I can picture one teacher there – I can’t recall her name. She was short and spare, and I remember her eager jutting chin. Quite unexpectedly one day (in the middle, I think, of an arithmetic lesson) she suddenly launched forth on a speech on life and religion. “All of you”, she said, “every one of you – will pass through a time when you will you will face despair. If you never face despair, you will never have faced, or become a Christian or know a Christian life. To be Christian you must face and accept the life the Christ faced and lived; you must enjoy things as he enjoyed things; be as happy as he was at the marriage at Cana, know the peace and happiness that it means to be in harmony with God and with God’s will. But you must also know, as he did, what it means to be alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, to feel that all your friends have forsaken you, that those you love and trust have turned away from you, and that God Himself has forsaken you. Hold on then to the belief that that is not the end. If you love, you will suffer, and if you do not love, you do not know the meaning of a Christian live.”

She then returned to the problems of compound interest with her usual vigour, but it is odd that those few words, more then any sermon I have ever heard, remained with me, and yours later they were to come back to me and give me hope at a time when despair had me in its grip. She was a dynamic figure, and also, I think a fine teacher, I wish I could have been thought by her longer.