It was a bright Monday morning, David Witherspoon was teaching thirty-two children in his classroom at the Primary School near where I live on the South Coast.

This Monday like so many others I’ve experienced was not extraordinary; just another April morning in rural Hampshire. I was sitting rather uncomfortably at the back of the classroom, at a small desk specifically designed for the ten year olds filling the room; just watching, and listening; a normal day in a perfectly normal English Primary School.

Witherspoon was taking the class through some maths exercises. He set them a multiplication sum, and then the children worked out the solution, and so did I.

“Why did you put the decimal point there?” Witherspoon asked as he walked past one of the children, and the ten year old replied, “because it belongs there Mr Witherspoon.” Cool answer, I thought.

The majority of adults – if they’re not teachers or help out at school in other ways rarely see inside a school classroom while it’s in session. We’re more used to getting our news from papers or the evening news, which usually only report on the negatives, like vandalism, and problems with kids unable to read properly. Life in a school becomes a blur with all the other things that pass in and out of our consciousness each day. Which is precisely why the morning spent inside Witherspoon’s classroom was proving so interesting.

It was quite improbable that news would be made here today; there was no conflict, no violence. And yet what was going on was so important; as in thousands of other classrooms around the UK at this very moment, children were being formed into what they will become when they suddenly turn into the next generation of grown up British citizens.

I watched David Witherspoon with the children. Compared with the pay expected in business and industry, teachers are paid ludicrously low wages, but as I watched Witherspoon going from desk to desk, I was reminded that his job – and the job of every school teacher around the country – is so much more important than the things the rest of us do in the name of commerce, or writing as in my case!

He stopped to help a girl find the meaning of a word in her textbook. He explained to a boy why the multiplication he had just completed was wrong. He bent over a desk to answer a question from someone else; not because they had asked, but because he could see they needed help.

It would be easy not to care. Usually there’s no-one looking over the teachers shoulder, and in a primary school especially, the people you’re in contact with every day are too young to really know if you’re doing a good job or a bad one; they have no frame of reference. They trust you.

It’s often said that children’s characters are shaped at home, but it seems to me that children spend so many hours in school, the classroom experience becomes central to their lives. A bad home environment can damage a child forever, and an indifferent school environment can bring results every bit as ominous. That one thought makes the British Educational System an awesomely powerful machine; both negatively and positively.

So what can a child pick up in a positive classroom environment? Well certainly that progress is one of life’s essentials; if you stay in the same place you were yesterday, you will never grow. Also that it’s important to be curious, to ask questions. It’s equally important to make an effort to be correct, not to be sloppy; or to not really care if you’re wrong about something.

Those attitudes are almost as important as the specific information David Witherspoon was teaching. When you’re a ten year old, if your teacher lets you know that he or she cares that you’re learning, and cares that you’re reading has improved, cares that you are trying you’re best to master complicated mathematical ideas – if those things happen – then you’re going to be a ten year old who stands a much better chance of becoming a successful and happy adult.

That’s what I was thinking in Witherspoon’s classroom  – and also how parents blindly turn their children over to strangers who will have such a monumental effect on their lives. Even the most concerned parent can have little control over what goes on in the classroom – and yet that’s where much of what the man or women that child will grow to become is determined.

It’s an enormous responsibility teachers have – and it’s made all the more so when you realise they are among the least thought about group of the British working population. We expect them to be there, and we give our children to them, and then we go about our own daily lives – seldom thinking about what they mean in regard to what the people of this country; and ultimately the country itself will become.

So I sat at the back of the room of the local Junior School, in a minute desk, straddling it like I would a bike – my legs sticking out at an uncomfortable angle into the isle. David Witherspoon announced it was “free reading time,” so the children reached into their desks to pull out their book.

They sat silently in their miniature plastic chairs and opened their books to the page they’d stopped at last time. David Witherspoon stood at the front of the class next to the whiteboard, he looked out at the thirty-two children; and then he looked at me, a grown-up sitting behind a tiny wooden desk; he smiled a half smile, then went over to Millie in the front row to help with a particularly tricky word.

David Witherspoon must be a proud man, and I felt proud for him too.

He looked forlorn; just sitting there beside an unused doorway of a large hotel, on a side-road; quiet but for the office workers passing in abundance at lunchtime. I stood across the street and watched him; for twenty minutes he had had his head cradled between his raised knees, while his arms and hands hugged his shins, almost foetal like. Every minute or so he would take a cigarette from his lips, and flick ash onto the pavement, then disappear momentarily beneath a haze of smoke; eventually discarding the short butt then immediately lighting another.

I threw a £10.00 note onto the jumper he’d spread carelessly on the pavement, but he didn’t flinch, I may as well have been invisible. “Do you mind if I join you.” “It’s a free world mate,” he croaked without looking up. I sat beside him – “but today this is my patch!”

I stayed! Passers-by stepped in and out of the shadows; occasionally there was a chink as a few coins landed in front of us. Somehow I had to gain his trust; perhaps I should tell him I was a journalist; although that rarely worked! What if I said I’ve always wondered what it’s like living out here; you know – on the street; though that might sound a trite condescending. In the end I just said hi; holding out a welcoming hand, “names Simon.” “Told you this is my patch, so fxxk off,” he said without moving.

This was going to be a little more difficult than I thought!

The pavement was beginning to feel hard already, and in the gloom of the doorway I could feel the cold seeping through to my jockey shorts.

“Look I can see you’re busy, what time do you stop for lunch?” That did it – slowly he raised his head, his eyes tried focusing on mine, but they appeared glazed, probably breakfast still swilling round his arteries. His lips became a shallow smile. “You don’t look like one of them office arseholes, what do ya want?” “A chat; a few minutes of your time, that’s all.”

We took the last table outside ‘Archers sandwich shop’, he told me his name was Greg, and he’d been living on the streets since he was twenty-seven, now he was thirty-three. “I came home one day and found my wife sleeping with one of my mates. I went mad, walked out on her and I’ve been here since. I had no where to go.” He bit hungrily into his BLT sandwich. Behind the grime he still looked young, and in good shape. “Do you sit on those cold steps all day?” “Naw, if I need a few quid, III beg for a while, anyway some sucker might want to come talk to me, buy me lunch,” he said with a smile. I think we were beginning to do that male bonding thing; but I wanted to know more about what life was like without a home address.

“My day consists of seeing other people in the same situation as me, you know – you get close to those around you, we look after each other; that’s the way it is on the street. It’s not like everybody else who brush you aside, and think you’re nothing – there’s a close knit family out there. And, I’m free – that’s the main reason. So many of the people that look down their noses at me are buried in their lives, they can’t get out of it. They’re not free. I feel free, there’s no roof to my world, no restrictions.” He reached beneath the table, and held up his canvas sack, “this is all I have, this and all this around me is my home.” I looked at the tall modern office blocks surrounding us, all mysterious obscured glass and bright stainless steel. “I like your interior design,” I said.

“I bet you have a car, I’ve never had the desire to drive; I bet you have a wife and kids,” he said looking down at the timeworn gold ring on my finger. “I bet it’s a struggle every month just to make ends meet”.

He was right, he was free; for a start I had to go back to my keyboard and write this up – and keep doing that in order to run my Volkswagen; my household budget with the never ending stream of bills cascading through my letterbox with annoying regularity. I have school fee’s and my wife’s wardrobe to support, this guy was on to something I had never actually considered; if I had it would have been to look down my nose, and deride him.

His shirt collar, what was left of it, may have been filthy, and his denim jacket frayed in places; but his wisdom was intact, and on the face of it superior to many of us living in what we irksomely call the real world.

While we headed back to the hotel doorway, I caught a reflected glimpse of us in a window; both of us ambling along, I could just as easily have been mistaken for one of the street people, my jeans covered with careless coffee stains, my hair wild in the wind. I was almost a vagrant, all I had on me was £5.16; I knew he had more, I’d seen him earn it, plus my £10.00 he had screwed up in his pocket. London folk rushed past us, like they knew some natural disaster was about to ensue, all of them with bills to pay, and back yards to tend. How easy it would be to step from my life into his shoes.

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Beddgelert’s a tiny village nestling beneath a thousand foot mountain in North Wales, and within striking distance of Snowdon, the highest peak in England and Wales. Snowdon rises over three thousand five hundred feet, its peak usually obscured by the clouds, and for all its plunging scree, razor sharp ridges, rushing streams and icy lakes; stands amongst the gentler grassy hills and lush valley’s of Snowdonia National Park. There are few places in the country where so much beauty can be found to the square mile, and this has to be a major contender for the ‘Garden of Britain’ award.

There’s much legend in the mountains too – a heavy mist frequently ascends from one of the most dangerous heights of Snowdon – the Devils Kitchen; and in the depths below, rumour has it, the Devil keeps a cauldron boiling continuously for anyone stupid enough to even think about scaling those sheer walls.

Beddgelert has changed little over the years, there are no new shops, there’s no new development either, and half the houses have a grade two listing. The villagers are proud of this place and want to keep it the way it’s always been.

The village was made famous by the faithful hound Gelert, who belonged to the Medieval Welsh Prince, ‘Llywelyn The Great’. In a tragically blond moment, Llywelyn mistakenly assumed his dog, when found covered in blood, had killed his child. Gelert was immediately executed by his master before Llywelyn realised the heroic hound had in fact saved the baby from attack by a wolf. A stone monument to Gelert still stands in the village. Legend has it the story was invented by the village Inn Keeper; who thought it might help put Beddgelert on the tourist map – but then some people will believe anything.

On the edge of the village, adjacent to a steep mountain track, is a small cottage called ‘Penlan’. The author Alfred Bestall lived there from 1956 until his death 30 years later. Bestall wrote and illustrated the Rupert Bear stories. I remember Rupert as a purveyor of great moral fortitude – obedient, considerate and warm hearted, with a natural curiosity and an anxiety to please everyone. Even so, I still loved his adventures.

Between the Prince Llewelyn Pub and a little gift shop called The Welsh Lady is the village Grocers and Off Licence. Now; there are those of us who whinge about working forty hours a week, and there are those who still believe it’s worth putting in every waking hour, however much they hate it, just to get a decent pension in the end; only to begin the task of getting a life during their retirement. And then – there is Roger Cauler.

Roger spends seven days a week amongst the tampax, tent pegs, milk cartons and agreeably smelling fresh bread in his generously stocked store. It’s like Harrods in the hills. Measuring no more than two large living rooms knocked together, it provides for all our dietary and bodily needs; and for the hardy there’s even reusable heat pads to warm the nether regions whilst hill walking, nylon rope to keep their tents out of the tree tops, torches and lanterns for the evening and fishing nets for the children’s aquatic fun filled afternoons. There’s also miracle grow to spruce up the garden, and candles for a romantic evening in if you’re not alone. In fact whatever you need, Roger will have it secreted somewhere amongst his pile of boxes.

There is one exception though; he doesn’t sell newspapers. Rogers boast is he can spot someone wanting a newspaper before they open their mouth, redirecting them to the post office across the bridge before they utter even one syllable.

His daily schedule is punishing. He potters around from about 7am, and the doors open at nine sharp. ‘During the summer I usually stay open till 11pm, but rarely get to bed before 2am; there’s always the web ordering and accounts to catch up on.’

Someone’s just come in to buy a phone card. He swipes it through the machine, but nothing seems to be happening. He swipes it again, while five more customers join the queue. He stretches his arms above his head, as he awaits a response – he’s unhurried and still smiling and joking and talking to me at the same time.

‘During the summer, if I haven’t had one hundred customers in the first hour I think it’s a little quiet’.

I first visited Roger Cauler’s grocery store six years ago; I was just passing through on my way to somewhere else. Then he had trouble getting into his seat behind the till. Even with the seat way back, the counter must have worn a groove in his stomach. At twenty-six stone he was the largest, most cheerful man I had ever met. Now he’s almost unrecognisable. ‘I’ve lost eight stone so far, all I’ve done is cut down my chocolate intake by about fifteen bars a day. Although I still can’t sell Turkish Delight, because I’d eat the entire stock.’

Roger opened a box of baked beans and began stacking them on the shelf. An old guy shuffled through the door and picked up a basket. He selected a few things presumably for his dinner. At the till he keyed in the items he was buying, took out his wallet, paid the money into the till, bagged up his goods and left without acknowledging either of us. ‘I suppose that’s what you call self service!’ I said to Roger.

‘One day,’ he said, ‘I was really busy. This great looking girl comes in and say’s in a quiet voice – have you got any tampax? Anyway that’s what I thought she said. Down the end of this display unit, last on the left, second shelf. A few moments later she came back to the till. I can’t see them, she said. I told her I had just had a delivery, and they were on the shelf. I asked if she wanted regular or super? I’d better have super, it was pretty bad last night. So I went and got them for her, and rang them into the till. She just stood there with an embarrassed look on her face – I wanted tent pegs, she said.’

I brought a Mars bar and stood on the bridge below which the Glaslyn and Colwyn rivers join to become one torrent of gushing cold water. Roger appeared backwards from beside the shop, dragging a heavy bundle of crushed boxes . He was already twelve hours into his nineteen hour day. I had suggested I buy him a drink after work. ‘I’d love to’ he said with a sigh. ‘But the pub closes at eleven.’

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