TETELESTAI

“This is Michael Thompson,” I said.  “He tried to teach me German.”  

Viv did her utmost to look interested. We were visiting my old school, Repton, and it had been a three hour car journey on a hot summer’s day. There had been a formal reception for the alumni of fifty years ago. There had been speeches and toasts. We had been able to reintroduce ourselves to each other after half a century. There had been plenty of “Can you remember….?” We had recollected the personalities of our day – the Australian maths master with his sarcastic school reports (“this boy will go far. I will help him to pack.”) – and the English teacher who had embraced Buddhism and had met the Dalai Lama. We had confirmed our awareness of those of our contemporaries who had gone on to better things – one was a High Court Judge – and those who had passed on to another place, whether up or down it was impossible to tell. Private thoughts about the stinkers we could remember from the mists of antiquity were put aside. We all knew that was long ago, and there was an implicit assumption that we had all changed for the better, whether or not that was true.

There was then an awkward pause during which we realised that, apart from having shared the same school, we had absolutely nothing in common with each other. It was sobering, and rather saddening. Characteristically, Viv tried to fill the vacuum with some remarks about the magnificent architecture of the main school hall in which the reception had taken place.  Eventually, we all fell silent. In Viv’s case, I knew she had built up the school in her mind as a centre of intelligence rivalled only by the Supreme Court of England and Wales. She had been surprised and slightly appalled to find that this wasn’t the case. 

The school has changed now, dramatically, since I was a pupil all those years ago. But at that time Repton was an “only boys allowed” boarding school. To many of us who were deposited there by our parents at the start of each term, it seemed that for twelve weeks we were being shut away from all known forms of civilisation. The Slough of Despond would have been a more attractive prospect. That impression was enhanced by the fact that Repton was set in the middle of the Derbyshire countryside, apparently miles from anywhere, and was staffed mainly, if not exclusively, by unmarried ex-pupils. Some umbilical cord appeared to have attached them irrevocably to their alma mater. They had not learnt to live in any other environment. It was as if the oxygen of the school was the only thing capable of keeping them alive. So they literally went straight from Repton to university - and then back again from university to Repton to teach for the remainder of their natural lives, like some extraordinary self-imposed life sentence. 

To make matters worse, the Board of Governors was almost entirely composed of Old Reptonians, who were delighted to see alumni back on the staff because that would enable them to perpetuate the standards that they themselves had espoused so many years before.  The result, unsurprisingly, was that there was little attempt to move with the times. In fact, they would clearly have found that a terrifying prospect.  

Michael Thompson was just such a teacher. In the fullness of time, he did retire, but clung to his Repton roots for years, becoming secretary of the Old Reptonian Society. He had only been persuaded with difficulty to relinquish that role and slip into full retirement. His only ‘family’ had been the school, and he patently missed the place badly. He turned up at every reunion, long past the time when the looks exchanged by the other attendees should have told him that he was about as welcome as a dose of clap in the early days of a six month voyage by Marco Polo to the far east. 

Perhaps you have already guessed it from the way I remember him: Michael and I had loathed each other on sight. There was no explanation for this.  I found his hectoring ways a total anathema. He must have found my reluctance to work for and with him wholly unacceptable. At any opportunity, he would cut me down. When the school wrote round to the alumni, asking them to mark his retirement with a gift, I replied in somewhat vituperative terms, refusing to contribute. I had seen him from a distance during the reception, but had studiously ignored him, and the favour had been returned. But as we filed out, I found him right next to me, and there was simply no help for it. 

I could almost read Viv’s thoughts: “Please God, not another boring old fart!”  She tried to look interested, but I could see that meltdown wasn’t too far off.   

What the hell was I going to say to him? I recollected that, during the time I was in his class, we had studied the novel Das Brandopfer (“The Burnt Offering”), by Albrecht Goes. Albrecht was one of the German authors who, in the era following World War II, had tried to show their fellow countrymen as ordinary people, caught up in something they had found it impossible to control. He and his contemporaries had attempted to explain, to a baffled world which was no doubt reluctant to hear it, how it was that the cultured homeland of Beethoven and Schumann, Goethe and Schiller, should have given life to the Holocaust and to a war which was promulgated with unprecedented ferocity and cruelty.

In the book, Frau Walker reveals the story of her war-time relationship with a young Jewish mother, who, realising that death is near for her and her family, brings her baby’s pram to Frau Walker for her to use rather than let it be destroyed by the German SS along with all her other possessions. That this is the key to the whole story is clearly demonstrated by the opening words of the book:  “Wenn das mit dem Kinderwagen nicht gewesen wäre….”  (“If the affair with the pram had not happened….”).  55 years on, that phrase still stuck in my mind, for reasons I am unable to explain. Now, abruptly and without thinking, I gave voice to it. 

Michael looked at me in surprise. His eyes misted over. In a quavering voice, he said: “Now I feel that all my years as a schoolmaster have not been wasted.”  Almost visibly, he glowed.   I was wholly taken aback. Luckily, Viv came to the rescue. “Photo op!” she cried, and nothing would do but that we should pose in front of the school hall, Viv first of all grasping a rather surprised passing pupil by the arm and persuading him to photograph the three of us together, then me and Michael and then Viv and Michael, whose glow was now approaching that of the evening sunset with a sunny day in prospect. When Viv enthusiastically planted a kiss on his left cheek, I truly thought he would go into melt-down.

Michael and I parted with a firm handshake and a look into each other’s eyes that betokened a recognition that we had both been the victims of circumstance, surroundings and upbringing. 

Michael died only a few weeks later. I hope my words were still in his ears. It had never occurred to me for one second that he was the sort of person who needed comfort, nor that I should be the one to administer it; but, looking back, he must have had intimations of mortality, and had wanted reassurance that his life had not been in vain, that he was leaving behind something of lasting effect. I had unwittingly provided that reassurance, with a brief fragment of a sentence.

I looked up at Viv from the school newsletter in which Michael’s death had been announced. 

“Do you know what Tetelestai means?” I asked her. 

“No, it’s all Greek to me,” she responded. I looked at her askance.

“It is Greek,” I said, with some asperity. She giggled. I never knew when she was teasing me.

“It’s the last word Jesus uttered when He died on the cross,” I continued. “It means ‘it is accomplished’.  It’s a word meaning that His life’s work had been concluded. He had set out what He intended to do. I think that’s what we had that day with Michael.” Viv nodded. Sentimental to a fault, there were tears in her eyes.  “I believe I enabled him to say “Tetelestai”, to feel that his life had been worthwhile, that it had ‘paid off’ in some way”.

There was a lengthy silence.

“Well,” said Viv, “I can think of one or two tasks at which I would love you to be able to say ‘Tetelestai.’ She stumbled over the word a few times. “Starting with the leaves in the front garden,” she added, pointing to the offending mess.

As I plied the rake which she thrust into my unwilling hands, I pondered the lesson I had learned. Every one of us has the power to make or mar an occasion with just a few words. I know that, all too frequently, I say things that were best left unsaid, but I do try to carry with me, wherever I go, probably the most valuable lesson I ever learnt at my old school, when I gave comfort, at a time when he needed it most, to someone I had always thought of as an arch-enemy. Life is too short for resentment to fester, I decided. 

I shovelled the dead leaves into the garden waste-bag, ready for the incinerator, along with all my bitter memories.