(In this issue the students are a group of mixed teenagers and adults taught by Roy Boardman, who for many years, directed the work of the British Council in Naples. Roy's work as a senior manager never eclipsed his real love which has always been teaching. Roy's case is very different from that of many brilliant teachers demoted into management positions, who happily click on their spreadsheets and lose their taste for teaching. One of Roy's students writes (below): " I can really let myself go, more than I can in Italian, in speech and writing". What an accolade for an inspired humanistic teacher!

Gaetano Corvo, on the course since 1997

We don't know how it happens, but it does. We come to the course not knowing what to expect, but what we do know is that it will be something different - different from what we used to think of as teaching English or any foreign language before we met Roy Boardman.

Some people on the course have been doing it for 25 years! Most of them are Italian teachers of English, not a retired bank manager like me. The first time I walked into the classroom I found all the lights off and Roy (as I discovered later) lying on the floor. Everybody was talking (in English, of course), about what I discovered later to be the implications of the horizontal position, and there were poems (Philip Larkin) and pictures (L.S.Lowry, "Man Lying on a Wall") which made us talk more and more about the horizontal position.

Manuela Sena, on the course since 1975

We never know what to expect from him. I am very shy by nature, but when I get to the course, once a week, I suddenly feel like opening up, and even if I don't say much I feel that I've said a lot. Sometimes I've said it to myself, as it were - but in English.

The others on the course do a lot of "creative" writing - Roy has taught us to put the "creative" in inverted commas because when we write at home between one weekly lesson and another we are in fact writing about ourselves, and it's a kind of therapy - not the kind of therapy you need because you are ill, but the kind that everyone needs. I myself have great difficulty in producing writing because of my shyness, but I have - after 25 years! - just started. I wrote a poem. Which I don't wish to quote!

Gabriella Alessio, on the course since 1980 What Roy does (or one thing that he does!) is to bring a two-minute poem into the class, which we might or might not 'experience' at the beginning of the lesson, if you can call it a lesson. For us, it's more like an invitation to be personal, rebellious, intimate, whatever you like as a result of how the day might have treated you so far. The last lesson was all based on the word ICE, and Roy's two-minute poem, which was meant to get us to talk about our experiences of ice (more than we would ever have thought). This was the poem (2-minute because Roy claims that he writes them two minutes before the beginning of the lesson, when his mind is pressured towards the topic of the lesson.

Ice takes time.
It comes in through the back door.
Left ajar
Through the front door
By the letter-box.
Home's ice-box kept us fed in war-time.
The local ice-factory made sure
At least
That the Dun Cow's whisky was iced
And there was ice in abundance
On the hobnailed-booted playground's winter slides
To ensure grazed knees under the desks
Where the icy knees of girls betrayed their pigtails.
Ice-floes floated on the midnight Thames
Ice was the end of the tie with Number One
Ice crisped on trees when Romeo and Juliet
Iced my teaching cake.
Ice.
Takes its time.
Follows me through.
Like heat and love and rhyme.

Of course, a lot of the references in this poem (which Roy says is just off the cuff, to get something out of us) have to be asked about, and this is what we do. So that Roy tells us that opposite his school in the early 1950's there was an ice-factory, that the Dun Cow was (is?) a pub in the Old Kent Road in London, that he swam in the Thames at midnight when he was 15, that his "Number One" was his first girlfriend. When he produced the whole of Romeo and Juliet with 14-15 year old children at the secondary school where he taught in 1960, he was delighted by the experience - and some of the cast came to see him in Naples several years later!

Gloria Caruso, Free Speech since 1975 I can really let myself go, more than I can in Italian, in speech and writing. It has taught me to get my own students in the Italian secondary school to let themselves go too. With Free Speech, everything penetrates into your life and what you seem to learn (which you can't define) you want to pass on to others.

Roy Boardman, Free Speech teacher There are fifteen people on this year's Free Speech course. There have been girls of 15, people of 50, but they all want to talk, and to talk in English. They're all at different levels, but somehow the idea of levels seems to disappear, and I have had people passing CPE after 5 months, because they have talked and written creatively. Creatively? Honestly about themselves, the strange ideas that come into their heads, the things they want to say that they had never dared say before in their own language, Italian.