Word: chalks
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...staying put is just one of the paradoxes of Muir's life, which has seen the boy who quit school at the age of 14 eventually become a distinguished professor. Thinking back to his early years, Muir recalls: "I disliked school from the start... with its smell of ink, chalk, slate, corduroy, and varnish. The classroom made me feel as if my head were stuffed with hot cotton-wool...
...Chalk Garden (by Enid Bagnold) is one of those rare plays that are genuinely and fascinatingly individual. When the curtain rises on a Cecil Beaton drawing room in Sussex, nothing could look more conventional. Even when the characters seem less in a comedy of manners than a comedy of mannerisms, Playwright Bagnold could still be having fairly usual fun with her eccentrics. But soon enough there is evidence of a special mind and temperament at work, of a kind of grande-dame method of playwriting, wayward and unconciliatory, but with a wit that delights and an authority that mesmerizes...
Thereafter, all the decorative oddities, all the artificial-comedy attitudes of The Chalk Garden prove a legitimate contrast and offset to a certain muted reality. Not without cost has the companion achieved a green thumb for people as well as plants, where the other characters all show gloved or clammy hands; not without reason has she been able to make things grow in a garden built on chalk...
Despite all the chalk, there is no lecture at the blackboard. There are a few too many whiffs of symbolism, but Playwright Bagnold is neither mystical nor didactic. Instead, after the fashion of all true high-comedy writing, something simply becomes the more touching for having seemed brittle, the more penetrating for having seemed fagade-like. The paper chase of upper-class antics and insolences does lead to the human heart; among so many blank-cartridged witticisms there are one or two real bullets...
...matter what he happened to be doing, he seemed able to doze off. He might be writing on the blackboard, and then, right in the middle of a sentence, collapse in a cloud of chalk dust for a nap. On such occasions, his pupils made the most of things. Sometimes they tied him to his chair; other times they would simply take French leave-firmly locking the headmaster in as they went...