Tiger
Timms could be a bit heavy at times. I recall we were all sitting in the
Chemistry Lab watching him assemble some equipment in order to
demonstrate an experiment, when he took from a draw a long cardboard
tube with a coloured plastic cap in one end. It prompted me to say
reasonably quietly to my neighbour, “looks like a firework”. With that,
Tiger stopped what he was doing and sent me to the corner of the room
near the door, to face the wall with both arms extended into the air.
Believe me, after only a few minutes it begins to hurt. Still needing another piece of equipment, he leaves the room to fetch it, but I instinctively knew that he would expect me to drop my arms as soon as he’d gone and would shoot back to check. Not to be outsmarted, I kept them in the air and sure enough, in less than half a minute he shot back in. The class roared with laughter at him for failing to catch me and in order to minimise his embarrassment off he went again without a word. This time I knew it would take him at least two or three minutes to get to the other lab and back and so I dropped my arms for some desperately needed relief. Someone was look-out by then and when he finally returned, my arms were in the air once more and when the experiment was due to begin I was called over to join in.
Trivial remarks such as I made, easily provoked harsh treatment in those days but we took it all in our stride; there were no pupils’ ‘rights’ then.
He
was connected in one way or another with Weston Favell church from where
the school organ came; an instrument I played on numerous occasions when
Colin Walker was the church Organist. Sometime after Tiger retired he
joined a music group (The Northampton Plainchant Choir) of which I was
already a member. When I was first introduced to him he didn’t recall me
at all which was a relief, but then I always reckon that teachers only
remember wiz-kids and trouble-makers.
It was amazing how, once having left ‘office’, like many a retired politician, he became a different person – amiable, funny, ‘human’ and while I was always invited to call him Leonard, as old as I was by then, it came off the tongue very awkwardly after all those years of calling him ‘sir’. On one of our social occasions, we were at another member’s house when Tiger sat at the piano and gave a very entertaining rendition of the Folk Song, ‘The Foggy Foggy Dew’ – a really risqué item about a weaver who shelters a ‘fair young maid’ from the elements, woos her while keeping her warm and ends up an un-married father. Wow! I bet we didn’t think Tiger knew of such things when he was teaching us.