Michael Schützer-Weissmann was the greatest teacher I ever had. When I was 17, I got into trouble at Sherborne, my school in Dorset, after a friend and I each drank a bottle of whisky. I felt splendid, but my friend had to be stomach-pumped. For that the headmaster, Robert Macnaghten, caned me. It was amazing that he managed to hit me six times, because he was famously blind — and had once awarded a detention to a coat hung on a peg at the end of his classroom, mistaking it for a boy refusing to sit down.
Caning probably saved me from expulsion, but I was thoroughly fed up with Sherborne: neither a ‘blood’ at rugby nor good in lessons. That’s how ‘Schutz’, as we all called him, found me. The day he walked into my English class and we opened Paradise Lost, my school life changed, as it did for the generations of boys and girls he taught.
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