My influences: Mr East ("Ichabod")

At the end of my primary school career I took the scholarship exam. To the astonishment of everyone except myself I won a scholarship to Bristol Grammar School, a direct grant school and Bristol's premier boys' school. I wasn't astonished as I didn't understand the achievement.

However, off I went to BGS. It was an amazing experience - a huge school (well, I thought so at the time - 1200 boys) with amazing facilities and all these posh boys with posh accents. However, as a result of a combination of laziness and indifferent health, at the beginning of the second year I found myself in 4β (beta), which was a kind of sink form, the lowest of five forms in the second year. The form master was Mr East, nicknamed Ichabod after Ichabod Crane, a character in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". Why the nickname was chosen I never discovered. In our first form period, Mr East set out his manifesto.

I paraphrase but what he said, broadly, was, "There are two kinds of boys in this form. Some of you find school work really difficult, and I am going to do my very best to help you get to grips with it. Some of you are idle, and I am going to give you a very difficult time until you pull your fingers out and start working. In a couple of weeks I shall tell you which I think you are, and then the fun will start."

The couple of weeks passed and then he called us up individually to tell us his diagnosis. "You, boy", he said to me, "are idle. Not for long".

He was as good as his word. He was our maths teacher; if I got less than 80% on a maths test I had to stay in after school (not a detention - these were awarded rarely and were seen as a disgrace) and if I got less than 90% I had to do extra homework. This was all done with good humour - on one occasion, when I got a homework question wrong he wrote, in red ink, "Ha, ha! Got you that time!"

Being of a systematic turn of mind, I learned how to flick pellets with a 12" ruler and became very skilled at it. On one occasion, just as Mr East came through the door, I let go of a pellet at someone on the far side of the room, and the pellet hit the door frame more or less level with his nose. He was about to take a Divinity lesson (RE as it sometimes called) and gave me 100 lines to be delivered on the following morning. I have never forgotten the sentence I had to write. It was, "The study of ballistics, whilst interesting, does not form part of the divinity curriculum." I had to look up "ballistics" and "curriculum" before I could start.

I imagine that his educational policy was transmitted to our other teachers too - I did a lot of extra work. But at the end of the year I went up to the second class of the five.

What did I learn? If you put in the work, you achieve the success.