Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore

The Bob Dylan quotation I've used as the title for this blog is one of my all-time favourite lyrics, and is very apt for a recent revelation.

Let me take you back in time to the mid-70's. I was studying for my A levels in a very traditional rural grammar school in which every teacher was - to my teenage eyes - at least 90 years old and hopelessly out of touch with modern life - the ladies wore tweeds, the men suits and ties. There were even segregated male/female staffrooms, and us girls were regularly inspected for the length of our skirts and whether blazers were done up properly.

We were waiting for our new English teacher, when an interesting sight mainfested itself in the classroom. In walked a tall, handsome man in his early thirties with a mop of curly dark hair, zapata moustache, intense hazel eyes, open-neck checked shirt and cords. We thought he'd come to mend the radiator - especially when he introduced himself as Roger - no teacher in our school ever revealed their first name.

But our English teacher he was - and the most inspirational teacher of my school career. Because of this one person I encountered and fell in love with the work of Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, John Keats and other great writers, and because of him I became an English teacher - I wanted to inspire the same enthusiam for literature in others that he had in me. From the start Roger stood apart from the other staff: he informed us that if we wanted to speak to him we should ask for him in the female staff room as he found the company more congenial in there...by the time I visited the school two years later the outmoded segregation of staffrooms had ended, in no small part I guess because of Roger's maverick refusal to abide by the gender divide.

Towards the end of our course, as we approached our exams, he expressed frustration at being told we would be leaving as soon as we had completed our course of study: he was looking forward to sharing with us 'some more interesting and important stuff' rather than being bound by the requirements of the syllabus. We shared his disappointment, but our consolation was an invitation to a party at his home. If my parents thought this was a civilised taking tea with sir, they were misinformed...

Roger lived in a rambling Elizabethan farmhouse which delighted me - to this day I would love to live in a house like that. For the occasion the huge garden / field at the back had been littered with bean bags and mattresses to sit on and there were huge speakers in the upstairs windows ready to provide the now-familiar strains of Dylan. At 2am he announced to the by now not entirely sober conglomeration of students: 'A couple of miles away there's a lovely thorn bush just like the one in the Wordsworth poem'. There a re very few people who could persuade me, without hesitation, to trek across muddy fields in high heels in the middle of the night in pitch darkness to 'see' a three foot high clump of shrubbery - but Roger was one of them.

As usually happens, I lost contact with Roger after he left the school - I remember being told his leaving gift was a goat, which struck me as entirely appropriate.

A few months ago I was reading a book by Iain Sinclair, which traces a journey round the M25, when I came across a reference to 'the writer, Roger Deakin'. Unusual name - could this be my old mentor? This is where the internet comes into its own - within minutes I was able to establish that this was indeed the same person; that he had gone on to write, broadcast and make films, living in the same moated farmhouse in which he had hosted our party, and sadly that he died about three years ago. But there was a reference in his writing to finding an old chain that had once tethered a goat....

I have bought his books to read so the inspirational teacher I knew all those years ago can continue to teach and influence from beyond the grave - perhaps that's true immortality...