Poem 19 John Vallins

I recently and quite unexpectedly made contact with John Vallins, my English teacher for several years while I was at King’s School Bruton in the 1960s.  I still have five short essays marked by John when I was in the third form, aged thirteen and fourteen.  Most of them were marked favourably and gave me a real impetus to my otherwise woeful academic work.  I felt that, at least, I could write a decent English essay!
 
John also taught me in the Lower Sixth form, before going elsewhere, eventually becoming headmaster of the celebrated Chetham’s School in Manchester.  Chetham’s specialises in teaching very gifted young musicians, and John would have been an ideal head, as he was himself a viola player, an excellent teacher of English and a fine communicator.
 
Another of John’s great loves was for the game of cricket.  John coached the First Eleven which, at that time, included my twin brother, Jim.  I well remember one Saturday morning sitting in the classroom suffering a lesson on one of our set books, ‘Samson Agonistes’, by John Milton.  The other John was in a cheerful mood and was waxing lyrical about the plight of Samson, betrayed by his wife Delila, who has cut off his hair and thus deprived him of his superhuman strength, and has then been blinded by the Philistines and thrown into a prison cell!  Samson who has previously boasted of killing a thousand men in battle with the jawbone of an ass, was feeling very dejected at this point in the narrative. 
 
Meanwhile John Vallins was enthusiastically declaiming the lines to us.  Obviously, he was enjoying the drama of the piece, but it was quite clear that he had another drama on his mind; the First Eleven was playing later that morning.   It was obvious to me that John was looking forward to the cricket as well as living the drama, as he was miming cricket strokes as he recited the text, scoring runs all over the field.  What a joyful moment for cricket! Such a bravura performance!  Meanwhile, it dawned on me that Milton and cricket could be loved equally.  I already loved cricket!

​​          Teaching Agonistes
 
You scored
so many runs
that day
without your
cricket bat.
Len Hutton
smoking
air guitar.
You roared,
         Oh dark, dark, dark,
                         click of tongue
                         crisp off drive
         amid the blaze
         of noon,
                          sweetest glance
                          to finest leg
         irrecoverably dark,
                          off cut
                         cool cat
          total eclipse!
                          stylish cover drive and
                          wristy follow through
                          for four!
Milton loved
your style
that day.
Bradman loved
your soul.
 
Dreary dungeon,
light deprived
dark as womb,
waking firefly
spotlights
darkest corner
of the room.
 
                        Robert Eshelby, 17th July 2022
                        For John Vallins