Everybody always said that Mr van der Velde was Dutch. When & how he came to England I have no idea. Could he have been a 1930s or wartime refugee? His accent seemed very English to me, though his pronunciation was very precise, a bit fussy
He was a small, neat man. White hair, white moustache. He wore round, wire rimmed glasses behind which he blinked owlishly
His wife was English. A large lady, well corseted, with a shelf-like bosom. Whenever you saw them together you got an impression of great devotion
Mr van der Velde was my Latin teacher
I cant imagine what it would be like now never to have learned Latin. But I regret that I did not work harder.
In fact I behaved very badly at times
Thing is, I hated all the declensions of nouns, past tenses of verbs. I also never got the hang of scansion. Why spoil a good poem by struggling to write u - -/ u u - above each line? Who cares about trochees or iambic pentameters anyway?
I loved the sonority, the etymology, the Latin tags. Dum docent discunt
Mr van der Velde always gave us treats in the last week of term. Read us stories. In the Country of the Blind, Saki. Once he dug out some aged philology textbooks from the storeroom. We had great fun learning that CINEMA ought really be pronounced KINEMA
Latin was the worst of my O level results. It was those damn scansions let me down I hadnt prepared whichever verse it was that they gave us. Mr van der Velde wrote noblesse oblige! on my final report, which devastated me because I knew I had let him down
Years later I met someone who reckoned she was the last person to be admitted to medical school without science A levels. She had done classics. She reckoned she had a head start on everybody else because she understood the vocabulary
And at least she would have known that a mere MB BS did not entitle her to the proud honorific Doctor
