering the second one.
Sources
- Mr McConnell-Wood and Mr Leggitt by Will Collier
- Pupil profile: joining Cranleigh School in Year 9 with a Sports and Music Scholarship
- Futures Bright for Cranleigh School
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column