Off the Cuff: A different view from outside the box

Never dismiss the joker," said Mrs. Carroll, many years ago when I went to her for advice. I was just about to inherit a class of my own, having qualified as a teacher, and Mrs. Carroll herself had been my teacher at one time, and at that stage in her life was a razor-minded septuagenarian.

"Remember William Ross?" she reminded me…of course I remembered Willie… Silly Willie as he used to be called then because he was always seeing things in a very twisted sort of way, at least for us fellow students. He made us laugh. "He made you all laugh, didn't he?" said Mrs. Carroll, reading my thoughts.

I must have nodded because she went on, "Did you know that young Ross had a higher IQ than most of the other pupils he rubbed shoulders with?" I wouldn't have believed that then, Willie with his unkempt dandruff-flecked hair, his dishevelled appearance, saggy baggy trousers, shirts that couldn't stay tucked in, a tie that was always 20 degrees off its plumb line and chewed through at the triangular tip, shoes that lay somewhere beneath layers of dust…. "You yourself had pretty good powers of observation," continued Mrs. Carroll, uncannily pinning my thoughts once again, "which will stand you in good stead as you assess 25 to 30 brats each year. But where Ross differed from the rest was in his ability to think outside the square. Watch out for the William Rosses in your classes. There'll be several, and they all won't look like eggheads, or, what is it you call them these days, nerds?"

This whole thing about William Ross was brought to mind recently when I read a terribly clever "Cuff" in the form of a letter written to the late poet Robert Frost, warning him he was not liable for insurance because he was a poet, and, according to a study, poets were shown to have very short lifespans…. Well, it was a line or four from Frost that I think first wised me up to the superior intelligence of my own late classmate William. (Yes, he passed away not too long ago, but not before topping his college in marine biology and then going on to head research teams for many years in exotic offshore locations).

But as students back then, we were once given the last few lines of Frost to comment on, taken totally out of context:

'The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.'

We weren't even told it was a Frost poem…. William, in a lengthy essay the next day, contended that the lines referred to wife-abuse, written from the point of view of the battered wife, whose life had become a drudgery (The woods are lonely dark and deep) and who had decided, one way or the other, to set herself free from her husband, Miles. (And Miles to go before I sleep).

How we all laughed; how serious William looked; how ashamed we all felt years later when we learned his own mum had been the recipient of such treatment.

But I knew straight off what Mrs. Carroll meant by an ability "to think outside the square", and in the years that followed I must say that advice did come in handy.

It was how I was able to spot 13-year-old Aamir, now a surgeon in London. Aamir it was who, once, when I asked the class to write a short essay on "Trophies for the Brave", turned up a chilling piece on the Red Indians and scalping. And it was the same lad who, when his classmates were discussing "the coolest music group", and the others were naming The Beatles and Duran Duran, offered his favourite: The Three Degrees. Everybody laughed. But I heard Mrs. Carroll, over the years, saying, "Never dismiss the joker."