Know-it-all

Today

Paul has an abundance of books which give you meanings of obscure words or scientific facts. This morning he was reading me titbits from a book that guarantees to turn you into a know-it-all within 365 days.

"Who wrote 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'?" he asked me. I thought it was a trick and said John Donne before agreeing that Ernest Hemingway had indeed written a book with this title and that it was from this book that the expression "did the earth move for you?" came from.

And so on with questions about James Joyce, the Spartans etc etc. "How do you know all this stuff"? he said. "You must have had a golden education." "I don't think so," I said "I just used to pay attention."

In My Day

Certainly we were not shielded from facts as children; there were 100s of books, any of which we were free to read, and conversation was not dumbed down. My older brothers were always happy to show off their superior knowledge to their little sister. And this sister, is must be said, was open-beaked for it.

In 1957, I started back late to school following the summer holidays (holiday at Burgh Island - see June 17 2007 entry) and joined my class with no knowledge of or introduction to my new class teacher.

For the first time I had a male form teacher; his name was Mr Baxter. In every way he was an inspirational teacher who never belittled or talked down to the children. Each day, starting at the beginning of the alphabet, he gave us a general knowledge question as homework. It was optional - but that made finding out all the more challenging.

"What is an aardvark?" was the first one I took home. I had no idea (this was before the days of ubiquitous wildlife programmes on TV). So we heaved out the Chamber's encyclopedia to discover that it's an anteater. I then went on to find out more about these creatures and their strange woodlouse type curling up properties.

Each day there was a new question, right through to "Z". They covered a whole range of topics and it was a rare day when I couldn't answer one.

Daddy told me to tell the teacher that an aardvark is someone who "varks 'ard", which I think I did. But I don't think he was impressed and I kept Daddy's jokes to myself after that.