Page 7 - Martin Holmes - Old Derbeian Article

Derby School & WWII
schoolboys for another such showing!); I found the smell and taste of wild garlic not to my liking; but above all I found the natural world full of beauty and peace in stark contrast to the ugliness and aggression of the human world.
So I thank the war for doing this for me as I doubt that left to our devices as a family in Derby this would have happened. I also thank Derby School for giving me an education I did not appreciate at the time but which I am sure equipped me to cope better with life thereafter than otherwise would have been the case.
However, five years of boarding school were enough to convince never to send any child of mine to one.
Academically I was a mediocre to poor student. The only subject that ever interested me was maths and even that eventually infuriated me when it got to differential calculus and “applied” maths, neither of which seemed to me to have the faintest connection to reality and no pleasure in them either. On the other hand algebraic geometry fascinated me as a wonderland in which weird equations plotted out to truly beautiful geometric patterns; there was still little connection with reality as I knew it but beauty is always welcome!
For a while I was the form representative on the “school council” (an idea of a liberal headmaster) only because no-one else wanted the job and I had the ability to waffle on about the latest meeting long enough to fill most of a class session in a subject many didn’t like. Such are the workings of democracy. I can’t recall what the “council” was supposed to do and I don’t think it lasted long.
In a somewhat similar manner I was often proposed as a member of the cast of any play the form was to put on but it always fell through in the end as I was absolutely hopeless at learning lines word perfect and my garbled lines, while keeping to the meaning, threw the others out of sync!
In a sense I was “doomed” to be marked out in some way or other. In music at the first class I was excused from ever singing in class again as my complete inability to match a vocal sound to a piano sound frustrated the teacher (in pre-war times the local cathedral organist) beyond bearing! It was somewhat comical to win a class competition for composing some time later; I had no idea what the composition would sound like, I had simply followed the rules we had been given and designed a pretty shape of notes strung together on my music paper!
In sport at first I had the advantage of height and could high jump and hurdle with best of them but in running, throwing, etc I was very much one of the tailenders though I usually managed a reasonable share of “standards” to go towards the house total. Only in my last year at school, after the war, did I shine in anything athletic by coming second in the cross-country, third in the