Broken Music: A Memoir by Sting

beginning of the autumn term. He hadn’t taught any of us before and wanted some guide as to the problems he would be facing in the coming terms. I struggled through the paper and waited anxiously with the rest of the class for the results at the end of the week.
    Bill walks in on Friday morning with a face like a burglar’s dog, throwing the pile of papers onto his desk with a resounding slap, as if he is delivering a fiat from Rome announcing a mass execution. This is not looking good.
    He proceeds, with an increasing vein of irony, to read out the percentages achieved in Monday’s examination.
    “Hanlon 75 percent, Berryman 72, Taylor 69…Hornsby 25, Elliot 23…and lastly, Sumner 2—yes, that’s right, 2 percent.”
    “Do you know why you got 2 percent in the maths exam, lad?”
    “Er, no, I don’t, sir.”
    “Because you managed to spell your bloody name right.”
    “Thank you, sir.”
    There are some titters from the back of the class.
    “Would you mind telling me how someone like you could have survived in this bastion of academic excellence with such a paltry and pitiable knowledge of basic mathematics? I have a cat at home who knows more than you do. How have you survived?”
    “Native wit, sir?” There are more titters from the back of the class.
    He survives by native wit
was the phrase that my previous teacher had used to describe my faltering progress through the school in my last report. I took it as a kind of compliment and had even shown it to my mother, who gave me one of her wry smiles.
    To Bill’s credit and my eternal gratitude from that day on, he literally took me under his wing. Perhaps he saw me as some kind oftabula rasa upon which he could inscribe the unique signature of his craft, like a missionary teaching a savage to read the word of God. Or perhaps he was just a damned good teacher with a job to do. Once he had set the other geniuses in the class to work he would call me over to his desk, sit me down, and painstakingly, day by day and week by week, reveal the hidden magic of the logarithm tables, the balanced perfection of quadratic equations, and the graceful logic of the theorems. A whole continent was revealed before me, until then concealed under a dense cloud.
    As well as being a fine teacher, Bill was also a hell of a storyteller. When things were going well in class, it wouldn’t take much of a hint to start him on one of his sagas. He had fought with the eighth army in North Africa, and marched with Field Marshal Montgomery fighting Rommel, the Desert Fox, and his Panzer divisions from Tobruk to El Alamein. He had changed his name from Mastaglio to Massey in case he was ever captured by the Italians and shot as a traitor. I think Bill taught us almost as much modern history as he did mathematics. Two years later I managed to achieve a surprisingly decent pass in a subject where I had expected to fail miserably, and I owe that to Sergeant Massey, aka Bill Mastaglio, or just Bill.
        Two terms at the grammar school will isolate me even further from my parents. Neither of them has ever read a book to speak of, or understands a word of any foreign language. Apart from my dad’s spell in the army, they have never been out of England. I, on the other hand, learn to conjugate Latin verbs, write in basic French, tackle the rudiments of physics and chemistry, read literature, and study poetry. I may as well have been sent to the planet Neptune for an education, for all the comprehension my parents have of thework I bring home. This is no fault of theirs, but with only a paltry amount of learning I have managed to become a ridiculous, intellectual snob. The education that they had so wanted for me becomes yet another barrier between us, a Berlin Wall of indecipherable textbooks, theorems, languages, and philosophies, which must hurt and baffle them.
    My parents are far from stupid, but in my arrogance and anger I begin to treat them as if they are. Sullen, uncommunicative,