The trouble with teachers

A teacher once told me that he couldn’t stand Pakistanis ‘because of the smell’. I was 13 at the time and it was during a classroom debate about immigration: he was very much agin, I was for. It struck me, suddenly, that he was very stupid – an astonishing realisation, as I was accustomed to believing teachers to be full of wisdom, a delusion inculcated in me by my parents.

This all took place in a very large comprehensive school in the north-east of England – a good school by and large, but almost entirely white. Of the 1,800 pupils only one was not: a quiet lad of Chinese Malay extraction, I think, who was known to all the pupils and a good few of the teachers as ‘Fu Manchu’. In fact, there was another non-white face in the crowd, but we didn’t know it at the time. It was only 20 years later that I realised my friend Jim was half Indian.