Last Year of English Lit by Chris Cottom

It was the year we went decimal, the year of Apollo 14 and My Sweet Lord. It was the year Foxy Rogers didn’t come back to school.

We’d spent the summer beavering through his reading list: Middlemarch, the Romantic Poets, Hamlet and Macbeth, returning for one more term as his Eng Lit elite, handpicked to try for Oxbridge.

We heard he was writing scripts in Hollywood, riding a Harley to St Tropez, getting stoned in Marrakesh. We heard he’d got married, become a Buddhist, bought a farm in New South Wales.

He’d coached us to A-Level glory, eschewing his classroom for the coffee bar in Tothill Street or the striped-mown grass of College Green. While London groaned its weary rhythms, we’d stride the Embankment or stand at bus stops, declaiming Hiawatha or The Faerie Queene. We were intellectuals, aesthetes, schoolboys no more.

We heard Foxy had been arrested for shoplifting from Foyles, for drunkenness in Soho Square, for cottaging at Charing Cross. We told ourselves we’d visit him in Pentonville, slip him a Penguin Book of English Verse, read him pieces we’d written: attempted sonnets, critiques of The Trumpet-Major, limericks in the style of Edward Lear.

We knew we were ready for Oxbridge and deer parks and dreaming spires, ready for girls at Girton or St Hugh’s who’d wear Laura Ashley and weep over Keats. We knew we’d never forget Foxy, knew he’d taught us everything, knew we’d see him soon. We told ourselves we’d hold a reunion, toast our guest of honour in the coffee bar, rewind the years by walking backwards around College Green.

We didn’t know how wrong we were, how, without him, none of us would make the cut, that we’d settle for Lancaster or Keele. We didn’t know we’d never see Foxy Rogers again.