The Office

Above the door to Tim Patton’s office were two coloured lights - a couple of old fashioned miniature bulbs, mounted in a box with coloured cellophane over them and wired to two switches screwed to his desk. When a pupil was sent to see him they would knock and then turn their nervous gaze upward. If the red light lit up the boy would have to wait; if it were green he would enter. The system struck me as quite a novelty at the time and in its sticky-taped, aging, cobbled-togetherness it gave some hint of what lay beyond the door. Tim’s office was legendary. It was such an unmistakeable embodiment of the man’s passions and eccentricities that when he retired in 1994 an artist and model-maker parent presented him with a perfect, scale replica of the room in a shoebox-sized, glass topped cabinet. It was the perfect gift: a tribute that recognised that this was a man best defined not by his achievements in the field of education, but rather by a force of character of which the very fabric of the school was merely an extension.

As the parent who created that wonderful diorama recognised, his personality was distilled within those four walls. As I remember the room was quite dimly lit. I think that there were windows on the left wall and there was definitely one at the back, but they were high up and either partially covered or so dusty that they allowed little light. On the right hand side as you entered was a full-scale cut-out of Marcel Marceau as Bip the Clown, standing in his most recognisable pose: feet perpendicular to each other, front knee bent, leading arm raised with palm facing up, the other hand resting on his hip. It was a stance that Tim himself often favoured when addressing us. Mime was one of his passions and as well as Marcel Marceau there were several posters advertising the school mime troupe, The Mime Machine, who performed every year outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The only other posters I can specifically recall included several Guinness advertisements from the “Guinness Is Good For You” days and a psychedelic Grateful Dead image, but there were many more. Something of the man’s approach to decoration can be surmised from the manner in which these posters were attached to the wall. Most of them must have been put up at least twenty years previously, but rather than finding any permanent means of adhesive (another headmaster, unconventional enough to have a Grateful Dead poster in his office but still more conventional than Tim, might have had the thing mounted behind glass, for example) he used sellotape. Reams and reams of the stuff. I imagine that at first there had been merely one or two pieces on each corner, but sellotape dries out, turns yellow and peels after a while and every time this happened Tim simply applied more. By the time I was at the school there was a layer an inch thick on the corner of each poster. By now you may have guessed that Tim was both a lifelong bachelor and a heavy drinker.

On either side of the room were giant, broken backed sofas, which were very difficult to get out of once you had sat down. Tim often taught classes in his office and pupils would rush to secure seats on these ratty pieces of furniture; those who missed out had to sit cross-legged on the floor. The office also served as a staff common room and after hours many of the teachers would congregate there to drink Tim’s beer and smoke. His supply of Guinness was colossal and took up a third of the prefect’s room, just down the corridor. It was testament to the innocence of the school that it never once occurred to me that storing several hundred cans of beer openly in a within-bounds area, frequented by twelve year olds, was in any way risky or foolish. In all my time there I never heard of any being stolen or drunk by pupils and the only incident I can recall was when my friend Patrick accidentally stabbed a can with a pool cue. Tim shouted at him at length for that misdemeanour, which at the time I considered to be bad luck on Patrick but not especially unfair.

At the back of the room was Tim’s desk, on which there was a large assortment of knick-knacks, mostly presents from parents and including at least one hash pipe. Behind the desk and on either side, and generally dotted around the room anywhere there was a bit of space, were unruly piles of books and newspapers yellow with age. The overall effect was one of bohemian semi-squalor. Very few teachers, I think, would be able to hold the attention of a bunch of twelve or thirteen year olds in a room with as many distractions as that one had.

Next time: The Temper of Tim/ Wit and Wisdom