Content area
Full Text
The War and Peace and The Thick Of It star recounts a 'brilliant' English teacher who played by his own rules and became her hero
The school's now called Valentines High, in East London, but it was originally Ilford County High School for Girls. It changed from a grammar to a comprehensive midway through my time there. It was a fairly unremarkable school - neither brilliant, nor bad - but Joe Meltzer, my English teacher, was brilliant.
You know in TV detective shows you always hear about maverick cops who do things their way? Joe was a maverick. He had absolutely no time for minor matters like the syllabus, or GCSEs. How he would have coped in today's educational climate, I do not know. He would probably have given up.
What he was interested in was literature and how one responds to literature. He had this Wild West attitude to teaching English and he had it in a school where most of us actually just wanted to tick the boxes and get good exam results. He wanted us to get fired up by literature and it...