A true original

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Appendix: Caerwent, Camelot and the magical coming-and-going lake

A true original: John Nettleship and the roots of Severus Snape

This is for John, who believed that the dead should be remembered not just as names and dates but as the quirky, individual characters they were; who hoped to have immortality through Snape; who got a kick out of being centre-stage and who wanted as many people as possible to see his Snape-hair in all its floppy glory. It has been stitched together from things which John told me directly; things which he told Tamara and others of his friends and acquaintances with whom I am in touch; things which he wrote, including the essays which he circulated around his fannish friends; comments by colleagues and former students and interviews which he gave to the press.

John's friend Ivor called it an "excellent teyrnged [tribute] to John" and it's been passed as OK by his sons: that doesn't necessarily mean they endorse or agree with every word, because people's take on other people always varies a bit, but they're happy for it to be posted on the net.

A condensed 1,000-word version of this essay, which appeared in May 2012 in the first issue of the Australian New Age publication Magick Magazine, can be found here.

Tamara always reckoned that John's voice reminded her of Wallace in the Wallace & Gromit films. I always thought of it as a curiously furry voice, something you ought to be able to stroke like a cat - either way, nothing at all like Alan Rickman's dark chocolate tones. But he too was a star performer, and he could sing like an angel - a powerful clear true baritone that won him cups and prizes.

John at Caerwent Roman Day, 13^th October 2001

There was so much of John Nettleship that was like Snape - and so much that wasn't, at least superficially. I personally have trouble visualising Snape signing letters with kisses, or having a favourite soft toy, or dedicating himself to growing roses: Snape, I feel, if he were to take up gardening at all, would probably prefer something pale and sinister which attracted moths. Nor, in all probability, would Snape be relaxed and confident enough to dress up as a Romano-British tribesman and let himself be photographed beaning a Roman soldier over the head with a shillelagh while grinning John's magnificent, three-cornered, snaggle-toothed and altogether engaging Cheshire Cat grin.

"If you'd seen my grades in Chemistry.... That's why Snape teaches Potions . . . Don't say awwww! He deserved it! We can all think of teachers we'd like revenge on."

JK Rowling, 18^th October 2007

Yet, there was no doubt that Snape was to a considerable extent based on John, for everybody that knew him (except himself) saw the resemblance at once, and JK Rowling admitted as much in New Orleans in October 2007, when she stated openly that Snape was based on her male Chemistry teacher.

To begin with, there was the physical resemblance. John at the time that he taught Rowling was in his thirties, like Snape in the books; whip-thin and (in the words of a former student) "ghostly white", with swinging curtains of long and often rather greasy black hair, a burning gaze, an intense manner, irregular teeth and a rather large nose, and was often a bit scruffy and unkempt, even though he was always fastidiously clean: he said himself that non-designer stubble was a frequent occurrence at that time, although in later life he would be rather dapper. Later on he would also have a liking for bouncing around in a billowing black academic gown although, curiously, he couldn't recall having done so while the Rowlings knew him.

John aged about forty-one

A black and white image taken circa 1980 shows him lounging in a deck chair, bare to the waist and grinning, sharing some joke with whichever of his sons took the photo'. When John used the picture himself to illustrate a booklet on Harry Potter's Chepstow he cropped the image to just head and shoulders because, he said, he didn't want a lot of strangers looking at his "nips" and I've abided by that,

John aged two

but I have the full photograph and it shows exactly the sort of white, toast-rack chest you'd expect Snape to have; along with alarmingly thin arms. Even at his fittest and least stressed - and this was not that time - John's arms were always thin; probably the legacy of a period of extreme muscular weakness he had suffered as a small child and which was most likely a mild case of polio. At five, he had owned a 4"-diameter, hollow rubber ball and he had had so little muscular strength that, he said, "It was a great achievement for me to kick it a few yards!"

It's easier to say in what ways John was not like Snape physically. He had grey, not black eyes; his teeth although interestingly varied were no yellower than is normal for British teeth; and his rather splendid nose ended in a humorous blob like an opossum's, rather than a hook. He was also a bit shorter: internal evidence suggests that Snape is about 5'10" or 5'11", whereas John was a compact 5'8".

Early portrait of Richard III in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries

John in April 1979, aged thirty-nine

Above all, Snape is meant to be ugly, and this is important both to his character (because it's bound to have made a difference to how he sees himself and how others react to him) and to the message he embodies, that even a sour ill-favoured man may be a great hero and a devoted lover. John in his prime however was, in a good light and without his spectacles, almost supernaturally beautiful: like a cross between an early 19^th century Romantic poet and a slightly undernourished pre-Raphaelite knight. He had, in particular, the best-shaped mouth I've ever seen on a bloke.

John at sixty-four, with grandchild

I was not the only person to remark on his resemblance to Richard III, which extended to some aspects of his personality, politics and interests, a habit of fiddling with things (film of him performing shows him twirling his thumbs round each other through almost every song) and some minor quirks of handwriting, as well as to a preference for dressing in mulberry and sky-blue, Richard's livery colours. It was ironic, then, that he was born in Nottingham (Richard's Castle of Care, where he had learned of the death of his only legitimate son), and went on to become a most devotedly patriotic adopted Welshman.

He was, as he himself said, "born in August 1939, one mile south of Nottingham Castle where the Bad Sheriff lived and two miles east of Wilford Grove where D H Lawrence sets the love scene in Sons and Lovers." Two among our number hold only nettle wine,

Snape's riddle, PS ch. 18; p. 207

Madam Z. Nettles of Topsham writes:
'I had no memory for incantations and my potions were a family joke! Now, after a Kwikspell course, I am the centre of attention at parties and friends beg for the recipe of my Scintillation Solution!'

CoS ch. 8; p. 98

[Wimbourne] Wasp fans (also known as 'Stingers') traditionally buzz loudly

QTtA ch. 7; p. 38

His family must have been in or around Nottingham for a long time, for Nettleship is a Nottinghamshire name. The "ship" part in this context means "field" - as it does in the more famous Watership Down - so the original Nettleships would have lived in or owned a field infested with that universal British hedgerow annoyance Urtica dioica, the stinging nettle. There is no mystery to why a teacher called Nettleship should be known as Stinger - or why Snape should have nettle wine. From Nottingham John went to Leeds University to study Chemistry, thence to teacher-training, then to a teaching job in Birmingham where he met and married his first wife Gillian, before finally moving to south-east Wales where he was to stay.

John did the Rowling family a great favour, for as Head of Science at Wyedean Comprehensive in Sedbury he hired Anne Rowling, a woman already partially disabled by multiple sclerosis and almost certain to get worse, at a time when no-one else would, and took her on as a Biology lab. assistant. He remembered Anne as a jolly, humorous woman with what she herself called "a dirty great laugh". He was enormously fond of her and fought the school tooth and nail to get improved disability-access for her: in particular, to have a lavatory installed in the science block so she wouldn't have to struggle back to the main building several times a day. All that is unambiguously good in Snape, his intelligence, wit and passion for his subject, his showmanship and fluency, his protectiveness of others, his courage, love, loyalty, honesty, dedication and sense of duty, his independence and his moral seriousness, is identifiably derived from John.

The origins of the more problematic aspects of Snape's character are complex. When John first read the Harry Potter books he saw Snape in a simplistic way, just as a teacher who was nasty to Harry. He knew that he himself had been quite strict and "exacting" as a teacher, that as he later said he hadn't suffered fools gladly, but he had never intentionally bullied anyone and he had thought very highly of Joanne Rowling, who was after all the daughter of a close friend. He knew that while Joanne was at school she had entertained her friends at break-time by telling them stories about a magical school staffed by comic lampoons of the actual staff at Wyedean, but he had no particular reason to expect her to turn him into what he saw as an unpleasant character.

Rowling had stated that she had incorporated snippets of a number of real teachers of whom she had unpleasant memories into Snape, including her primary school teacher Sylvia Morgan, who had a harsh voice, an overbearing manner and a bad habit of dismissing students as unintelligent and then arranging them in class according to how thick she thought they were. [Curiously enough, although Rowling believed Morgan to have dismissed her as second-rate, John said that Morgan had actually thought highly of the young Joanne's talent and had preserved some samples of her work, although these had since been destroyed.] John, who knew Morgan and agreed with Rowling's opinion of her, was sure that Snape must be a composite of Morgan and a Head of House at Wyedean who had had a habit of intentionally humiliating students - a behaviour which John detested - and of speaking in a soft voice to make himself more sinister and threatening. He did not at first connect Snape in any way with himself.

His family and friends, however, saw the resemblance at once, and in 2000 a reporter showed up at Rose Cottage, having heard the rumour that John might have been the original model for Snape. "Such was my conviction", he said, "that Snape carried the persona of this guy that I ignored the long black hair etc and was taken aback when Louise Hancock turned up and said 'You’re Professor Snape, aren’t you?' I took her to Shirley and complained bitterly, but all I got for that was 'Of course you are, but I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t like it!'" In an interview some years later, he added that "She'd been laughing that this crotchety old bugger in these books was the man she was married to."

A series of articles appeared in the British press from July 2000 onwards, identifying John as Snape. These reports made it clear that he was unhappy about being identified with what he still saw as an essentially unpleasant and hated character. He had no qualms about people saying things about him which he knew to be true, even if they were unflattering, and would just say "I don't mind!", and he was equally realistic about other people: he could acknowledge the failings of friends and colleagues with beady-eyed objectivity, and yet not love them any less. But he was very upset and stressed by anything he felt to be false accusation or by the suggestion that he might have been a bad teacher, and his distress at learning that he was the main inspiration for Snape was apparent in some of these articles.

Indeed, he would later say to me that at the time, circa 2002, "it wasn't much fun being the Snape prototype - some people were very nasty about it, as he was obviously regarded as a bad guy by most readers." He had absorbed the idea of Snape as a horrible person, but even that early he was introduced to the idea of Severus as a means of immortality, when he went into hospital for a minor operation and the Irish theatre sister greated him as "Professor":

"Oy'm soo pleased to meet you at lahst. At lahst I can tell people I've met a reel loive character from a book!!"
"Ha now! I wasn't very happy about that, considering what a loathsome character Snape is, but I've got used to it now."
"Yes, of course, it means that you'll live on in these books after you're dead!!"

Whereupon the anaesthetist smiled thoughtfully and slid his needle into the back of my hand . . . . . .

Snape and Hermione as drawn by Mel

It was at around this point that the American Harry Potter fan Tamara Baker, a.k.a. the fanwriter Catherine Cook, contacted John to reassure him that many fen in fact liked Snape a lot,

John as drawn by Mel

and that he was a character who clearly was meant to have a lot of good in him, even if it was encased in a rather snarly exterior. They became, and were to remain, great friends. I got to know him in 2007, through Tamara, and Melanie McCall (the HGSS artist usagistu) in turn got to know him through me in 2009: of all the fanart Snapes he had seen John thought that Mel's Snape looked the most like himself (or at least, like he would look if he had a broken nose) and it helped that her Hermione looked a bit like a short version of his wife Shirley. Even in fantasy, he preferred Snape's love-interest to be somebody he could see as a fantasy version of Shirley. We were not the only friends he made in the fandom, but we three, along with several of my immediate circle of friends who were Snape fen, made up what John called The Sisterhood.

John cared deeply both about teaching itself and about his students. In a previous post he had martyred himself, fighting his employers and knowingly getting himself into trouble and stress, in order to champion the cause of child-centred learning. He had a deep analytical interest in the actual process of teaching, and had been lined up to do a Master's degree in Philosophy of Education, until a tempting job offer side-tracked him. He still wrote articles on educational theory for scholarly publications. Unlike some of his colleagues he was particularly interested in reaching and teaching the less able students, as well as the gifted ones who could bring him personal glory, and when he learned that a favourite former student, a wise, dreamy, motherly girl somewhat reminiscent of Luna Lovegood, had died of a heart condition, he locked himself into a room on his own and wept.

When he became seriously ill, a local friend of his with the netnick Fyds commented online about the unfairness of such a good man having to die comparatively young, and described him as "one of those people you would always have total time for, life-affirming and generous in all things". He was loving and compassionate and he thought very highly of Joanne Rowling, who often hung around the Science Department at break-time to be with her mother and therefore de facto hung around with John and with Shirley, who was first his senior lab. assistant and later his second wife. And yet judging from some of her comments about Snape and about the teachers on whom Snape was based, Rowling seems to see Snape, and therefore by implication John, as a sadist (which he emphatically was not, especially in the sexual sense: he was revolted by any sexual imagery which suggested unhappiness or coercion), a bully and a cruel man.

This isn't actually as extreme as it sounds for Rowling also calls the Weasley twins, whom she clearly likes, "cruel" and she has admitted that she likes Snape (even though she coupled this with saying that she wanted to slap him). There's no reason to think that when she says Snape is cruel she means anything worse by it than when she says that the twins are: she's stated that she does like Snape, even though she qualified it by saying she'd like to slap him, and she even said that she would hesitate to say that she loves him - which is tantamount to admitting that she does. She clearly has a lot of affection for Snape, and therefore by implication probably for John. Nevertheless, she clearly saw John in a way very different from how his friends saw him or how he intended to come across, and was apparently unaware of his concern and affection for her. John could be verbally catty and like the twins he was a rebel, a non-conformist - but he wouldn't have done an eighth part of the callous things the twins do, and his non-conforming extended to not conforming to the destructive stereotype of what a non-conformist rebel should be.

I am told that some of the fen think it's wrong to discuss Rowling's attitude to John and the possible reasons for her ambiguous attitude to Snape, but by explicitly stating that Snape was written as an act of "revenge" against her male Chemistry teacher, and also saying that he contains elements of various bullying unpleasant teachers she met, she has both opened up her own feelings for public discussion and launched what could be interpreted as a public attack on John. This has had unpleasant consequences in both directions: on the one hand, it has caused some fen, including at least two heavyweight essayists whose work may be remembered, to assume that John must have been a dreadful person who did her some serious injury; on the other, it has caused many Snape fen to feel intense hatred for Rowling. Neither of them deserves this, so it's important to look at how two decent people managed to end up at cross-purposes.

In any case, these are books which will probably be read for centuries, even for thousands of years, just as we still read about Monkey and Don Quixote and Odysseus and Maeve of Connaught. A large part of Potter fandom is fiercely anti-intellectual and believes that it is a crime against nature for a woman to analyse and think about books instead of emoting and gushing, but there will be people seven hundred years from now who will want to understand why Rowling wrote what she did, just as we want to understand Chaucer. Speculation is going to happen anyway, and it will have a better chance of being accurate if it starts on the basis of recorded information from people like John who actually knew her.

John was aware of himself as having been quite strict and "exacting" as a schoolmaster - he said that he had had to be, to prevent the students from blowing themselves up - and not always popular with his pupils, but even students who disliked him found him an excellent science teacher, clear, interesting and informative. He was the best and brightest, full of colour and interest, but he did at times share some of Snape's more challenging characteristics.

At the time that he was teaching Rowling, John was at the tail-end of a failing marriage and was suffering badly from stress and chronic insomnia, and he said himself that this had had a deleterious effect on his mood and temper: but even he was possibly not aware of how wild his behaviour had sometimes been "when he was Snape". A near contemporary of Rowling's at Wyedean spoke of never knowing how John would react if spoken to at that time, as he might either stare blankly into space or, unpredictably, erupt like a volcano. Given John's own comments about the effects of protracted sleeplessness it's clear he was ill with exhaustion and was alternating between falling asleep with his eyes open and jerking awake without knowing he'd been asleep, and then screaming at people because he was disoriented and panicky. It ought to have been obvious to any observant person that he was unwell rather than necessarily unpleasant, especially as one can see from the deckchair photograph that he was desperately thin and pale at that time and had dark circles under his eyes: but one of the themes in the Potter books is teenagers not realising that teachers are real people with feelings and sufferings of their own.

Also, one didn't have to know John very long to realise that there was something a bit odd about his social skills. He seemed to have no casual friends: no middle ground between mere acquaintances to whom he would barely speak, or close friends - of whom he had many - to whom he was exceptionally open and honest. The two, I have realised, went together: he couldn't be friends with someone at all unless he felt he could be close to them and really trust them, because his honesty and openness towards people he liked made him very vulnerable.

He said himself that "Unfortunately I tend to say exactly what I feel on any topic, I've got very little sense of reserve" and that he had never learned to dissemble, even though a colleague had advised him to do so. This inability to hide his true feelings was both symptom and cause of a ruthless honesty practised as a deliberate virtue: he commented that in the Potter books Rowling "shows how unpleasant behaviour is regarded as acceptable if its perpetrators are popular. // This often militated against me, as I would never compromise my integrity by joining a gang" and that consequently, even as an adult, he was "often left as the odd one out" for refusing to go along with the majority opinion although he was, he said, nearly always proved right.

By email or post although he could when required be serious, analytical, an intellectual and political heavyweight, most of the time he came across as a bouncy-bouncy teenage fanboy: buoyant, eager, playful and witty. But his speaking manner was stiff and bitten-off, unless he knew you really well. It took two years of regular conversations on the 'phone with me for him to stop sounding as if he'd swallowed a poker, and he never did learn how to end a conversation gracefully but would just pull up in mid flow and say "Gotta go now, bye-ee!" or "bye then!" (or if it was usagistu he was talking to, "bye-zee!").

A lifelong old-school socialist, he was for many years Chairman of the local Labour Party. He became Chairman of Caerwent Community Council in 1991 and was the many times re-elected town councillor for St Bride's Netherwent (although I imagine he didn't take that last job on until after he retired from teaching). But he told me very early on in our friendship that he was handicapped in local politics because he was unable to tell from someone's manner whether they were friendly towards him or hostile. If somebody made a less-than-flattering comment about him, he had no way of knowing whether it was meant affectionately or nastily: indeed on at least one occasion he asked me to talk him through it, explaining what clues I could see which told me that a statement was hostile to him. Because he was open and trusting and preferred to think the best of people, he assumed that all critical comments about himself were meant affectionately until otherwise proven, even when it was pretty clear they were intended as attacks. Sometimes this had the effect of disarming enemies and turning them into friends; sometimes it just annoyed the hell out of them.

John aged eight, in the Cubs

Sometimes he found to his distress that he had made an enemy without having any idea how he had done so; and since he didn't know what he had done to offend someone he was sometimes anxious that people might take offence over something quite anodyne. Clever and curious, he had done well at school proper, although he hadn't been happy there until he reached the Sixth Form. At the local Anglican Sunday School, however, he was constantly being told-off and sent home early and in tears, with no idea what he'd done wrong. When he was eight he refused to go back to Sunday School and joined the Cubs instead, but that too was to turn sour. Following a change of leadership, the Rover Scouts (young men aged 16-23) who now helped run the troop, whom he described as "conceited sadists", routinely beat him with a knotted rope, leaving him crouched sobbing in a corner and still with no idea what if anything he'd done wrong.

Knowing him as I did, I suspected that what he'd done "wrong" was to fail to comply with implied orders he hadn't even noticed, as well as being pretty and not physically strong: if for example the group leader said "It's getting late now, boys", probably everyone else would understand "... so hurry up and finish what you're doing", and John wouldn't. But nobody ever gave him a chance to explain and he didn't find happiness or acceptance as a child until he refused point-blank to go to Cubs again (even after the man who ran it came round to the house to try to persuade him to return), joined the local Church Choir, and began to work on what would be a glorious singing voice. That was vintage John really - both that he was brutally bullied and made miserable to punish quirky behaviour which was quite innocent in intention, and that he knew his own mind and had a steely, unshakeable determination to follow it.

He also had other odd little quirks. E.g., all emails to John had to be formatted as Rich Text, because he disliked the font used in Plain Text to the point of becoming quite excited about it, and he would invent his own spelling for words if he thought that the official spelling was "ugly". His interests very easily became obsessions: if he wanted one or two Green Man images, for example, then he would want hundreds. He also said himself that he was extremely visually-oriented: I wasn't quite sure how he meant this, but Temple Grandin has an interesting essay about visual thinking.

Tamara and I (along with duj and wynnleaf of The Sisterhood who both had a lot of experience of the condition) were as sure as one can be that John had a borderline case of Asperger's syndrome. This is a mild form of autism often associated with very high intelligence and analytical ability, along with a reduced ability to process fuzzy, contextual situations and some difficulty in understanding social cues and norms, especially sub-text and implied mood. John himself agreed with us: it was only giving a name to something he already knew about himself, and he had the sense to know that it was nothing to be embarrassed about, and that it was a label which bracketed him with Einstein and Newton and with a very high proportion of all scientists, lawyers, mathematicians, musicians, medical and surgical consultants, programmers, Talmudic scholars and chess players.

Personally I see Asperger's Syndrome, and autism generally, as the wetware equivalent of overclocking a computer. If it doesn't work out, you get a fried computer, someone too disabled to live independently; but if it turns out well you get a much faster system, albeit one which is often a little flaky, and if it does work well then the benefits generally outweigh the deficits. It's not a malformation, as such, but a minority neurological mode which, like the "Type A" personality type, has a particular set of advantages while increasing the risk of a particular set of problems. It's not fundamentally different from me saying that I was top of the class at school in sciences and in my own language but abysmally bad at foreign languages, except that Asperger's represents a specific set of good-ats and bad-ats which tend to cluster together and to run in families. There is quite an active Aspie Pride movement, which promotes the advantages of Asperger's-style thinking in many academic and scientific fields.

Also, a 2011 study (The Journal of the American Medical Association: Neuron Number and Size in Prefrontal Cortex of Children With Autism ) indicates that autists have an unusually high amount of brain tissue dedicated to social skills, rather than a lack of it. One of the marks of an intelligent creature - part of what makes a rat brighter than a shrew, a dog brighter than a hedgehog, a human brighter than a lemur - is that the more intelligent the animal, the more it tends to get its behaviours by learning them from its parents or deriving them from experience and observation, rather than depending mainly on instinct. To be born with a set of instincts missing, then, is in some ways perhaps to be farther down the human road and away from the monkey-programme - even if it can cause difficulties with reading others or being read by them.

It was this mild but immutable social oddity which explained how John could be such a kind and loving man and yet come across to some of his students as harsh or unfeeling. If he knew that somebody was suffering, that they needed help, he would be full of concern and generosity but he didn't do subtle hints or subtext: unless it was really glaringly obvious, he wouldn't know that somebody was upset unless they stood in front of him and said "I am upset."

It wasn't that he didn't understand human emotions: he was very observant, and when he thought about people in the third person he often understood what was going on with them very well and could explain it with considerable subtlety and sympathy. But when he had to speak to somebody directly and interpret their tone of voice and body-language he was likely to get lost. A former student who disliked him said to me that as a teacher he was "insensitive and clueless" and I replied that that was literally the case: he lacked a sense, and as a result he perceived no social clues, but the problem was with his neurological wiring rather than his character or intentions, just as it is with somebody who is deaf.

[In any case, I'm not sure how sensitive he needed to be. He wasn't one of the pastoral care staff, since he had the self-knowledge to know that he'd be no good at it, and when I look back at my own teachers at my own excellent girls' grammar school, I liked most of them immensely and I remember them with love and gratitude, but I can't offhand think of a single instance where I could clearly say that one of them had been sensitive.]

The same student complained that John was very attentive and communicative to students who wished to learn but would barely speak to the rest. Assuming this to be accurate, it sounds like a clear manifestation of his inability to form shallow connections. He was either deeply connected, or not connected at all, and he didn't know how to do the kind of casual relationships most people use to get by socially because he didn't know how to be friendly without baring his heart - but it may well have looked like favouritism to Jo Rowling. Also, of course, since he was unable to dissemble he would be unable - unlike most teachers - to pretend to like a student when he didn't: if he thought that a student was an annoying little tit, it would probably show.

John claimed that this sequence, shot in the school science lab., showed Snape vaporising himself

Those with whom he had formed a connection, thought the world of him: one former Caldicot student liked John so much he provided him with a lifetime of free tech. support out of sheer affection. When he died, a former student going by the netnick Dr_J_R posted an RIP notice saying: "Mr Nettleship gave me the chance to retake my A levels when I messed them up first time around. But much more, I owe him all that I am career-wise - he was an inspiration and I hope that when I lecture I have at least some of his enthusiasm.//He was the first person I knew who had written a research paper – and I still have a copy of the paper today.//I will always remember the explosions, the smoke and the flames of chemistry lessons – and, after something had gone BANG, John Nettleship saying in his wonderful nasal tones 'Wow – let’s do that again!'//Thank you Mr Nettleship – I will never forget!"

One of the minor social quirks often associated with Asperger's is an inability to tell if one is boring the other person, but this was never an issue with John, for he was knowledgeable about and able to speak on so many subjects, was so clever, sparky and funny and so full of incident that he was about the least boring person on earth. Conversations with John were never long enough, for however long he spoke for, he always left them wanting more. I could have spent a lifetime talking to John, about everything and nothing.

A trawl through the online forums in which former Wyedean students reminisce about the school shows that "Stinger" was loved or disliked in about equal measure. He had the reputation for being a great showman and extremely entertaining - usually on purpose, although the end-of-term raps about various aspects of chemistry which he used to put on to amuse the class got a mixed reception, and some students found them risible rather than witty. Exciting things happened during his experiments, possibly not all of them intentional, and many students found his lively, witty presentation and his boundless enthusiasm for his subject infectious. Even some students who were scared of him still remember his classes as full of laughter and excitement. One ex-student of the period referred to "a lovely school full of very talented and inspirational teachers" with the sole exception of one bloke who was a groper: John was described by him as "quite chilling" because of his "ghostly white" skin which had led the speaker to imagine that he lived in the Science block and never came out - like Snape in his dungeon! - but also "strangely compelling" and not nearly as sinister as the groper, and in context he clearly sees John as one of the talented and inspirational ones.

The forum conversations show that John could be as playful at Wyedean as he would be in later life, chatty and casual (although possibly not as casual as the colleague who happily told his class that eating oranges always gave him an erection); he told various students that he had damaged himself - one says, resulting in a nasal voice, another that he had killed off his nose-hairs - by sniffing bromine to cure a nasal infection. Following his marriage to his second wife Shirley in the mid '80s, he apparently had a habit of greeting her by crying "Wifey!" in front of the class whenever she brought him chemicals.

But according to these forum comments, and his own, he could also be hot-tempered, erratic and overly fond of handing out detentions, especially when he was addled by stress and lack of sleep, and his jet-black hair and extreme pallor caused some students to view him as a frightening and almost supernatural figure, like a troll under a bridge, without realising that this was at least to some extent a stage persona. When one student drew a caricature of a sort of snarling gargoyle figure and excitedly announced "That's you, sir!" John took it in good part and didn't confiscate the drawing. Later, he would come to suspect that the boy had shown this drawing to Joanne and it had influenced her portrayal of Snape.

He had, in any case, reasons to be hot-tempered. As a child he had suffered violence himself (although not from his parents), and his very first paid teaching job had been six weeks at a Secondary Mod. in south Leeds where the staff had constantly caned the students for every minor infraction. John had become something of a hero to the children there because he was one of only two members of staff who didn't want to hit them, but when we discussed it he agreed that these experiences had to some extent re-set his internal thermostat. Like Snape, he was probably less inclined to think that verbal snappishness and ill-temper to his students were of any significance in comparison with the extremes of physical bullying and abuse which he had witnessed and indeed suffered.

Caldicot Comprehensive, from acen Language and Resources Centre for Welsh Learners

He started working as the Head of Science at Caldicot Comprehensive in 1970 and initially the climate of the school was quite civilised, but over the four years that John was there there was a gradual build-up of gang violence from the students towards the newer and more vulnerable staff, culminating in a close colleague of John's being punched in the eye, breaking his contact lens. When the Headmaster refused to take any action this colleague suffered a breakdown and never taught again. Two months later, in February 1974, a delinquent pupil called the Domestic Science mistress a fucking old cow and John, in a well-intentioned but very slightly odd attempt to defuse the situation, intervened and said "Come on [name] she's not a fucking old cow". He was felled, as he said, by a single blow to the face, knocked backwards into the staff room and then repeatedly kicked in the balls. John was a forgiving man but not a soft or a daft one: he went straight to the police as soon as he was fit to do so, and the boy ended up in jail for assault.

At the same time he also suffered workplace bullying from his own managers because of his championing of child-centred learning, and attempts were made to freeze him out of his job because the County Council wanted an experienced grammar school teacher in the post in order to raise the perceived tone of the school, even though even those students who disliked John seem to be agreed that he was exceptionally good at conveying his subject in a clear and interesting way. Even though he was Head of Department he was deliberately marginalised and prevented from making any decisions, and this progressive isolation caused him extreme stress.

On the plus side, however, he had at Caldicot a small group of students who were both fond of, loyal to and supportive of him. At least one of these was so very fond of him that they remained good friends for the rest of John's life.

Wyedean School, showing buildings which the school moved to in 1976 © John Grayson at Geograph

Six months after suffering what must have been a highly traumatic criminal assault, he started work at the recently-opened Wyedean Comprehensive where he was to remain until his retirement in 1997, but there, too, there was a high level of delinquency and the headmaster, an erudite man who may have been a partial model for Dumbledore's dreamy detachment, at first treated this with a sort of benign unconcern. [He had white hair, too, if I remember correctly, although not a beard.] At a staff training session about a third of the staff complained to a counsellor that they couldn't teach because the students wouldn't listen to them: the headmaster hoped that the experience had been "cathartic" for them, but did nothing about the underlying problem. Students in some of the classes were verbally abusive to John almost from the start, and in May 1975 he became the sixth Wyedean teacher that year to be physically attacked: a gang of six boys were hanging about in a classroom where he had a class coming in in ten minutes, and as he shooed them out of the room he put his hand on one boy's shoulder to steer him along and was punched in the face again, bending his glasses.

At this point, and following John's angry protests, the headmaster having initially done nothing now went to the other extreme, and re-introduced corporal punishment for students who were physically or verbally abusive to the staff. The headmaster and two deputies were allowed to cane students, and the heads of department, including John, were permitted to use a slipper on aggressive boys.

Although he had originally been against corporal punishment, after the violence he had witnessed and suffered at Caldicot and Wyedean John now approved of this measure, as a last resort in order to regain and maintain order. I did and do think that he was wrong, and in fact we had a serious fight about it: I know from my own circle of friends and a long-term interest in abuse issues that delinquent children very often turn out to be abuse victims of one sort or another, and I considered John's belief that he would necessarily be able to spot whether these children were emotionally disturbed or not, or that somebody higher up the academic chain would have identified them as such before they got to him if they were, was hopelessly naive. On the other hand, the students in question were all ones who had attacked the staff either verbally or physically, and it could be argued that if you attack somebody you can't really complain if they hit you back.

John maintained that this move did work and did restore order, but if so it was evidently temporary, or his memory was selective, because the conversations on the Wyedean forums show that by the 1980s violence against the staff and especially against John himself was endemic, despite the severe canings handed out by a teacher called Mr Mooney (really). Part of my argument against corporal punishment was, precisely, that it doesn't work - and it evidently didn't.

Former students on the forum talk about hearing that another pupil had thrown John out of a window in the Science Block: they weren't sure whether this was true or apocryphal but at the very least somebody had claimed to have thrown him out of a window, and other people had found this both funny and feasible. [It would, at least, have been a ground-floor window, for the Science Block was in a modular, prefabricated weatherboarded building like a cross between a Portakabin and a garden shed and known, bizarrely, as a terrapin, after the trade-name of a West Country firm which makes them.] Whether or not the window incident was true, at least one of the speakers claimed to have actually witnessed John being shoved against a wall and then lifted bodily off the ground by his throat so that "his little legs" were clear of the floor, which they all seemed to find amusing rather than disturbing.

Even a girl who had quite liked him and was marking his death with a sympathetic RIP admitted to having stuck a pin in his backside, and elsewhere she recalled another girl throwing a can of tuna at him. Another ex-student recalls one of their mates shouting "Stinger you mong!" at him (a "mong" at that time was abusive slang for a person with Down's Syndrome). Another recounted an incident in which John had sat him on a trolley and then tossed a medicine ball to him in order to demonstrate conservation of momentum and had accidentally knocked him off: he had responded by deliberately throwing the ball at John with intent to injure, and then complained that it was unfair of John to demote him as a result. Like Snape, John was fairly tolerant of behaviour few other teachers would put up with for five minutes, yet was blamed for trying to keep order at all. Another student boasted that John had had to be stopped from teaching her year because he was unable to get any control over them - all this during a period when, according to John, his situation was considerably better than it had been in his first year at Wyedean.

A student who was at Wyedean three years behind Rowling assured me that I was wrong, that if John said he had suffered violence there he was lying, that it was a peaceful well-behaved school and he had never heard of any aggression there - then admitted cheerfully that he too had heard that a fellow student had thrown John out of a window. As with the scene where Harry and co. accidentally knock Snape out while disarming him, and then don't bother to seek any medical help for him even though Harry thinks he looks as if he might be dead, it seems as if violence against John somehow wasn't seen as counting, it wasn't real or important if he was the victim. Because he was a resolutely sticky-out nail that wouldn't be hammered flat, he was regarded as fair game.

He would probably have got on better, ironically, if he'd been more obviously disabled but because he was so intelligent and self-aware and made an effort to cope with his problems, most people didn't realise he had hardly any social instincts and was frantically making it up as he went along, so they didn't cut him any slack. Instead of sympathy, he got mockery.

Illustration by Tealin for ch. 14 of PoA

All of this goes a long way to explaining why it was that somebody who when he was settled in himself was a most kind and patient man, could in the classroom be excitable enough to be instantly recognisable as Snape to just about everybody that knew him - and, by extension, why Snape is written the way he is. John had been attacked so many times both at Wyedean and at Caldicot that he must have been constantly on the alert for where the next blow would come from, and being attacked and beaten for being odd had traumatic childhood associations, as well as being painful and frightening in itself. By the time he was teaching Rowling he was also in the midst of a divorce and sick with sleeplessness, as well as the usual high-octane stress associated with teaching itself, and he was being actively bullied by some of the students - so it wasn't surprising if he sometimes retaliated in an attempt to maintain order. Stella, one of The Sisterhood, who herself is a primary school teacher in Italy, commented that "If you have some bullying students, sometimes you just have to show them that there is someone in charge and that he is better at bullying than them, in order to make them stop..."

Like Snape, John was evidently capable of going up like a rocket and spectacularly "losing it", if what is said on the forums is true, for one former student recalled that on one occasion in the 1980s he told John to "Fuck off" and John slapped him in the face. This was unprofessional but also understandable, for the guy in question is obviously a smug bully who likes to jeer at anybody he perceives as odd - he is still jeering at John's oddness and gloating over his distress more than twenty years later - and even he admitted that he had asked for it and that getting slapped was fair enough. Aspie people do tend to get overloaded and overwrought more easily than others and then lash out in panic, and John's students would have tried even the most placid. A friend of mine who used to teach in Scotland in the 1980s quit the profession after she snapped and lifted a particularly annoying pupil bodily off the floor by his hair. She didn't leave because she got into trouble, either, because she didn't: she left because she was afraid that if she stayed, she might actually murder one of the little horrors.

There are echoes, here - and probably not coincidental ones - of Severus (magically) striking James in the face when James has bullied him unbearably, and striking Harry when Harry calls him a coward. This same jeering ex-student recalls John tutting to himself almost constantly - something he never did in later life, that I'm aware of - and sees this obvious sign of extreme nervous strain as something still to be gloated over a quarter of a century later. The Marauders with their taunting cruelty towards Severus really existed, but they were teenage louts mocking a struggling schoolmaster, not a fellow schoolboy, and it was perhaps only taking up with Shirley, who was first his senior lab. assistant and then his second wife, which saved John from flying apart altogether. All of the comments about John behaving erratically seem to date from before his marriage to Shirley in the mid '80s: like the loving girl in the fanfics, she was the first person really to appreciate him in all his edgy, snarling glory, and saved him from drowning in his own wild distress.

One thing I didn't like in John - the only thing, really - was that he had a rigidly punitive attitude to wrongdoers, but that kind of simplistic thinking about social issues is quite common in Aspies, and in any case his anger towards offenders was powered by concern for their victims. He saw delinquent, violent students not just as a personal threat but as the malign force which had driven his friend at Caldicot Comprehensive into a breakdown and ruined his career, as well as making it harder for willing students to learn - and he cared very much about the students who wanted to learn, especially the less able ones who were struggling and couldn't cope well with distraction.

Nor could he really understand why some students were not willing to learn. Having been a manager myself I did try to explain the concept of getting people to want to do what you want them to do, with particular reference to recruiting more members to the Caerwent Historic Trust of which he was the secretary and main driving force, but insofar as he understood this at all he equated it with dishonesty. When I suggested that he might get more members if he organised more social events such as club dinners, his response was a baffled "But people ought to be interested in local history" and that they shouldn't need extra inducements other than that "ought to".

His reaction to unwilling students was the same: they ought to learn, because it might be important to their future careers, and because he was both sensible and dutiful himself and not entirely on the ball when it came to social matters, he didn't understand why people didn't always act in their own best interests, or why it might be necessary, or possible,

The Wyedean Science Department circa 1977, with Shirley at far left and John at far right

to persuade them to do so. And because he didn't really know how to be persuasive, he was sometimes abrasive. We see this clearly reflected in the Harry Potter books: Remus Lupin modifies Harry's behaviour far more effectively than Snape's bluster or McGonagall's detentions, because he is manipulative and emotionally blackmails Harry into feeling guilty about endangering the life his parents died to save. But like Snape John was too honest, too straightforward and too northern to be manipulative, and unlike Snape he didn't even know how to be.

Snape, of course, developed an abrasive teaching style in part because he began teaching when he was only twenty-one, with students some of whom were only a few years younger than him and had known him as the bullies' favourite target. John had a similar problem, in that even in his late thirties he looked about eighteen. A group photo' of the Science Department staff, taken in the mid to late 1970s, shows John - the Head of Department - looking like a bespectacled schoolboy who has wandered into the shot and then tagged along with the grownups.

At heart he was as young as he looked, always. He once estimated himself to me as being about twelve but he was too hard on himself, for he in fact was eternally sixteen: innocent, enthusiastic, idealistic, playful, a little naive and simplistic at times but at the height of his considerable intellectual powers and full of passion and energy. It's a lovely age for a friend or a lover - but a difficult one from which to control a classroom full of students in what I'm told the Swedes call "the chair-throwing grades". Years ago, long before Snape ever sprang to life on the page (and yet years after JK Rowling had last seen him), John liked to dress up in his black teacher's gown and entertain his classes by singing about a Dark wizard and a burning gaze:

With pointed hat and nails like claws
And a terrible smile on his face,
The wizard sits behind locked doors
In his cell in a mountain place;
Around the walls of his magic den,
Laid out in endless line
Are books of spells for him to cast
And bottles of magic wine.

With horny hands he waves his wand
And scatters upon the fire
A powder which burns with ghostly light
As the flames rise even higher;
His lips recite a magic spell,
The flames dance on the walls,
And shadows deepen on his face
As on his knees he falls.

As I turn the page of the picture book
The scenes change endlessly –
Kings and queens and palaces
And galleons on the sea;
But whenever I look at the picture book,
I linger at the place
Where the wizard sits in his mountain cell
With a terrible smile on his face,

And books of magic spells to cast
And bottles of magic wine;
And all the time his wicked eyes
Are gazing into mine. He must have had that in mind when he posed for these photographs in 2007. He was so upright, such a pillar of the community and almost prim in some ways, disdainful of smoking or excessive swearing and unable to drink alcohol because it gave him hiccups: yet something in him fancied the idea of being a Power by candle-light, a mage and an alchemist; he wanted the hunt in the dark and the sweet voices lisping in the fire, and perhaps Rowling sensed in him that streak of Goth romanticism which led Severus to the Dark Arts.

[Photographs of John taken for an interview in 2007, from WalesOnline and Free Press.]
[More information on the song The Wizard by Peter Jenkyns, with music, can be found here.]

It was part of his eternally-teenage playfulness I think that he quite enjoyed acting the dragon, and didn't really take in the fact that some students might find him genuinely alarming: yet he was at least to some extent right, for even those ex-students on the Wyedean forums who found him frightening mostly seem to have done so in an excited and even a proud way, like somebody who owns a big scary dog. In any case one of John's lecturers at Teacher Training College had actually told him that the best way to deal with badly behaved students was to "lose your temper". He gradually came to realise that this had been a bad lesson he should never have learned, but changing an established behaviour pattern is even harder for people with Asperger's than it is for the rest of us.

A particular clique on the Harry Potter Network (a strange sub-group who seem to have turned Rickman!Snape into a quasi-religious cult figure almost totally unrelated to the Snape of the books) have said that one shouldn't talk about the fact that John could be hot-tempered and excitable in the classroom or that he thought he was probably an Aspie, because it might damage the fen's respect for him. But the idea that fen of the canonical, book Snape might respect someone less the more they were shown to be like canon!Snape is ridiculous - in fact the usual reaction is "Aww, sweet!" - and Asperger's is not something anybody need be ashamed of. Nor is a respect which is based on pretending that somebody is someone other than who they are worth the paper it isn't written on.

Wynnleaf of The Sisterhood commented that "I notice you've taken some criticism for mentioning in public that you thought John had Aspergers. And some people apparently think this is too personal a thing to mention. Well, you know, I really wish Aspergers didn't have such a negative connotation. It seems to run rampant through my extended family and I feel like So What? Most of the characteristics seem perfectly fine to me, even though they apparently seem odd to others. I have spent a lot of time talking with my daughter who is diagnosed with Aspergers trying to help her understand that it's not a Bad Thing, it is simply the way she is and many of the characteristics are more like gifts. So I dislike people acting like you shouldn't mention it because it's too personal. Or worse, when people act like a person having Aspergers should be kept an embarrassing secret. It is NOT embarrassing. It is simply different from most people. Granted it means that person had/has a more difficult time understanding others, but if we are mature adults, should we see that as embarrassing?"

John wanted both himself and his connection with Snape to be remembered, which entails knowing where they were alike as well as where and why they differed. His teaching style and eccentricities have already been discussed publicly on the net by former students, often in jeering tones by people who neither knew nor cared what was going on with him, and he deserves to be defended, and remembered, and loved, not as some bland plaster saint but as the lovely little firecracker he really was.

The fact that John had this slight social deficit also explains a lot about Snape. Rowling almost certainly didn't realise that John was hard-wired to miss social cues and in any case Snape cannot be an Aspie, because in order to be an effective quadruple agent he has to have an ability to both read and deceive others on the fly which no Aspie would have (except possibly Dumbledore, who is a powerful mind-reader with over a century of practice at interpreting people - but that's another discussion for another day). So she has written Snape with many of John's mannerisms and behaviours, but she has interpreted them as signs of spite or rage rather than of a failure to understand how his manner might come across to others, and she has shaped Snape's background in order to explain that spite and rage.

It is noteworthy, however, that duj of The Sisterhood, who has three autistic sons, identified a kind of shadow of mild autism in Snape's behaviour long before she knew anything about John, even though Snape himself cannot be an autist.

The irony is that Rowling evidently thought of John as an intentional bully and rejected his attempts to get back in touch, yet she is close friends with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, an obvious autist who has most of the same social problems as John plus some exciting new ones of his very own; who is widely (if perhaps equally unfairly, since he probably can't help it) also considered a bully; whose temper is so excitable that his ministers famously were said to be afraid to tell him any bad news and to have had to develop coping strategies to distract him before they did so; and who is reputed, rightly or wrongly, to have once punched a minister in the face just because he was in a bad mood. If the stories about Brown's temper are true then Rowling appears to be condoning in one man what she condemns in another: if they are not true then she ought to understand how somebody can get a reputation for being a bully when they are just stressed to the gills and socially awkward.

John in 1993

Temper or no temper, John put great thought and effort into making his lessons interesting and engaging and getting the students to try things out and discover things for themselves, and for most of them this method worked well (although not for Rowling - of which more anon). He also tried to engage with the students socially through humour, which worked in some cases and not in others. His chemical raps were a high spot of the school year to some students, even if they didn't otherwise like him, but were seen as ridiculous by others. It was a pity that he was never "discovered" by the media in his own right: he would have made a terrific eccentric popular-science presenter, and on telly his little raps would always have come across well because they could have been properly framed and wouldn't have run the risk of appearing awkward.

Because he was playfully flirty and had a slightly ribald sense of humour, some of his jokes seem to have been mildly risqué - but that seems to have been part of the culture of the school. One of John's colleagues happily told his class that eating oranges always gave him an erection, which doesn't seem to have been seen as anything out of the ordinary, and one staff member was an actual groper. On the forums John, with his Gothic appearance and fierce manner, is held up as an example of a teacher who was only play-pretend sinister as opposed to the groper, who was genuinely sinister. John by contrast was shocked and mortified when he first learned of the existence of fan-fictions and fan-art which paired Snape with Hermione: it was years before he could bring himself even to consider the idea, and then only if Hermione was clearly an adult.

Cartoon by sydpad, one of my favourites although the dialogue's a bit American - as a Briton Snape would more probably say "Potter, get your ***# arse in gear!!"

Again, it's clear from the forums that while some students disliked his sometimes slightly off-colour humour others saw it, and him, as one of the high spots of the Wyedean experience. Not many people ever seem to have been neutral about John, just as few people are neutral about Snape: his intrinsic John-ness, dramatic hippy-Goth style and blazing beauty made sure of that. And the contrast between his austerely sculptural good looks and his willingness to clown around subverted expectations and created a dislocating effect: rather like the recent Panasonic advert in which a beautiful, noble statue of greyhound-headed Anubis, god of the dead, suddenly jumps down from his plinth and starts chasing a stick.

It may have been the discontinuity between John's slight stature and almost delicate good looks and his robustly northern manner and speech - very much as in the famous Boddington's Bitter advert where the beautiful, elegant girl in the gondola swipes someone's beer and turns out to have a thick Manchester accent - which prompted Rowling to give Snape the doe Patronus.

One bit of playfulness which seems to have gone down like a lead balloon has a complicated history. Soon after John was identified as the main model for Snape, it was reported that at the time Rowling knew him he had had a habit of flicking students with the tip of a screwdriver. Tamara - who thought it was rather cute - asked John about it and he said he had no idea what this was about and that they must be conflating him with some other teacher. Whenever it was mentioned on the net thereafter, Tamara and I would say that it was untrue, but in fact after John's death a former student came forward and insisted that at the time he knew him, in the late '70s and early to mid '80s, John had indeed flipped people on the back of the head with a screwdriver if they were being too slow at completing their written work.

Black rabbit at Rose Cottage, 6^th June 2009 (photographed by John)

I've no reason to doubt this, because other details of the conversation make it clear the guy did know John. I've also no reason to think John was lying. I never knew him to tell a direct lie - if asked a question he would answer either honestly or not at all, not talk about something and provide false information. But I know for a fact that he did at times have a rotten memory, because on one occasion he told me about a wild black rabbit which had been visiting his garden, and we discussed it; and the next day he sent me a photograph of it, and we discussed it again; and then eight days later I asked him if he'd seen the authentic Welsh black bun lately and he didn't know what I was talking about. Evidently the screwdriver and all its works had disappeared into the haze of exhaustion he had been struggling through at the time.

Presumably this too was his idea of a joke, at the time: in the absence of being able to ask him I imagine he had it in his hands one day and it occurred to him that it would be funny to flip someone with it, and having done it once, and perhaps got an amused or amusing response, he saw no reason to stop. It is common for Aspies not only to fiddle constantly with things in their hands, especially when anxious, but also to think that if a joke was funny the first time it will necessarily be equally funny the two hundred and seventy-fifth time.

This was a way in which he was both like and unlike Snape. "Unlike" because Snape in the books is extremely un-physical: we never see him touch a student at all, or anybody else that I can remember, until he hauls Harry away from the Pensieve towards the end of fifth year. "Like" because my informant seemed to think that John flicking people was a heinous crime, even though it doesn't seem to have been intended as a punishment but simply as a jokey way of saying "Get a move on there", whilst dismissing the frighteningly severe punishment beatings handed out by Mr Mooney as being of no significance.

Flicking a student with a screwdriver would probably be seen as illegal now, but caning them definitely would be. If a severe caning is acceptable, a little flick or rap must surely be; and if a flick is unacceptable then a beating must be so much more so. Like Snape, John was blamed out of all proportion while others got a free ticket for much worse offences, because his slightly odd manner and striking appearance and his offbeat charisma made whatever he did disproportionately noticeable. And this, mind you, was in a school where - according to the forums - the metalwork master routinely made the first years cry, and often picked them up by the scruff of the neck, like kittens.

I wish that John had taught at my own (highly eccentric) school, Heriot's Wood in Stanmore, for we would have appreciated his wit, intelligence and enthusiasm, treated his raw nerves kindly and got him to perform his chemical raps for charity, and he would certainly have been no odder than most of the other staff. But even at Wyedean, there were many people who appreciated him, even if there were also many who didn't: former student David Cole called him "Much maligned and misunderstood".

[If, in fact, the issue with "the screwdriver thing" was that he was doing it too hard, somebody needed to say to him "You're doing that too hard". He probably wouldn't be able to tell just from body-language.]

[He evidently did have some kind of a mild tropism for screwdrivers, for he wrote and illustrated a book called Sammy the Screwdriver for his grandchildren, with the specific purpose of encouraging the sort of child who doesn't like books but does like toolkits to take an interest in reading.]

As for Snape's other less-than-wholly-desirable traits, his spite and grudge-bearing cannot come from John, who would scarcely know a personal grudge if it bit him on the bum, and I don't suppose Rowling knew Sylvia Morgan well enough to know whether she bore long-term grudges or not. Snape is identifiably about 70-75% John and maybe 5-10% Sylvia Morgan, but most of the rest has got to be Rowling herself: she has said that there is some of herself in all of her characters, and it's clear that she is a person who incubates long-term grudges, since she assumes that everybody on earth must like her be longing for "revenge" on their teachers and she is still trying to get back at John thirty years after the event, for what can only have been a minor offence.

We know it was a minor offence not only because John was a good man, but because if he'd done anything too dreadful Rowling wouldn't have made his alter ego one of the main heroes of her story. Her grudge-bearing against John, in fact, is weirdly mixed with affection and admiration, for she gives Snape a moral seriousness and at times a grandeur which few of the other characters possess.

[Forget about her initial post-DH statement that she didn't see Snape as a hero. The primary meaning of "hero" in modern British English is "rôle model" and it is clear from the reasons which she gave for thinking that Snape wasn't a hero that she thought she was answering the question "Is he a good rôle model?" Once she realised that Americans still used "hero" mainly to mean "one who behaves heroically" she agreed that Snape was a hero. It is self-evident that she thought of Snape as one who behaves heroically while she was writing the books, or she wouldn't have had Harry say that Snape was probably the bravest man he ever knew.]

The Netherbow Arts Centre as it appeared in the mid 1990s, prior to re-modelling, from Royal-Mile.com

I do think that some of Rowling's ambiguity about Snape is because she has put into him various aspects of herself about which she is uncomfortable, especially this capacity to bear a grudge, and since she doesn't like these aspects of herself she can't understand why the Snape fen do. A friend of mine did some work with her in the early or mid '90s "before she was famous", when they were both earning pin-money by marking homework for creative writing courses at the Netherbow Arts Centre, and he reports that she was as odd and ambiguous about herself as she is about Snape, alternating between arrogance and random extreme self-criticism.

On the other hand, she may be ambiguous about Snape just because she was ambiguous about John - seeing him as somebody who was sometimes loving and sometimes hostile, rather than as an essentially loving man who was ratty because he was fuzzy-tired and had limited social skills, and didn't really understand how he was coming across.

If, indeed, part of Snape comes from Rowling herself, then we the Snape fen ought to love her, because she is a part of Snape and Snape is a part of her, and because John loved her and wanted us to do so. She was the daughter of one of his closest friends, as well as being a former student in whom he had taken an interest at the time (whereas he never actually taught her sister Dianne), and he was immensely proud of her, and filled with protective rage and pity whenever anybody did anything to harm her. He grieved for her because throughout her teens, he said, she had been "hammered by her mother's illness, hammered by her mother's death, hammered by her lousy husband . . . . ."

This was despite the fact that he could see that she had, at best, very mixed feelings about him - but like Severus's his love was not dependent on how he was treated, and he had no particular expectation of being liked, or resentment of being disliked. I'm not sure whether this was a sign of meekness or of extreme self-containment. There was a bit of a streak of Luna Lovegood in John, as well as of Severus Snape, and he didn't really care much what anybody thought of him except Shirley. That is to say, he minded very much if people thought things about him which were false or unfair, and was distressed if he found that someone disliked him for reasons he couldn't understand, but his own opinion of himself was not at all dependent on other people's opinion.

John in April 1979, aged thirty-nine

On 13^th December 2010, three months less one day before his death, John gave what he knew would probably be his last ever interview. The interviewer was Nancy Cavill, the daughter of Ivor Cavill, a well-known senior lecturer in Haematology who was an old friend of John's. She reported that despite his terminal illness he was "still sharp, and keen to talk about his memories of his former pupil": he reported that he kept dropping off to sleep in mid sentence. He had intended that the article should be illustrated by the never-before-published 1979 photograph of him looking poetic in cheesecloth, taken at the height of his Snapishness, but in the event it appeared after his death unillustrated, at least online, although it may have been illustrated when it appeared in Wales on Sunday which is an actual newspaper.

This very good interview, in which he spoke of his great pride in Joanne, was much more natural and informative than his previous newspaper interviews in which he had tended to come across as over-hearty: Nancy, of course, was the daughter of a friend and therefore somebody to whom he could unbend. It contained some new information I hadn't heard from him in life. Although Rowling complained publicly about John giving her bad marks in Chemistry, and said that she had turned him into Snape to get revenge on him for it, John himself told me that "She obviously detested the subject though her marks were OK". It was actually surprising that she did as well as "OK" - for he said of her in this interview that "She seemed determined not to speak to me. [cut] I looked at the crib sheet [test results] and I could see that this child had a high score so I thought, 'I've got to make sure I reach her,' but she wouldn’t even hold a test tube."

She was, he said, "a somewhat timorous child", and he didn't know whether she was actually scared of him or not, but "In every lesson she sat by the emergency door - partly to keep away from the smoke from experiments, partly because it was the furthest seat from me I think." In this case, I suspect his enthusiasm for his subject had blinded him to the intersection between "timorous" and "semi-controlled explosions", and that Joanne sat by the emergency door because she had a very sensible desire to be able to make a rapid bolt for it if he should happen to set the terrapin on fire.

Nevertheless, she obviously does have some kind of grudge against John - although he reckoned that when she said "he deserved it" she meant that he deserved to be caricatured and lampooned, not that he deserved to be killed by a giant mutant viper, and he was probably right about that. I have wondered whether the "I see no difference" scene was drawn from life. In the book it's actually ambiguous whether Snape means "I see no difference between Hermione's teeth now and Hermione's teeth before" or "I see no difference between Malfoy hexing Granger and Potter hexing Goyle", but assuming that Rowling intended the former I wondered if her problem with John was that he had hurt her feelings with some similar comment. He was capable at times of being spectacularly tactless, but if so he wouldn't have intended any harm - he would just have thought it was a funny line.

I've also wondered whether she had a crush on John, which he would undoubtedly have failed even to notice. She pays more attention to writing Snape's physical presence - his gestures and appearance - than any other character's. She has said that Hermione is a self-insert and Hermione at one point has a major crush on a teacher (Lockhart); and sour grapes would explain why she chose to make Snape ugly when John was so handsome. It would also explain why she was so tongue-tied in John's classes that she wouldn't even speak to him. He commented that out of all the students he had taught over the years, she was probably the least responsive.

It must be said that John thought the idea that Joanne might have had a crush on him was ridiculous. But then, he seldom noticed things like that, and was astonished when another student did turn out to have a definite crush on him.

On the other hand, she was reported to have admitted to fancying Mel Gibson, so perhaps she just prefers chocolate box looks. She might just have been tongue-tied because she was unnerved by John, or by the subject itself. Ironically, neither of them seems to have realised that the other almost certainly had a hard-wired learning disability - in John's case, for reading social cues and in Rowling's for understanding numbers - so John assumed that this otherwise very bright girl would be able to understand chemistry and physics if he could only engage her attention, despite the amount of maths involved, and she seems to have assumed that his well-intentioned but probably rather clumsy attempts to draw her out of her shell were him "picking on her". He said to me that "I believe in leaving pupils to be themselves and although I pressurised her with questions, I never complained about her unpreparedness to answer", but if she hated the subject and was panicked by the sums, I don't suppose she was alert to such fine distinctions. Pressure is pressure.

Of course, Rowling's bad experience with Sylvia Morgan at primary school had probably left her primed to see aggression and humiliation where none was intended. John in his raving-with-insomnia phase must have been fairly hard to take in any case, and she too must have been very stressed due to her mother's terminal illness. She probably thought that those teachers who left her alone were the ones that liked her, and that John disliked her and that was why he kept asking her questions in class: but according to John himself some of the other staff found Joanne's introverted and uncommunicative manner annoying even though she was, he said, "totally inoffensive" (a description which I suspect she would not find as flattering as he intended it to be), and they disliked her and didn't want to be bothered to teach her, whereas he thought that she was worth the effort it would take to bring her out of her shell. Even though he was probably wrong about her having scientific potential, because she was constitutionally unable to understand the maths involved.

[In case anybody thinks it's wrong to comment on what John said about teaching Rowling, incidentally, virtually everything he said to me privately about her was also said publicly and appeared in articles in the British press, and I have revealed nothing new which isn't a comment on or expansion of something which is already public knowledge.]

John preferred a catadioptric table-top reflector, whatever the hell one of those is, and didn't get on with refractors

Whatever the precise nature of her feelings about John, the young Joanne can't have disliked him as much as all that, for she voluntarily took optional evening-classes in Astronomy with him. Indeed we agreed that the reason the Astronomy mistress Aurora Sinistra is such a nonentity in the books was perhaps because Rowling didn't want to show Snape teaching Astronomy as well as Potions, yet couldn't visualise an Astronomy teacher as having any identity other than a Snape-ish one, so she left Sinistra blank.

I'm not sure where Snape's sulkiness came from. John never sulked at me, much, but I wouldn't like to swear he never went off on a major strop at anybody else. Nor was he noticeably spiteful or petty, although he could certainly be catty and sour, with a side-order of snide.

As for the origin of Snape's sarcasm, it's clear that Rowling is very sarcastic herself or she wouldn’t write sarcasm so well, or attribute it not just to Snape but to Dumbledore and Flitwick and to some extent to Harry. John too could be quite sarcastic, but that isn't necessarily a fault in a teacher. Although Rowling herself seems to have seen pedagogic sarcasm as a problem, and so portrays her characters as resenting Snape's (and therefore by implication probably John's) acid tongue, in fact none of the other students at Wyedean - even the ones who disliked John - seems to have seen it as an issue.

If anything, sarcastic teachers are usually very well-liked, even when their sarcasm is extreme. A young Scottish friend of mine, speaking of her own schooldays some time probably between 1999 and 2005, said that one of her female teachers was so sarcastic that she reduced her, my friend, to tears on three separate occasions, but she remembers her as being the best teacher she ever had. Snape actually reminds me of Mrs Styles, my own Chemistry mistress, whom I liked immensely.

In a discussion about Snape's teaching style some years ago, wynnleaf of The Sisterhood commented on a teacher of her acquaintance in Kansas: "...our local schools have a 5th grade teacher (that would be with 10 year old students), who is a man in his early thirties. He is *very* Snape-like in his demeanor in class. One of my kids -- now 16 -- characterized him as 'ruthless.' Nevertheless, most of the students really like him. He makes over-the-top threats which some of the more gullible students [cut] actually believe and they *still* like him. Parents try to get their kids into his classes because they often feel that by age 10 their children really need the disciplined study habits that he'll make sure they get. Point is, in real life very few people actually think (at least around here) that this teacher is mean, nasty, etc."

The newspaper columnist Allison Pearson, writing in The Daily Mail on 28^th March 2007 about the different styles of teaching preferred by girls and by boys, referred to "Psycho, H-Bomb, Smithy, Railey, Greaser, Doughy, Vodd. No, not a rapper remix of the Seven Dwarves, but the nicknames of real teachers who once taught male acquaintances of mine.//Powerful, sarcastic, funny, eccentric and occasionally sadistic schoolmasters, they are remembered with affection and gratitude decades later." "Stinger" surely deserves a place in that august company.

Oil of Vitriol: drawing by ericoides showing John as chemist as magician, rather than as Snape

Over time, the young man's character is written in the older man's countenance. John may have done his share of snapping and snarling when he was young and tired and ill with insomnia, but at seventy you could see his amiability written in the lines of his face, and the lines in his face were ones of laughter and mildness.

He wasn't a totally soft touch: he'd go to great lengths for anybody who was helpless and in need but if somebody had it in their power to help him as well, and refused to do so, then he had the sense and pride to be less likely to be obliging in future. But if he was still Snape, he was Snape as Snape might be thirty years after Lily told James to sling his hook, and married Severus instead. Somebody in the fandom - I don't know who, because it was quoted to me by someone who had forgotten where she heard it - once said that Happy!Snape would be like Tigger, and there was a lot of Tigger in John.

John and Shirley at a High School Reunion, 9^th May 2009

Although John was something of a flirt he would, he agreed, have run a mile if anybody had tried to take him up on it, for he was faithful and constant to Shirley, whom he adored, as she adored him. Theirs was an almost epic romance - I've never known a more devoted couple, still wildly in love as well as loving, after a marriage of nearly thirty years. John wasn't sentimental exactly - he was too Northern for that and besides, his sentiments were genuine ones - but he was, in his own slightly dour and amused way, unafraid of expressing warmth and love. He measured the worth of his life in the strength of his marriage, and the highest praise he could give to any woman's beauty was to say that she reminded him of Shirley, who in his eyes was always his perfect, private Emma Peel.

Nor was this a case of shallowly selecting a lover by her looks.

John with his sons Dave and Steve and their partners

He fell in love, and then based his ideal template on the woman he loved, rather than falling in love with someone who matched a pre-existing template.

He and Shirley each had children by their previous marriages: John had two sons and a daughter, David, Lynn and Steve in that order, and Shirley had a son and daughter Richard and Louise, and their children had twelve children between them and another generation starting up as well. John saw little of his daughter after his divorce from his first wife, but was on the warmest terms with all the rest and their house was constantly filled with grandchildren. John both adored his blood- and step-children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren on an emotional level and took a literally academic interest in helping them to learn by making learning fun, teaching them music, teaching them to read, drawing educational cartoons for them etc..

John in 1998 with a prize cup he won for his singing

An example of John\'s photography: getting creative with Shirley's home-made marmalade

He had a great deal in him to teach. There were a few things he didn't or couldn't do - he assured me he didn't dance, for example - but almost anything he did do, would be done well

John (at centre with cornet) and the Uptown Syncopators

John (at front right with cornet) and the Uptown Syncopators

(except computers and Biology - like Snape, his knowledge of creatures was weak - but latterly he had me to do those). He was a gifted and dedicated teacher. He had a brilliant mind and a deep understanding of politics as well as of chemistry, physics, astronomy and mechanics - even tidal mechanics. He had a singing voice as strong and clear as a bell and won prizes for competition folk-singing (it's a "Welsh thing"!), and he could both play and teach a variety of musical instruments e.g. cornet, piano and flute.

Indeed, in his late teens or early twenties he had played the cornet in a jazz band called the Uptown Syncopators, where he had concealed his considerable beauty behind heavy NHS spectacles, an unfortunate haircut and a dreadful little beard that looked like pubes. He was a clear, thoughtful and witty writer; a charismatic stage-performer; an accomplished photographer and graphic designer and a not-half-bad cartoonist; proficient not only at DIY and gardening but at housework too; and also very athletic, at least where water was involved. He was accustomed to go swimming every other day, and could dive like a gull.

Born on Lammas Day, he was more or less a pagan by default, and when Evangelical Christians were reported to be fulminating against the celebration of Hallowe'en John wrote to the press that "Next time a bunch of children turn up dressed as witches" they should "give them a treat, as penance for the cruel and unjustifiable persecution directed at witches over many centuries in the name of religion". Unlike Shirley he did not consider himself to be a Christian, was not as he said a "believer", but he loved the ancient local churches and especially their carol services deeply, in a non-denominational sort of way, and he had a powerful sense of the sacred and often attended Sunday church with Shirley, sharing the general principles of the Anglican faith even if not the specifics.

His own house was at Five Lanes, a small settlement in Gwent a couple of miles west of the ancient and historically important village of Caerwent, and the whole area was imbued for him with a sense of power and the long past.

Arms of Gwent

Caerwent, where Shirley was born and near which they both lived, lies in the administrative county of Monmouthshire, called in Welsh Sir Fynwy, and in what is now the "preserved" or ceremonial county of Gwent. Gwent traditionally occupies the low-lying area between the river Usk to the west, the Wye to the east and the Severn to the south, and a large area of green hills to the north, extending into the southern end of the Black Mountains. Some scholars think that in the post-Roman period there was a small kingdom called Ewyas to the north of Gwent, others that Ewyas was the original name of the whole area including Gwent: either way Gwent was originally a kingdom in its own right although it had a somewhat chequered history, and in the tenth and eleventh centuries it was intermittently combined with the kingdom of Glywysing (Glamorgan) to the west to form the super-kingdom of Morgannwg. Sitting just on the Welsh side of the Wye as it does, it counts as Marcher land and for a long time there was confusion as to whether it was in England or in Wales, but it is now definitely considered to be Welsh, and John was a passionate foster-son of Wales - even though he could be as beadily objective about the problems of his country as about those of his friends. Gray Hill seen from the north-west © Roy Parkhouse at Geograph

I remember how he climbed Gray Hill - whose name, he said, meant holy or Otherworldly, as it does for the Grey Mare, the Mari Llwyd - in order to see the sun rise at Midwinter over the standing stones and the stone circle at the crest of the hill, two miles to the north of Rose Cottage: but it was Wales and it was wet, and all he saw was cloud. It wasn't until after his death that I learned that he had taken a party of what his friend Ivor Cavill called "the Caerwent faithful" up Gray Hill to see the Midwinter sun (or more probably the Midwinter cloud cover) every year, for years.

Insofar as he recognised a divinity, he was a Goddess-worshipper. He was a man who really loved women, not just in the sexual sense but as friends and companions. Indeed he had what I considered to be a too-trusting and innocent conviction that women were somehow intrinsically better and more valuable than men, and was a feminist so ardent that it sometimes became annoying. A few times I had occasion to point out to him that not everything in history was about the wicked usurpation of the rightful rule of the Divine Feminine by an evil patriarchy.

Neolithic footprints on the mudflats at Uskmouth, from Rhagor (National Museum of Wales)

History was one of his great passions, along with science and politics and Shirley and music and his hordes of blood- and step-children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His sense of history was tinged with mysticism, and he was definitely in the right place for it. Seven miles to the south-west lay Uskmouth and neighbouring Goldcliff, an area of mudflats along the shore of the Severn which has produced some of the earliest evidence for a modern human presence in Britain. Eight thousand years ago, families with their children foraged barefoot across the flats and the prints are still there, buried under layers of silt.

Stone circle and outlier on Gray Hill, © Brian E Clark at The Megalith Portal

Gray Hill was of great importance to John, for it was the centre of his sacred landscape. The stones on Gray or Grey Hill are not immediately obvious: they consist of a 32ft-diameter ring of thirteen low flat-topped stones, set into the bracken like a mouthful of teeth, with two larger stones at the centre which used to be upright but are now fallen, and two outlying standing stones called The Pipers beyond the circle.

Standing stone on the summit of Gray Hill, looking south-west - Caerwent is to the south-east, and the remains of a stone circle are out of shot to the left © Steve Sheppard at Geograph

There is some doubt as to what the monument actually is and what shape it used to be, for some stones have been removed, and the hillside is dotted with man-made cairns and with natural boulders which obscure the lines of the original Bronze Age design. Some people say it's an astronomical sighting arrangement; some that the circle is the kerb of a lost burial mound, although I don't personally see why it shouldn't be both: if Christian churches can be aligned according to the compass, Bronze Age sacred buildings can be aligned on the sun.

In an essay written not long after he came out of hospital following major surgery in autumn 2007, entitled A Pocket History of Caerwent and subtitled "a personal view of a steadily unfolding history", John begins:

Our locality was better known in antiquity than it is now, an area renowned for its beauty and fertility, a magical landscape. The focus of all this is Caerwent. And somehow it all remains a secret, there are few who know about it except for us who live here.

The key to understanding is Gray Hill, Mynydd Lwydd. Stand on top and look around. Spread out below you is the land of Gwent Iscoed - Gwent below the Wood. It runs down to the Estuary and the eye is beckoned out westward to Flatholm, burial place of kings, and beyond to further centres of the Celtic civilisation. It’s a Sacred Landscape, and why? Because it lies beneath the great sanctuary of the Sun. More ancient and more accurate than Stonehenge, for 5000 years the standing stones have marked the rising point of the midwinter Sun. Here great ceremonies were held to greet the rebirth of the waning Sun, the promise of another year.

In this landscape people have lived for about 10,000 years, as we know from flints found around Llanmelin. Between Caerwent and Rogiet were found skulls looking outwards from the back of a cave, the sign of people with similar beliefs to those around the Mediterranean and Middle East at that time (there is a continuity here with the keeping of the skull of St Phillip in Cyprus and the candlelit faces we show on Hallowe’en). These people lived about 6000 years ago. Then artificial caves were built, like the burial chambers at Heston Brake and Gaer Lwydd. From them the ancestors looked out towards the sunrise. As in the name of Gray Hill, Lwydd here means Grey i.e. of the Otherworld

Towards the end of this period, he said, the stone circle and its outlying standing stones were erected on Gray Hill, and over the next thousand years a cemetery of smaller burial cairns grew up further down the hill. Four thousand years ago barrow-mounds were added at Crick, Caerwent’s Brook, Five Lanes and St Brides: the people that built them must have been highly organised but because most of their artefacts were made of perishable materials such as wood and leather little is known of them, not even whether they were settled or semi-nomadic.

In December 2007, less than two months after writing this article, he told me that having seen only cloud on the Solstice he went back up the hill the following day, and this time he did get to see the sun rise. Considering that he was still recovering from some of the most radical surgery it's possible to have, and that even if he drove to the foot of Gray Hill he would still have had to climb it on foot, this is a measure of his devotion, courage and sheer indomitable pig-headedness.

Roman town walls at Caerwent, on the south side of the walled town looking east © Clive Perrin at Geograph

Nowadays the village of Caerwent is dwarfed by the military encampment of MoD Caerwent. MoD Caerwent, built around the village of Dinham just north of Caerwent proper, was first a munitions factory, then an RAF arms-dump under US administration, and is now an army training facility which also allows part of its land to be used by local farmers and firms - and by the Dr Who film-crew. Caerwent itself is now one of those villages so small that as you drove through it you might say "This is Caerwent was it?" In its day, however, it was a sizeable Romano-British walled town, with three temples and its own forum, basilica, amphitheatre and bath-house, and it still has some of the best surviving Roman remains in Europe. The walls of the Roman town are still in excess of sixteen feet high in places, and when they were built they were nearly twice as tall.

The later Welsh village, however, has been built largely outside those walls. The Mediaeval church and a few houses are within the line of the walls of Venta Silurum, but most of the houses are south-east of it or in smaller clusters at north-east and north-west. John believed that this showed that something in the Celtic spirit rebelled against being confined within walls and straight lines although I suspect it also had a lot to do with the fact that once the Romans and their slave-labourers had left, there was no-one in the area who had the specific skills or the imported materials needed to maintain their buildings. It was easier for the local people to put up their own buildings outside the walls and rob (that really is the technical archaeological term for it) stone from the Roman town to build their houses.

Wild daffodils at Rose Cottage, 1^st March 2009 (photographed by John)

John loved Wales, and the Celtic spirit, with a passion and his own colouring, with his white, white skin and black, black hair and grey eyes, suggested Celtic blood even though he hailed from Nottingham. On St David's Day he sent me a message headed Dydd Dewi Sant and a photograph of the daffodils in his garden, taken that morning. He had grown them from seed but the seeds were of the authentic wild native Welsh daffodils which he loved, and which have largely been supplanted by the more garish cultivated varieties: "small plants less than a foot tall", he wrote in the Caerwent Community Newsletter, the flowers having "a medium yellow trumpet" and the petals "very pale with a delicate twist". He drove around the area wild-daffodil-spotting the way people in England go looking for bluebell woods, because anything that was Welsh, especially anything that belonged to the Kingdom of Gwent, was magical and precious to him, and Caerwent most of all. The daffodils will be important later.

I suppose that loving Shirley and loving Caerwent were inextricably linked, since she was born and bred there. Caer in Welsh is a wall, a castle or a city. Caerwent - pronounced (at least by John) "Kai-went" with an almost inaudible "r" - is a Welsh/Brittonic hybrid which means "fortified place with a market" or "city with a market", and its Roman name was Venta Silurum, "market town of the Silures" (pronounced "Wenta Silurum" because Roman "V"s were always "W"s). The Silures were a dark-skinned, curly-haired nation in south Wales who rallied to and fought alongside the famous British general Caradog (Caractacus) when he fell back to Wales from a starting-point further east, and held out against the invading Roman army for thirty years, inflicting on the Legions their worst ever defeat in Britain. Of them Tacitus said that neither clemency nor cruelty could sway them. Venta Silurum, said to have been the first town in Wales, along with a fort at Isca ("place on the river Usk", now Caerleon) eight and a half miles west of Caerwent on the east side of what is now Newport, established a defensible Roman presence in the area and Venta Silurum became the capital and administrative centre for those of the Silures who were willing to be reconciled to Roman rule.

John at Caerwent Roman Day, 13^th October 2001

John's heart, however, was with the unreconciled, always. When Caerwent held a Roman Day in October 2001, everyone else came respectably dressed as Romans or as Romanised natives in togas and shawls, but John turned up in a sackcloth tunic, with a club, all ready to fight off the invaders. He did think about that sort of thing: he told me once, very seriously, that if he had been one of the soldiers at My Lai he would have shot his commander to save the villagers regardless of any consequences to himself, and I believe that he would have done so. Although he could at times be jittery and over-anxious he was also limitlessly brave: he really took the pastoral aspect of being the local councillor to heart and even though he was quite a wee guy, and by that point nearly seventy and in failing health, he used to go out in his car in the middle of the night and patrol around the houses of neighbours (male as well as female) who he knew were being threatened by violent partners, in the hope that his presence as both witness and willing muscle would scare the attackers off. So far as I know, it did.

According to his son Steve, John joined the Labour Party as soon as he was old enough to do so, and travelled to Europe with a Socialist friend from university in order to hear political speakers there. This would have been in the late 1950s or early '60s and provides an interesting analogy with Severus at the same age, although the politics John was getting into were of a different complexion from, and probably rather less extreme than, those of the crowd Severus ran with. After his death, colleagues from the Labour Party paid tributes and Chepstow councillor Armand Watts in particular said "He has been an inspiration to me since I was 15-years-old. He invited me into the Labour party and was an extremely well-thought of and unique character. He will be sorely missed." Yet, although John was a lifelong Labour Party activist he toed the Party line only when he personally agreed with it, and he was willing to fight all comers when he didn't, or when he felt that the internal politics of the local constituency were affecting Labour's chances of winning the seat. He may not have been very good at reading social cues, but at the wider level he had a sound grasp of political tactics.

Fyds called him "an old school socialist of the Bevan type" who had "worked like a Trojan for any number of charities through his life", and John himself told me that he had become a convinced believer in the Comprehensive Schools system (something about which I may say I didn't entirely agree with him) after witnessing the brutal regime at a very low-rent Secondary Mod. on an isolated estate in south Leeds, where the children were kept in line by constant use of the cane. His interest in politics sprang from a will to fight for social justice for anybody disadvantaged or oppressed. Chronically unable to leave undone that which he perceived to need doing, he treated his retirement from paid work as simply an opportunity to do more unpaid work, and spent much of his life - even to the last weary dregs of it - ploughing through a sea of paperwork for the Labour Party and the Caerwent Historic Trust, his other great labour of love.

Interior of Caerwent church of St Stephen and St Tathan © Ruth Sharville at Geograph

As a prize-winning local singer he was sometimes called on to sing solo at church services and functions. On one occasion while I knew him, for instance, he was asked to sing Passing By at Caerwent church as a gift from the bridegroom to the bride. You can see and hear film (a .VOB file) of John singing five songs, Memory, Hither Come, Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Going Home, Sweet-and-Twenty and Passing By, with piano accompaniment, here. You can also listen to his unaccompanied performance (a .mp3 file) in Caerwent church here.

This church which John loved so much, the Anglican parish church of St Stephen's and St Tathan's at Caerwent, dates back to the 13^th C in part and was originally dedicated to a local saint called Tathyw (see Early British Kingdoms), who became confused with Saints Tathan and Stephen because they all shared a feast day on 26^th December. According to tradition, in the late 5^th C a local king called Caradog Strong-Arm (named after the original general) had a palace at Venta Silurum which he donated to Tathyw to found a monastery.

Caradog appears in the Arthurian mythos as Caradog Freichfras and then as Carados Briefbras, "Caradog Short-Arm". In the Welsh Triads he is named as Arthur's chief elder at Celliwig in Cornwall - which for reasons explained in the Appendix is probably a misreading of Llan-y-Gelli near Caerwent - and as one of the Three Battle-Horsemen of Ynys Prydain (the Island of Britain), mounted on a horse called Lluagor, "Host-Parter", who himself was one of the Three Bestowed Horses of Ynys Prydain. His wife Tegau Eurfron, "Pretty Golden-Breast", was one of the Three Splendid Maidens at Arthur's court and the love between Caradog and his wife was named as one of the Three Surpassing Bonds of Love in Ynys Prydain. Then as now, it seems, Caerwent was an auspicious place for a devoted couple.

Caerwent church, looking south towards Highmoor Hill and Slade Wood behind the church, © Iain Macaulay at Geograph

The ruins of Tathyw's church lie under the later one, and the graveyard around it overlies an earlier one which dates back at least to the 5^th C: that is, the graveyard and perhaps the first church probably predate the monastery. Built originally in the 13^th C out of stones robbed from the remains of Venta Silurum, the Mediaeval church was enlarged and gained a tower and porch in the 15^th C.

There must originally have been two side chapels

The Civitas Silurum stone, standing inside the door of Caerwent parish church © Nick Smith at Geograph

on the south side but they were removed at some point, leaving two blocked-off arches on the south wall of the nave: these were reopened during restoration work in the 19^th C and a third arch added, giving access to a new south aisle. A fire in 1860 destroyed the two original bells, and a single bell was recast from their fragments: the church was also badly damaged by a lightning strike in 1974. The inscribed base of a Roman statue, with a reference to public works decreed by the tribal council of the Silures, stands just inside the porch: indeed the church doubles as a secular as well as a religious focal point for the community and many objects of archaeological interest are displayed there, as in a living museum. [See John Ball's Homepage for more on the history of the church, and Mary in Monmouth for detailed photographs of the building and of the many interesting carvings and artefacts it contains.]

View looking up towards Highmoor Hill at right, with Caerwent parish church at left, from Google Streetview

Behind the church, beyond the south wall of Venta Silurum, the ground first falls away slightly into what was once a river bed and then a wide smooth expanse of grass sweeps south up Highmoor Hill to a low crest at Slade Wood. In an interview in October 2003 John said: "For me, it is one of the most beautiful places in the world with a magic and a mystery all of its own. I feel as though I am at the centre of the world." This I understand well, because I have the same feeling about the slope of grass at the foot of Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh: if you lie on your back on the grass there and listen to the earth, you can feel the world turning. I would have shown it to John if I could have.

In this interview, John spoke about the possibility that St Patrick had been born at Caerwent - not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds, for Patrick was born in a walled town near a river which sounds like the Severn, which means it pretty-well has to have been either Caerwent or Gloucester. Caerwent was, in its day, one of the most important towns in the west of Britain. Geological evidence shows that the stream which runs past Caerwent, now called the Ned(d)ern or Troggy Brook, has silted up over the centuries: in its heyday it was navigable by boat and the archaeological evidence confirms that Venta Silurum was accessible by water as well as by road. Modern Caerwent has a population of one to two thousand but at its peak Venta Silurum had around three thousand inhabitants: still tiny by our standards, but at a time when even London only had between thirty and sixty thousand people, three thousand seems to have been enough to qualify as a small city. In fact, "Caerwent" is a corruption of Caer Guent, as is "Gwent" - the historic kingdom and modern county of Gwent, that is, is called "district where Caerwent is" in the same way that Oxfordshire means "district where Oxford is", even though there are now some much larger towns in the area.

Some scholars even believe that Caerwent is the historic Camelot, and that the church of St Stephen where Malory says that Arthur married Guenever and buried twelve defeated rebel kings was the church which is underneath the present church of St Stephen and St Tathan - whether or not the church really was called St Stephen's in Arthur's day. John was keen on this theory which, again, is not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. There are excellent reasons, set out in the Appendix, to think that, at the very least, the three neighbouring sites of Caerwent, Caerleon and an Iron Age hill fort called Caer Melyn, which is close by Caerwent, were where later writers thought Camelot was - and it's perfectly possible that they were right.

John was not just a passive observer of Dark Age Caerwent, either: he took root in it, he became a part of it, by anchoring ancient myth in modern reality.

Portion of the Historia Brittanum

The various surviving copies of the 9^th century compilation called the Historia Brittanum - a sort of Early Mediaeval Pears Cyclopaedia - include several slightly different versions of a list of twenty natural and magical Wonders of Britain, many of them sited in Wales or the English West Country. Most of them can be matched with a high degree of probability with surviving modern landscape features, and a few are very clear and obvious.

Some, however, are more obscure. One of the oddest-seeming was a lake called Llyn Liuan or Liwan, said to be both in Wales and on the Severn, which means that it had to be somewhere near Caerwent. This was a pool near the mouth of a river which flowed into the Severn: it had a whirlpool in it, and it had the wondrous characteristic that when the tide was high water poured into it without raising the level in the pool, and when the tide fell again this extra, vanished water would reappear in a rush.

John had the following snippets of information to work on:

a) The middle section of the Troggy Brook which (theoretically) flows by Caerwent disappears in dry weather in a way which shows that part of it is running underground, and it is known to have done this even in the past when the Troggy was a strong stream instead of the trickle it is now.

b) In wet weather, for more than half the year, the Troggy below Caerwent not only reappears but widens into a shallow pool which has a tendency to appear and disappear faster than normal rainfall and drainage would lead one to expect.

c) Archaeological and geographical evidence shows that the Troggy was once a much wider stream.

d) The archaeological evidence shows that ancient buildings in the area tend to cluster along the edges of what is now the contour-line ten metres above sea-level, but there are no buildings of the period below the ten-metre mark - suggesting that the ten-metre contour marks the original limits of a lake.

e) Local legal documents and maps and the memory of some elderly residents confirms that there were once at least two pairs of whirlpools, known locally as Whirlyholes, within the likely contours of that lake, at least one of which is still marked by a very deep hollow and both of which are hollow enough that they tend to fill with water to form pools.

f) In 1879, engineers working on the Severn Tunnel broke through into an underground chamber full of water in the area, and in so doing permanently diverted a powerful spring which had fed the Troggy system.

g) The whole area is known to be riddled with caves and underground fissures.

You can read about this project of John's in more detail in the Appendix, but it was this basic information which enabled him to show that in the past there must have been a lake, with whirlpools, in between Caerwent and Caldicot and that these whirlpools were "swallow holes" through which water flowed back and forth between the lake and an underground reservoir. It remained only to show how this underground system could form a siphon which would cause the incoming tide to disappear and reappear in the way described in the Historia. Along with Dr Andy Evans (a geologist from John's own alma mater, Leeds University), who is an expert on the Wonders of Britain, and Steven Perry, a student of tidal mechanics, John co-authored a scientific paper which appeared in the periodical Folklore, convincingly identifying Llyn Liwan as the lake on the Troggy.

By extension, this means that the lake on the Troggy, in between Caerwent and Caldicot, is probably Llyn Llyw, translated as "the shining lake" or "the lake of leadership", the pool near the Severn which appears in the Mabinogion in the early Arthurian tale Culhwch and Olwen. It was in Llyn Llyw that the massive, killer-whale-sized salmon who was the oldest creature in Britain lived and from which he carried Arthur's knights to save Mabon from a cruel prison. This connection with salmon mythology suggests to me that the downstream end of the Troggy, which is called the Nedern Brook, is named for Nodons, a locally important Celtic deity associated among other things with salmon. Nodons is believed to be connected to the mythological figure called the Fisher King: this too will be important later.

It can be given to few men to rediscover one of the lost Wonders of the land and restore it to memory. Nor were John's historical interests confined to the ancient past, and I know this better than most because when he was compiling his Caerwent Historic Trust newsletter people used to send him information and images with weird file extensions which he didn't recognise, and he used to forward them to me to sort out and convert into dot-docs and j-pegs which he knew what to do with. In recent centuries Caerwent has built up a lively industrial heritage, and I often had to extract documents relating to people and events of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Along with a colleague Gareth Jones he wrote the Book of Remembrance for the village. His son Steve said of this that "He strongly believed if we don't find out about the people from our community's past, the people who make up the history, then it will be lost forever." John and Gareth composed brief biographies of all the soldiers of Caerwent who had died in twentieth century wars and he told me how very pleased he was when the relatives of the dead told him how well he had recalled their loved ones to life again, how well he had captured them. Now I try to do the same for him, for he believed in memory.

As a small child, John's mother had repeatedly told him that he was so pretty it was a pity he wasn't a girl. Far from making him vain, this had left him disproportionately insecure about his looks and feeling that any damage to his appearance was damage to his worth, and with a profound sense that being male made him somehow sub-standard. To find Snape described as ugly, therefore, was a harsh blow and he was deeply upset by the least realistic and cruellest of the three drawings Rowling did of Snape. To learn that Snape was widely loved, however, and seen as attractive lifted his spirits immensely, and cheered him even as he was dying. The love we all spent on a fictional character was not wasted, for it went to John: he appreciated it and unlike Snape, he got the chance to be happily smug about it.

Jester, one of John's grandchildren's ponies, cornering at speed (John's own photograph)

He had no pets that I know of - certainly not while I knew him - for he and Shirley liked to be able to go away on holiday or to visit their hordes of relations whenever the fancy took them, but he had a benign, neighbourly attitude to non-human animals - even to the rabbits that swarmed his garden - and was fond of his grandchildren's Welsh ponies, who were kept at grass just along the road from Rose Cottage and whom he helped them to look after. Early on they had had a fat chestnut Thelwell-pony type called Mr Softee, whom they had taken on from an equine rescue charity who had nursed him back to health after he had been found half-starved and neglected: John was very upset when Mr Softee had to be sent back and re-homed after neighbours falsely accused him of spreading sweetitch.

At 5'8" John was compact and very fine-boned: he characterized himself as "dainty" and was quite tickled when a reporter described him as "dapper". It was possibly only the slight extra cragginess of features which is sometimes associated with Asperger's syndrome which saved him from ending up looking like a girl. But he was a perfect example of the expression "well-knit": a nicely balanced medium size and build; slim without being scrawny, at least when he was well, and effortlessly well-proportioned. Muscular without being muscle-bound, at seventy he still had the physique of a fit man half his age. One of my favourite quotations is Dean Inge's comment that "We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse" but John, had he been a horse, would himself have been a springy little Welsh pony with excellent conformation. He minded very much that he had been badly scarred by surgery, but he was still beautiful and still looked about fifteen years younger than his chronological age.

This is the third time that I have seen a chemist remain much younger-looking than they really are for decades, and then suddenly fall away under the onslaught of an aggressive cancer.

Caricatures of Snape by JK Rowling

The uglier and less realistic of Rowling's drawings of Snape may be cruel libels on a handsome man (and the more realistic one demonstrates her unfortunate tendency to make the lower part of her subjects' faces far too short,

Semi-realistic drawing of Snape and Ron, cropped from a group drawing by JK Rowling

without which she could probably draw to professional standard), but all three drawings illustrate an important point: that it is not only some of the major characters and locations in the Harry Potter books which were

John in December 1978

demonstrably inspired by people and places in the real world, but also many fine and often eccentric details, which echo life at Wyedean in a way which often suggests a deliberate "in joke". All three drawings presumably show how Rowling herself visualises Snape, and in each one he is shown wearing a Dracula-collared cloak which is never described as such in the books, but which is clearly a piss-take of a high-collared hippyish jacket which John wore when Rowling knew him. Even the stubble is drawn from life - John assured me that five o'clock shadow was a common occurrence at that time, having super-white skin and black hair and being, often, too busy even to go to the lavvie, let alone to shave thoroughly.

Not that he was Goth-coloured all the time. He loved sun and sea and sand, sleeping in tents, sunbathing and swimming, as well as gardening in whatever sunshine was available in Gwent: during the three and a half years that I knew him he went to the Greek Islands at least twice, to Italy, to Cuba and to Vietnam, and I may have forgotten a few. Consequently although his native colour was extremely pale, during the time that I knew him he was probably suntanned brown more often than he was fair.

Rowling's decision to change the colour of Snape's eyes is an interesting one. John's colouration - fair skin, black hair and pale eyes - is classically Irish. Black hair, dark eyes and dark skin is also a common combination here but to have black hair, dark eyes and fair skin is unusual in Britain. For this reason I have made Snape part Spanish in my fanfics but there is a strain of that colouration in some parts of Wales, also believed to be possibly due to Spanish blood, although rather longer ago - either because some early Celtic settlers came from Iberia or because there was quite a strong Roman presence in Wales, and many Roman legionaries were Spaniards. A particular Y-chromosome gene associated with Mediterranean origin is found in 1% of men in the general British population, and in 30% of men in north-east Wales.

I don't know whether Rowling gave John's alter ego black eyes just because she thought it would suit Snape; or because she was too shy to look John in the eyes and see that his eyes were grey; or whether making Snape an apparent northerner (because Spinner's End is a kind of pastiche of northern English industrial clichés) but giving him Welsh colouring was a reference to John's status as an adopted Welshman who was born in Nottingham, and still had a somewhat northern accent.

Snape's hair was very definitely copied from John's. He was inordinately proud of his Snapey hair, and still preferred to wear it as long as Shirley would let him even after it had turned grey. He had always just let it flop and then parted it wherever it seemed to want to go, and latterly it had tended to flop at the centre, although in my opinion it no longer hung quite right with a centre part. I did try to persuade him to move to a slight side-parting, telling him that the difference between a side and centre-part was the difference between looking romantically Byronic and looking as if he was peering through a gap in a hedge, but he replied firmly that he liked looking as if he was peering through a gap in a hedge.

His attitude to publicity and to being seen changed over the years. When I first knew him, he was very wary of letting photographs of himself "when he was Snape" be published on the net, in case it led to excessive attention which might upset his wife. But when he wrote his Harry Potter's Chepstow booklet in July 2009 he used the 1980 photograph of himself lounging bare-chested in a deckchair as a tailpiece decoration, and he had intended that his last ever newspaper interview, in December 2010, should be decorated with the 1979 photo' of himself looking poetic and Ricardian in white cheesecloth. In July 2010 I asked for his permission to show a selection of photographs of himself with swinging curtains of hair to a fellow Snape fan in order to illustrate a point about Snape's hair and he replied "Swinging curtains - glad somebody appreciates them [cut]. Yes I like them, spread 'em around!" So I am doing so.

His relationship to his fictional reflection was complex, and over the years he went from being mortified at being identified as Snape, then feeling that the film identification of Snape with Alan Rickman was to the good because it made Snape more fans, then finally to referring to Snape as "me" and regarding Rickman!Snape in fanart and fanfiction as an ersatz intruder. I told him that Snape was about as like him as a son or a brother would be, and was a sort of bastard child he had had with Rowling, all unknowingly, only to have this unexpected offspring turn up fully grown years later - an idea he found amusingly scandalous.

"There was this child hiding in the back of class year in, year out", he said in that final interview, "and you didn't know what she was thinking but it all comes pouring out 20 years later. Instead of her thinking, 'There's Mr Nettleship in his white coat and his experiment just blew up,' she was thinking, 'He is wearing a black coat and the experiment will blow up when he touches it with his wand.'"

I told him when I first knew him that he must not think that we Snape fen liked him only because of his connection with Snape. Rather, we liked Snape because Snape was an example of a kind of person we liked, and since John was very like Snape in many ways, he too was an example of a kind of person we liked - and would still have liked even if he had had no connection with Snape at all. He identified strongly with my analysis of Snape's character - especially with the idea that Snape gets landed with necessary jobs no-one else wants to do, and then is looked askance at for doing them - and said that it was a great help to him in enduring all that he had to endure while undergoing very drastic and painful surgery in autumn 2007.

John was not the only member of his family to end up as a character in fiction. His little brother Roy is a maths teacher who taught at Mundella Grammar School in Nottingham, where he was known as "Battleship" and also - because of his jagged hairstyle - as "Spike". Spike ended up being lampooned by a former pupil under his own name "Mr Nettleship" in the British satirical/scatological magazine Viz. [For the benefit of foreign readers who may not know it, Viz is a bit like Mad only way filthier and less mature - it does or did include e.g. a long-running strip about a man whose testicles were so large he had to push them around in front of him in a wheelbarrow.]

I don't know whether "Mr Nettleship" was a long-running character in Viz or made a single appearance, but if the latter it must have been a memorable one, for he became the exemplar of the rigid, dull, stuffed-shirt style of teaching.

John singing with his friend, musician Claire Hamilton - and Fidelis

This was actually most unfair: I gather he is and was a train-spotter par excellence but as you would expect from a brother of John's, he is far from being the sort of desiccated martinet evidently portrayed by Viz. On the Old Mundellians' forum he is spoken of fondly and referred to as "greatly respected"; as, like John, never appearing to get any older; as wearing "Jesus sandals"; being the only teacher who cared enough to bother to turn up for an old school reunion; suffering from distracting "restless arm movements" and as being a decent bloke despite looking as if he had just escaped from jail.

Basing a fictional character on a real person so obviously that everyone that knew them could see the resemblance at once was a bit of a gamble on Rowling's part, since it depended on John being good natured enough not to sue her, and doing so without asking or warning John was a bit off in my opinion: although of course she had no idea at the outset that the books would take off in the way that they did, or that Snape would become internationally famous. It could, potentially, have done John great harm - it did initially upset and depress him, and caused him to be ill-treated by some people - but the contact from Tamara and the information that many people liked Snape a lot cheered him immensely. Tamara wrote a strange little fanfic for him, involving a toy dog called Fidelis who could come to life in order to protect Snape (a perfectly reasonable idea in a fictional universe in which statues can march to battle to defend their castle) and sent him a Beany Baby Fidelis which he adopted as a mascot.

John "being Snape" at the 13^th C Blackfriars Priory in Gloucester, probably 2007

He was in his own way a considerable performer, he loved to sing and play the cornet and to do his little chemical raps and even his lectures in class were exercises in Performance Art, so being turned into Snape was rather like an actor being handed a starring rôle, forever. Having embraced his inner wizard, he entered into the thing with enthusiasm and even earned pin-money dressing as Snape to conduct tours of Chepstow for an American tourist company. It wasn't that he needed the money, either - it was just for the love of getting into character and bouncing about in robes.

Steve expressing his appreciation of his father's alter ego

His family, too, embraced his Snapishness. His son Steve even turned his father's ink and paper shadow into a make-my-day humorous boast, and put up a poster at his office saying "The Character of nasty Professor Snape in the Harry Potter Books is based on my Dad".

Even at the outset when, he said, "being a bit naive, I used to swallow every thought of Harry's as definitive", in the days when he still thought Snape was "loathsome", John was fan enough and sporting enough to put in an appearance as what Tamara called the "Ur-Snape" at a Harry Potter fan-club meeting at the St Pierre Marriott hotel, although when a boy there told him that Snape was his favourite character "I told him he must be mad, poor lad!" It took Tamara to give him a new view on Snape and "Since then", he said, "I've managed to improve my overall grip on what Joanne is really telling us".

That is to say, what Tamara had convinced him of was that Rowling intended Snape to have many hidden virtues - as, indeed, she clearly does - and that she intended Harry to be an Unreliable Narrator, whose views are coloured by his own prejudices, prior experiences and incomplete information. He never did get to the point of accepting that Rowling might be wrong about any of her characters and that even if she had truly thought of Snape as evil, that wouldn't alter the fact that his actions are those of somebody who clearly has many virtues and whom many people would like.

To clarify, Rowling's characters are manifestations of thoughts in her head and if she says that a particular character would act in a particular way, that's how it is, but I do not see that we have to share her moral evaluation of her characters' behaviour. A canon-compatible Snape cannot be so cloyingly saintly that Rowling couldn't have mixed feelings about him, whether we share her ambiguity or not, and a canon-compatible Dumbledore cannot be so villainous that Rowling couldn't think that on the whole and with a few caveats he's one of the good guys, whether we agree with her or not: but we are free to think that e.g. Harry's use of Crucio is more disturbing and unpleasant than Rowling thinks it is; or that Molly Weasley is a shrill annoying harridan who sees her children as extensions of her own ambitions even though Rowling seems (judging from some of her comments) to view her as the perfect mother; or that Hermione's action in scarring Marietta Edgecombe for life to punish her for being more loyal to her own mother and her government than to a friend of a friend she barely knew and hadn't really wanted to get involved with in the first place was disgraceful even though Rowling thinks that the punishment of this "traitor" was fully justified. John however clung to the idea that Lily was entirely perfect because Rowling seemed to think she was, regardless of how cold and offhand she was to his alter ego, and he accepted the morally dubious idea that any cruel or illegal thing done by the Trio was acceptable because they were the Good Guys and so anything they did was automatically justified, because Rowling seemed to think that it was so and whatever she thought must be right.

Even so, John was an enthusiastic, intelligent and analytical fan of the series. This is John on Hagrid, for example: "There is ... a character shift that may have been inevitable due to the choice of actor: Film Hagrid is far less up-and-down than book Hagrid. I don't get much sense of his insecurity or vulnerability in the film, he seems to be the ever dependable Hulk. Book Hagrid gets bouts of depression, I think [cut] Whereas I thought of Hagrid and Snape being of equal interest in the books, Film Hagrid's a bore, he's only half alive compared with Snape."

John lectured locally on the connections between the Potter books and the Chepstow area. He even wrote his own fanfic, a lively and amusing addition to Fantastic Beasts called The Scalpipede, illustrated with one of his own lively little drawings, and he had plans to write an SS/OC romance although failing health and Labour Party paperwork meant that it never got past the planning stage. He would hear no wrong of Rowling and saw only good in her, she was one of the few people in whom he would acknowledge no faults at all, even when discussing the fact that her agents (whether with or without her knowledge I don't know) had stopped him from doing Snape tours.

Personally I thought this was a flaming cheek, since Snape was an obvious near-duplicate of himself (acknowledged as such in 2007 when the author admitted she had written Snape in part as a satire on her male Chemistry teacher) which had been taken and used commercially without his permission, and now he was being prevented from asserting any ownership over the piece of himself which had been taken. The situation was analogous to a photographer taking an image of somebody in the street without asking their permission, turning it into a highly successful poster and then refusing the unwitting model any rights over their own image. But when somebody asked John about it and wanted to do a story his reply included the comment that "the blogs following your article contain a lot of invective directed against Joanne. I am very concerned at the unpleasant attitude of these people. The books were written for love, not money, and as Joanne said recently 'The death of my mother is written on almost every page of these books.' I know, because as Max Boyce would say of other circumstances 'I was There!'"

View from Gray Hill down towards the Wentwood reservoir, Midwinter sunrise 2009 - the last year John was fit to climb the hill - from Llanvair Discoed website

To me as a pagan one of the most striking things about Snape is that he is the only character in the stories who comes across as what I would consider to be a real wizard (or rather a witch, since in the circles I move in "witch" describes a method of working which is both gender-neutral and ecumenical), rather than a storybook character waving a wand. There is something powerful and shamanic in the way Snape keeps Harry safely on his broom in the first book by locking eyes on him and chanting, or sings Draco's wounds shut in the sixth book. John too had some of that deep force: even though he wasn't a practising witch or mage he had great charisma and energy, and his sense of connection to Wales and Gray Hill and the lost lake was strongly magical. When he took his parties of the faithful up to the crest of Mynydd Lwydd to see the midwinter sun up, to go to the grey place, to the gates of the Otherworld, he was probably the nearest thing Caerwent still had to a local Druid priest.

He certainly fitted one of Terry Pratchett's definitions of a witch - that of a person who, upon perceiving some distressing social problem, says "Somebody ought to do something, and that somebody is me."

He believed that Rowling too had force and that she was a seer, because of the way in which her stories sometimes anticipated real-life events she could not have known about. She may just be extremely good at assessing characters and predicting how they will react in particular circumstances: but when John dressed up in robes and sang about a Dark wizard after Joanne had lost touch with him, but before Snape was written; when the man who was clearly the main inspiration for Hagrid behaved just as Hagrid does when confronted by a situation which mirrored one in the books, even though Joanne had no knowledge of it; when the sickly, pleasant-mannered but not entirely reliable colleague whom John believed to be the model for Remus received bad news which caused him to howl in a voice resembling a wolf's; then John believed that Rowling was a witch in truth.

This wasn't all that unreasonable, either. Although John could at times be as daft as a brush many of his wilder-seeming ideas, if you blew the froth off and looked at them critically, weren't nearly as daft as they sounded (even if some of his ideas about ancient history and the suppression of the Divine Feminine by a wicked patriarchy had resulted from his getting the ancient Israelites confused with the ancient Greeks). Despite her Bible-Belt-appeasing denials that she has ever had any interest in anything to do with real witchcraft or the occult, I know for a fact that before she was famous Rowling used to draw up illustrated astrological birth-charts for friends and neighbours, because one of them turned up on the Antiques Roadshow, and there was no mistaking her distinctive artwork and therefore no doubt that the author was who she was claimed to be.

There was a dark side, however, to John's conviction that Rowling was clairvoyant, for he believed that since Snape had died young, and the story of his death had appeared whilst he himself was awaiting major surgery for cancer, that meant that he was bound to die soon too, that the cancer was bound to be fatal - and indeed it proved so, whether or not Rowling had genuinely foreseen it. Yet he also said that "... it occurred to me that Professor Snape is a kind of Horcrux for John Nettleship" - Snape, in a sense, would make him live on nearly forever, for as long as the books are read.

It is in part to make that come true that I write this piece. Even if John were forgotten, so long as Snape is remembered there will be a piece of John still in the public mind; but since there were significant differences between them, and John did so much more than teach and love and die and was such an important character in his own right, to remember only his fictional shadow and forget the man would be a significant loss. The passage which I was translating seemed innocent enough—to all the rest. We were reading at sight—the professor's particular hobby; and he was exploiting upon us the Twelfth Oration of Lysias. . . .

"'And although he has been the author of all these and still other disasters and disgraces, both old and new, both small and great, some dare to proclaim themselves his friends; although it is not for the people that Theramenes died, but because of his own villainy—'"

Then I choked and stopped. Tears swam in my eyes, and a hot flush scalded my cheeks. . . . "It is a lie," I burst forth. "A cruel, hateful lie. . . . I will not read it—I will not read another line," I cried. For the past had opened like a darkness lightning-cleft; all in one moment I felt the injustices of ages; the shame of an aeon of scorn—and they asked me to read against myself the lying record. . . . After that they nicknamed me Theramenes: I was nicknamed after myself, and none suspected. . . .

Professor Charles Kelsey Gaines, from Reincarnation: An East-West Anthology compiled and edited by Joseph Head and SL Cranston, p. 264

[Interestingly enough, although at the time most classical historians agreed with Lysias that Theramenes was a villain, many modern scholars now see him as a principled moderate who was judicially murdered by his colleagues in the oligarchy for refusing to go along with a financially-motivated massacre of immigrants.]

Also, as a believer in reincarnation I think often of a story told by Professor Charles Kelsey Gaines, who was Professor of Greek Philosophy at St Lawrence University in the late 19^th C. As a student at a college in New England, circa 1870, he had found himself translating from the Greek a critical account of the Ancient Athenian politician Theramenes, who had been executed supposedly as a traitor. He realised with a wrenching shock that Theramenes was himself and began to shout and rave in misery, proclaiming his own innocence.

If reincarnation is for real - and I believe that it is - and given that the Potter books will probably be read for centuries, the odds are good that some future incarnation of John will read about Snape and remember that this character was once based on himself. I don't want him to look up his past self and find himself described only as a cruel bully who must have done JK Rowling some terrible injury, to cause her still to be plotting revenge against him thirty years later - especially as he was and perhaps will be somebody very distressed by false accusation. I want him to read about and recall who he really was, and so become doubly immortal, as John Nettleship and not just as Severus Snape.

Snape was important to John - but he is also important to Snape. To begin with, those who hate Snape argue that because he has this or this difficult characteristic, he must be a bad man. But John was like enough to Snape that nearly everybody that knew him spotted the resemblance at once, and as well as sharing all Snape's virtues he also shared many of his more challenging personality traits, especially the hot temper and the sarcasm. These traits did not prevent him from being an outstandingly good and loving - and loved - man and the mainstay of his community, therefore they do not preclude Snape from also being outstandingly good and loving, and loved.

If you are interested in authorial intent, rather than only in what's on the page, then knowing that Rowling clearly based Snape to a considerable extent on John can illuminate some points which are obscure in the books, especially to do with Snape's physical appearance and manner. Failure to do so, on the other hand, can lead to some strange aberrations, such as the high-powered fannish essay which claimed in all seriousness that Rowling had given Snape long hair in order to feminise and "tame" him - although why that should make him tamer is anybody's guess. Snape has long hair because his physical appearance is closely based on a real guy with long hair.

From Book 2 onwards we are told repeatedly that Snape has long hair which forms curtains, and at the start of Book 2 we are told that his hair is actually shoulder-length, although this is mentioned nowhere else. One of Rowling's caricatures of Snape shows him with hair brushing or perhaps just below his shoulders and the other with hair right down below his shoulder-blades (and which appears to be occupying the same space as his high cloak-collar), while her more realistic drawing shows his hair midway between shoulders and jaw. There are at least two ways of interpreting "curtains of hair", but since we know Snape was largely based on John, and John had curtains of hair, it's reasonable to assume that Snape's curtains are probably intended to be like John's curtains when Rowling knew him - smooth, straight, bobbed, fringeless, centre- or slightly side-parted and varying in length between jaw-length and just touching the shoulders, according to when he last had a haircut.

It is unclear, in the books, whether Snape's hooked nose is intended to be what Americans think of as a hooked nose - a nose buckled at the bridge, which is sometimes called a hooked nose here as well but is more commonly termed a Roman or aquiline nose - or whether it is intended to be a straight nose bent down at the tip, which seems to have no specific name in the US but is called a hooked nose here. But the fact that John's nose was straight with an amusing blob on the end, combined with Rowling's drawings, suggests it's probably meant to be a straight nose with a hooked-over tip.

Snape's height in the books is also not made very clear. All we know is that he's visibly shorter than Sirius, who is tall, yet he is close enough to Sirius in height that Harry only realises Snape is shorter than Sirius when he sees them close together; and he is sufficiently taller than Narcissa, who is tall for a woman, to be able to look down into her face when they are both standing. Depending on exactly how tall Sirius is, this gives Snape a potential height-range from about 5'10" to 6'1", but since John was only 5'8", Snape should probably be as short as we can get him whilst still being taller than a tall woman, and only slightly shorter than a tall man - so Snape is probably 5'10".

We all - even me - associate Snape with Alan Rickman's rich, dark, languid drawl. I personally dislike the films, because they change the whole nature of the characters and situations so much - they change Snape into a confident, reserved, commanding middle-aged bully instead of the very young, excitable, emotionally labile man, barely more than a boy himself, that he is in the books, who lashes out because he is young and scared and tired and out of his depth; change Harry into a soppy, doe-eyed innocent instead of an angry, semi-delinquent tough-with-a-heart-of-gold who steals and lies without compunction but who, unlike his film counterpart, does not hesitate even for a second before abandoning the quest for Triwizard success in order to go to somebody's aid; change Hermione to somebody prim and priggish instead of the bold girl who was snogging an international sports star when she was fifteen; change the Death Eaters at the World Cup into a terrifying, disciplined marching army in sinister parade masks, destroying all in their path, instead of a whooping, drunken rabble in Balaclava helmets who set fire to a couple of tents by accident by blundering through other people's cooking fires - but even I think Rickman's voice is to die for. But there's no actual evidence for it in the books, and Snape is in fact probably meant to sound like John - which is to say, quite a lot like Wallace in the Wallace & Gromit films.

Nor was John by any means the only real person whose character and/or appearance seems to have contributed to the Potterverse. Knowing that Joanne Rowling had started telling stories about a school of magic

Phyllis Lewis with one of her ceramic sculptures, from This is Gloucestershire

while she was still at Wyedean, as a way of lampooning her real teachers, John and other former members of the Wyedean staff made a hobby and a game out of matching people, places and events in the Potterverse with real counterparts in and around Chepstow. John wrote a series of essays identifying various local characters and their fictional equivalents, which were circulated around The Sisterhood and others of his fannish friends, but these were not for general release because not everybody was as happy to be turned into fiction as he was, and he didn't want to get Rowling sued.

In this article, therefore, I have given a name to only one likely original who has not been openly identified by Rowling, and that's the late Phyllis Lewis, a well-known local sculptor in ceramics and passionate defender of the Forest of Dean who taught pottery classes at Wyedean and who was widely recognised as the original for Professor Sprout, and was apparently perfectly happy about it. I have also omitted any identifying information which wasn't directly relevant to explaining why John matched each person with a particular fictional counterpart.

In some cases I felt that John was "reaching" - straining too hard to find a match for everybody in the books. Some of the characters will be more or less pure invention, or based on people Rowling knows but whom John never met. But there was no doubt that many of them, and many events, were at least partially inspired by real people in and around Wyedean - as you would expect, since the whole thing began life as a skit on the Wyedean staff.

This is not in any way a criticism of Rowling. Most authors base at least some of their characters partly on real people - it's well known that Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on one of his Professors, that Peter Wimsey was inspired by a university friend of Dorothy L Sayers', and those of us who were on the British SF convention scene in the 1980s know that some of Terry Pratchett's characters are at least partially inspired by real-life fannish personalities (and I have reasons to suspect that Sybil Ramkin was partly based on me) - and Rowling is perfectly capable of inventing characters from scratch when she needs to. Dumbledore seems to be 85% invention and he is one of the most interesting and complex characters in the series. But what is unusual about the Potter books is that many of the characters began as caricatures of one small group of people who all knew each other, and so were able to read the books and say to each other "Oh, hey, look, that's you!"

I know that some fen feel that it is some sort of crime to suggest that there might have been real life inspirations for some people and events in the Potterverse, but you only have to compare Rowling's own drawings with the real staff at Wyedean to see that it was so, and the books are full of in-jokes about real items of British politics and folklore and sly clever references to other authors - Tinworth, for example, is the name of a fictional Cornish village in the murder-mystery Safer Than Love by Margery Allingham, which takes place in a boys' boarding school, and Umbridge and Tonks are the names of two of the teachers at St Trinian's. In any case this essay is about John, and it is a fact that John made a very active hobby out of spotting likely real-life inspirations for the books, lectured about it and wrote a book and many essays about it, and that at least three other members of the Wyedean staff shared his interest.

I have often said that Terry Pratchett is the Shakespeare of our age and Rowling is the Dickens. Pratchett's books are full of resounding, beautiful phrases which will stay with you for life. Rowling's literary style is merely workmanlike, her actual writing isn't Great Art as Pratchett's often is, but her plotting and dialogue are of very high standard and she is an absolutely superb and very subtle delineator of character. Few writers, perhaps none, can best her at those telling little details of gesture and speech which show us a personality in action rather than merely describing it. Under the Invisibility Cloak of her introversion she must be an exceptionally observant people-watcher, and she honed her skills at Wyedean.

Phyllis Lewis with some of her ceramic sculptures of local workmen, from GloucestershireLive

Rowling has admitted that Lockhart was based very closely on a real person (although John didn't seem to know who); that Snape was based on John (although she has recently tried to backpedal) with a side-order of Sylvia Morgan; that Harry is based on her husband and Ron on a friend of hers; and that Hermione is a self-insert. By her own account, Lockhart must be about 85% real, and it was clear that Snape was about 70-75% John. Likewise, and allowing for the fact that Pomona Sprout doesn't get all that much character-development in the books, Professor Sprout seems to be based almost neat - certainly as regards her appearance - on Phyllis Lewis.

Low-resolution copy of Pomona Sprout as drawn by JK Rowling

Phyllis was a gentle, friendly soul with a flop-brimmed hat with flowers around the rim and a face like a floury bun, who seems to have been universally adored by her students. Lest any of those students still think that John was some sort of monster, note that he and Phyllis were good friends. She it was, with her artist's eye, who first noted his striking resemblance to Richard III, and she was a member of the spot-the-reference crowd, and happy to be identified as Sprout. When she died, in July 2010, John helped to organise her funeral and he had me separating out and normalising a recording of her singing a song about the Forest of Dean, taken from a local radio programme, to play during the service. She had a nice voice, not all that strong but sweet and clear and slightly husky - an excellent voice for folk music.

Black-line version of Rowling's drawing of Pomona Sprout, used at Phyllis Lewis's memorial exhibition

High-resolution copy of Pomona Sprout as drawn by JK Rowling

John himself, with his powerful baritone, usually sang in the slightly operatic Welsh manner but I wanted to hear him sing She Moved Through the Fair, which I felt would suit his voice admirably. We had a jam session on the 'phone with me teaching him the tune, singing it back and forth until he got it, and I sent him recordings by other singers, and he sang a verse on the 'phone for wynnleaf - but I never did get to hear it sung in his voice. He performed it at one of his music meetings, the last, I think, he ever went to, and he said it was well-received: but nobody recorded it, and after that there was no more singing.

In October 2010, at Clearwell Caves in her beloved Forest of Dean, there was a memorial exhibition of Phyllis's work which included a display talking about her connection with Professor Sprout. Because all the versions of Rowling's drawing of Sprout which were on the net at that time were very fuzzy, John had me trace over them and produce a cleaned-up black-line version as best I could. A sharper version of Rowling's own drawing appeared on the net years later, so you can judge how accurate my blackline version was.

There were other characters who were clearly about 60% real, although in taking ownership of them and turning them into her own characters Rowling was sometimes somewhat unkind to the originals, as she was to John. There was at Wyedean a powerfully-built, bushy-bearded, emotionally labile, weird-critter-loving Biology teacher in bikers' leathers, but he was highly intelligent and academically able, and not particularly tall. There was a slightly frog-like woman who had a sugar-sweet manner but was actually a manipulative, controlling and devious political animal with a circle of aggressive students who were her acolytes, but she was morally opposed to the physical punishment of students and her goals were on the whole good ones, in intention if not always in practice.

John felt that it was not a coincidence that Rowling's father's name was Peter, and indeed the fact that John was friends with her father, with whom she had publicly severed all relations (understandably so, since he seems to be about as suited to fatherhood as she is to a career in higher mathematics), probably contributed to Rowling's decision to reject any attempts by John to get back in touch which, I suppose, is in some ways understandable. It's interesting that Peter Pettigrew is, in the end, slightly redeemed by his reluctance to kill Harry.

In other cases, it was only a few striking characteristics which were reproduced. There was at Wyedean an immensely tall and rather grand French mistress, but I don't know if she was like Madame Maxime in other ways. The headmaster was erudite, eccentric and a bit twinkly, a laissez-faire manager and I think also white-haired, but he probably wasn't an over-mastering genius, or a former would-be dictator, or emotionally abusive, or the mastermind of a secret army. The father of one of the students, who lived in a noticeably large and upmarket house, objected to the school's eccentric all-in-one Science curriculum in the same way Lucius objects to Hagrid's teaching, and succeeded in having John blocked from teaching science at Wyedean in the holistic, innovative way he preferred, but they were a pleasant-enough family. There was a jolly, fat bon viveur who flopped in his armchair as if fused with it: he was a former Chemistry (Potions) teacher and well-connected, but he wasn't a manipulative social networker. [All of this was already revealed by John in public lectures in and around Chepstow.] It's not at all surprising that all these resemblances exist, since the stories did begin as a satire on the Wyedean staff, and many of them are probably intentional in-jokes. Many of the characters are mostly fictional and borrow only a few of their characteristics from real life - but borrow them they undoubtedly do.

To some extent the staff are "types" and you could find partial matches for most of them in most schools, but many of the resemblances are extremely specific. Even a quick trawl through the Wyedean forums reveals a jumble of individual characteristics and incidents which are unmistakeably echoed in the books, including a few which even John seems to have missed.

There was a teacher called Mr Mooney, although his name seems to be the only thing he shared with Remus. There was a teacher who liked to weird students out by removing his glass eye, or tapping it with his fingernails, although he was not in other respects much like Mad-Eye Moody. John was struck on the head and injured by a cricket ball (Bludger) while refereeing a match. The staff were "unashamedly biased and supportive of their houses and you could see that it really mattered to every body, Mr Mooney used to clearly show favouritism to the Chichester teams even after leaving his post as head of that house." There was a school pond - and a school pumpkin patch. The students at one point had a craze for séances; at another, the headmaster banned all kissing and cuddling, so famously that it was said to have been reported in the national press, and he was remembered as "trawling the edges of [a school disco] pulling apart love-sick teenagers". Some of these incidents have been reassigned, so that both Mooney's house bias and the headmaster's gooseberrying ended up attached to Snape, but they clearly reflect real events.

Something else which was copied from life was the fact that Snape is brilliant at Potions, but makes a mistake when talking about Dark creatures - for John's knowledge of Biology was not up to the standard of his Chemistry and Physics. I had to tell him that one of his colleagues had been quite right to warn male students that tight trousers might affect their fertility, and what "metastasis" meant, and that the yellow fluid the doctors drained from his lungs was lymph.

A former Wyedean student told me that the claim Dudley makes to Harry about Stonewall High, that "They stuff people's heads down the toilet first day at Stonewall", was traditionally told to prospective new students about Wyedean, although it wasn't actually true. John himself said that the way Lily treats Severus was pretty standard for the way girls did treat boys at Wyedean, when Joanne Rowling was there, and that the bullying was also fairly accurate as there was "a lot of taunting and backbiting" in Joanne's time. Joanne herself once stood up to and physically fought with one of the bullies and "got her on the floor" - much to her teachers' surprise, since she was so small and usually inoffensive. Since she has admitted that Hermione is a self-insert, this may have a bearing on the scene where Hermione slaps Draco.

Plimpies as drawn by JK Rowling, from Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them

"Muggle", incidentally, was a play-word used at that time by the Wyedean staff, including Anne Rowling, as a substitute for "muddle" - as in, "I'm in a bit of a muggle", presumably meant as the same sort of internally reflexed joke as "Dyslexia drools KO". If the spurious plagiarism case involving the The Legend of Rah and the Muggles manuscript had continued, John was all poised like a greyhound in the slips, ready to spring into action and testify on Rowling's behalf about the origin of the word. Plimpies, on the other hand, he thought were the golf balls at the local country club, which seemed to be magnetically attracted to water.

John made a hobby out of spotting likely local inspirations for places in the books, and wrote the booklet Harry Potter's Chepstow which is essentially a tourist guide-book for fans of the series who want to walk round the town spotting sites connected with Rowling herself, or with the Potterverse, complete with a map and a suggested route. I beta-read it for him, and even sourced a couple of the photographs. There were also other connections which John found - or in a couple of cases, which I did - which didn't get into the booklet because they lay outside Chepstow itself, such as the fact that "Dursley" is the name of a town about fifteen miles from Chepstow.

Chepstow Castle reflected in River Wye, from Chepstow Web Site

Of the obviously Potter-linked sites in Chepstow (and in John's book) the most striking is probably Chepstow Castle itself, which the young Jo Rowling probably saw a couple of times a week while she was living in Tutshill (Sedbury and Tutshill are twin suburbs of Chepstow, Sedbury to the south and Tutshill to the north, on the English side of the river Wye). This is the oldest stone-built Norman castle in Britain, begun in 1067, the year after the Norman Conquest. It stands on a cliff above a smooth expanse of water (in this case, a river), with a tunnel at the foot of the cliff which carries the water in under the castle. Look at the castle from across the water and on the left-hand side of the building, in the same position in which Rowling's own sketch-map of Hogwarts is labelled "Lawn slopes down to lake (tree)", a wide skirt of grass sweeps down to the river's edge and ends in a cluster of trees and bushes, including what looks like a large beech tree.

Again, I am not saying that there's anything wrong with taking real places and using them as the basis for fictional locations. I suppose nearly all writers of fiction do it - I've certainly done it myself - and it seems to have been what the several authors of the Arthurian cycle did when they (very probably) made Camelot out of Caerwent, and Caer Sidi out of Sudbrook Camp (see Appendix). It is a noble tradition. But it's also interesting to play spot-the-reference, and John liked to play the game for the Potter books as much as for the Historia Brittanum.

Abandoned wooden buggy in Clearwell Caves mine-working

The most entirely incontrovertible of the resemblances which John found was outside Chepstow proper. About nine miles nor'-nor'-east of Chepstow is an ancient iron-ore mine called Clearwell Caves, set in an area of farmland partly surrounded by the Forest of Dean. It was in Clearwell Caves that Phyllis Lewis's posthumous sculpture exhibition was held. Of them, John said this:

"Since 1970 or before they have been

JK Rowling's own drawing of Gringotts' tunnels

a tourist attraction and of special interest to families around Christmas when children can meet Father Christmas in a rather magical setting. The Rowling children are sure to have been brought here, as were my own. Iron ore is transported in little trucks which run on very narrow rails through a maze of tunnels. The tunnels must be very long as they apparently extend to the basement of Gringotts bank, where the Goblins use the little wooden buggies to access the security vaults.

"You will see that Joanne’s own sketch corresponds quite well with the old buggy lying on its side in the recent photograph."

Some of the connections are odd or partial: winding cobbled streets which are like Rowling's sketch of Diagon Alley, but steeply-sloped and too narrow for a pavement café; mysterious, rambling old inns which might or might not have inspired

The Three Broomsticks or The Leaky Cauldron or The Hog's Head; a subterranean waterway which flowed under the floor of the Rowlings' house and could be accessed via a grille underneath the dining-room table; secret, tunnel-like lanes; a Green Dragon pub; a Merlin Bookshop whose proprietor bore a distinct physical resemblance to Mr Ollivander. Halfway up a steep hillside a mile or so north of Chepstow is a walk-through tunnel called The Giant's Cave: it isn't really all that much like the cave halfway up a mountain where Sirius and Buckbeak live in GoF, but you can see it might have sown the seed for Grawp taking up residence in a cave on a mountain.

Detail of JK Rowling's own sketch of Hogwarts

Reclining mulberry tree at the Marriott Country Club, St Pierre, near the Marriott hotel (John's own photograph I think)

One of the more eccentric probable connections was to the Whomping Willow. Two miles south-west of Chepstow is the Marriott St Pierre Hotel and Country Club, of which the Rowlings were members and where the young Joanne used to swim.

Gnarled oak on the golf-course at the Marriott Country Club, St Pierre, near junction of M48 and A48, © Jonathan Billinger at Geograph

In front of the hotel was a giant, convoluted mulberry tree which one night whomped in very truth, for it fell over in the night and then kept on growing from a now-recumbent trunk. John was sure this horizontal mulberry was the original of the Whomping Willow, but while poking about on the net I came across another candidate - a spectacularly gnarled oak tree which grows beside the main path around the club's golf course, where Rowling is pretty-much bound to have seen it, probably many times. Unfortunately I was only able to get hold of a photograph showing one limb of this remarkable specimen, but what I have is strikingly like Rowling's own rough sketch of the Whomping Willow.

John at Beachley, 27/09/1976: taken about 5 miles east of Caerwent and 4 weeks after Rowling started at Wyedean

John, of course, was not merely the most part of the Snape of the books: he was also to a considerable extent the Snape of the fanfictions. Snape's ugliness (at least as far as Harry measures male looks) is such a major point of his appearance in the books, and the message he embodies - that looks are irrelevant, that a plain man can be a hero and a lover and an ugly man should not be overlooked - is such an important one that it's rather annoying to have to admit that those of the Snape fen who thought that really Snape should be beautiful were on to something. But there he was: slender and muscular with his silky hair blowing like feathers across his sculptured cheekbones, and as handsome as a fallen angel - although beautiful, raven-haired, sensual fanon!Snape probably never sounded like Wallace, or told anybody he'd killed his nasal hairs by sniffing bromine to cure a cold, or ended conversations with "Bye-zee!", or gambolled about like a Labrador puppy.

John lived out many of the clichés of fanfiction for real. He had a brilliant mind, and dashed off research papers for learned journals in between marking essays. He patrolled in the night to protect the vulnerable, regardless of any risk to himself. He suffered from sleeplessness and it was exhaustion and stress which accounted for his hair sometimes being greasy, but even at his scruffiest he was scrupulously clean, and even when he was at his most stressed and snarling he had a heart of gold under the sarcasm and rage, and was concerned about and protective of his students even when they didn't see it. His anger was due to exhaustion and emotional pain, and a loving and lovely young lab. assistant saved him from his isolation and unhappiness by recognising the good in him, and was rewarded with romantic ardour and worshipful devotion (although the loving girl was in the same general age-bracket as himself, and not twenty years younger than him as she usually is in fanfics).

He was passionate and loving and he understood, completely, the hurt/comfort scenario, in which the physical or psychological suffering of one character and the efforts of another character to care for them generates intense emotional closeness, for he had lived it for real. Facing massive surgery, which he knew would leave him in great pain and sickness for weeks afterwards, he said that it was almost worth it just to have the intense extra emotional closeness which came from being nursed by Shirley. [With any normal person, I would have said, "for months afterwards" - but John's powers of recuperation were astounding, and he was swimming lengths and doing heavy gardening within a few weeks of having about a quarter of his guts cut out. Neither of these figures is an exaggeration.]

It wasn't only the solemn and romantic clichés which were true, either, for as part of his rôle as the senior Science master John was, he said, de facto in control of sex-education classes. He didn't specify whether he taught them himself or not but in context I suppose that he meant that he did, and if so this is a point where you just have to sympathise with young Joanne. Far from being awkward or sulky about it as Snape usually is in that particular plot bunny, John had a bracingly robust and casual attitude to human biology, and he believed strongly that his students should learn to talk about their bodies and bodily functions without embarrassment or snickering, because this would make them both less likely to be sexually abused and more likely to seek medical or sexual advice if they needed it. It must have been nightmarishly embarrassing to be taught sex-education in what was probably a very bouncy, upbeat manner by a devastatingly handsome and boyish-looking friend of her mother's, especially if she did indeed have a crush on him.

There was at least one important respect in which John was definitely not like fanon!Snape, for slash fen may be disappointed to know that despite his flowing locks and rather delicate bone-structure, John was about as straight as it is humanly possible to be. Nor was he interested in the sort of prowling, brooding sadomasochism which is often foisted onto fanon!Snape: indeed I said to him once that Severus, having endured decades of complex power-games as a spy, would not want that sort of thing in his private life as well and that he would be looking for either wine and candlelight and romance, or an uncomplicatedly jolly romp in the hay - with which he strongly agreed.

I was pleased to see that some of my own fanfic notions of Snape were demonstrated in John, such as the idea that he could sing gloriously: although I had visualised Snape as a tenor, whereas John had an amazingly deep voice for such a little guy. I had correctly predicted that Snape would be very open and chatty, given half the chance, and that he would be capable of getting into a racing high and being buoyantly happy and antic and excited - opinions in which I was in the minority, at least before the publication of Deathly Hallows.

The hardest thing, perhaps, for Snape fen in general to appreciate about John is that he was so like Snape in so many ways, clever, hot-tempered, excitable, sarcastic, brave, loving, self-sacrificing, stoical, loyal and yet he was so bounding and Tiggerish. Tremendously good fun, he was also very good at having fun, both verbally and physically playful. Despite his occasional difficulties with social cues John "did" friendship better than almost anybody I know, and for three and a half years he was the friend I heard from most often, spoke to most often, went to first with any news. When for the first time in my life I managed to obtain photographs of my late father, to see what he had looked like, John was the friend who immediately asked to see them, the first person I showed them to other than my mother. Yet, we never met, for we lived hundreds of miles apart. We were to have met up in March or April 2011, when he had been due to come up to Scotland to visit one of his sons, but he was dead before we had the chance. I knew him for less than four years and I will miss him for a lifetime.

What shall we do for love and laughter now that lovely Johnny is dead?

One of the things I most like to write in fanfics is Harry and Severus stalking around each other like bristling dogs, gradually coming first to understanding and then to friendship; recognising that there was right and wrong on both sides, and that they really have quite a lot in common. All of the things I have written about both Severus and John, above, apply equally to Harry, except possibly "clever" and "loving" - hot-tempered, excitable, sarcastic, brave, self-sacrificing, stoical, loyal - and Harry had liked the boy in the Potions book, before he knew who he was. [I'm not saying canon!Harry's thick, but he's no boy genius either, and he's a bit of a cold fish. He's moderately kind, when he remembers to be, but not very emotionally engaged. We see this especially in DH after the raid on the Weasley wedding: Harry is unable to share Ron and Hermione's huge relief when they learn that the Weasleys are safe until he thinks specifically of Ginny, even though Molly and Arthur have loved him like a son for years.]

It was perhaps because Rowling herself never spoke to John as adult to adult that Harry never properly talks to Severus in the books, not even to his portrait - she didn't know how to speak to John herself, so she didn't know how to write Harry speaking to Snape. And, OK, fair enough, one can quite see that to someone as shy and introverted as Rowling, both John's crusty-colonel I-don't-know-you act and his boundingly enthusiastic bouncy bouncy wonderful-thing-about-Tiggers fanboy mode would be a bit unnerving: but Harry is made of sterner stuff, and ought easily be able to hold his own in a verbal sparring match if Snape could no longer shut him up by threatening to take points.

The Potter books are supposed to deal with death, but they cheat, because the talking portraits enable grieving friends to stay in touch with the dear departed (and it's clear from the way they behave that they're a lot more than simple recordings - if they are recordings at all, they're high-level AIs modelled on the mind of the deceased, like Orac), so it's never too late to say what needs to be said. Here in the real world we have no such easy two-way communication, until we die ourselves: only the vagaries of mediumship and future incarnations.

John had already been ill for over a year when I first got to know him. In 2006 he had had surgery to remove a rectal polyp - something I might have glossed over here as too personal, except that his family already said so in a newspaper obituary and besides, he felt it was important not to be coy about bodily ailments, because coyness leads to not going to the doctor in time to fix what ails you. But what ailed him was, ultimately, beyond fixing.

An operation to remove a polyp would normally be quite minor, yet John spoke later of having had post-operative complications for six months; perhaps because that wasn't all that was going on. By spring 2007 a tumour had developed on the scar from the original operation, and he was booked in for further surgery intended to remove a substantial length of gut: but he woke from the anaesthetic to be told that when they had opened him up the surgeons had found that as well as the rectal tumour he now also had a completely different cancer, a bizarre, insidious but slow-moving abdominal thing called pseudomyxoma peritonii, which grows in a crust like lichen and acts like a malignant cystic fibrosis, and which his doctor called a "jelly monster". They had removed his appendix, the starting point of the pseudomyxoma, but left everything else in situ so he woke to find that instead of his body being put right, his medical position had suddenly got a whole lot worse. His health declined sharply over the next few months, and because he had no fat reserves to speak of he became desperately thin.

He behaved with great dignity and courage and put up a slightly hysterically cheerful front in order not to depress his friends, both when it was thought that his situation was hopeless and, later, when he was told that effective surgery was possible. It was at about this point, a month before he went back into hospital to have a great chunk of his insides cut out and what was left flushed through with hot chemotherapy drugs, that I first got to know him.

The surgery left him in persistent pain, and between it and insomnia he crashed from his bed to wandering about in the darkness and back to bed again. Sleepless and knowing that I was a night-bird who seldom went to bed before four, he would email me in the small hours of the morning: I called him my Midnight Cowboy.

Nevertheless, his general health improved remarkably: he put back the weight he had lost and despite severe and continuing post-operative problems, for three years he once again looked, and to a large extent acted, like a fit man in his mid fifties, although he was rising seventy. In some ways he had been lucky - lucky when he had survived a serious car crash in 1995, and lucky now, for the surgery for the initial tumour coincidentally led to the pseudomyxoma being identified before it had progressed very far: but having been so calm and stoical and brave when it was thought that he was dying, and having endured massive surgery without complaining (much), he had used up several years' worth of supplies of "brave" and now became panicky and over-anxious, convinced that every blip in his recovery was the pseudomyxoma coming back. His concern all the time, his great worry, was not for his own survival but that he didn't want to die and leave Shirley on her own, and she said later that he had said to her "They have to do something because I want more days with you".

He was right to worry, for eventually it did come back - even though most of the symptoms he had fretted over were innocent and in fact, despite his creeping horror of it, the jelly monster wasn't the main problem. Pseudomyxoma grows so slowly that his specialist was saying "We'll look at this again in six months, and if it's increased significantly then we'll probably have to take your spleen out next year", but some time in the summer of 2010 John's luck ran out. It was bad luck, and not something which had been inevitable from the first, for although he had managed to develop two different cancers simultaneously, both of them had had a high likelihood of being completely cured by the treatment which he had received in 2007. Even when the pseudomyxoma recurred, it meant that another round of major surgery was on the cards but his specialist had every expectation that that would be the end of it, and there seemed no reason why he shouldn't live to be a hundred.

In October 2010 a routine check on the pseudomyxoma found aggressive, fast-growing tumours growing in his liver, even though the rectal cancer had seemed to be entirely gone. Perhaps it was an entirely new cancer, a third one, brought on by years of sunbathing and handling chemicals. Cancer is, in my experience, the occupational disease of chemists. After a confused few weeks during which his pseudomyxoma specialist frantically tried to set up a joint surgery session which would treat both sets of cancers at once, and the snow fell and one of the hardest winters on record settled down over Britain like a vice, the tumours in his liver were found to have already multiplied to the point where they were too advanced to operate on. When it was clear that he had very little hope he became again calm, stoical and wryly humorous about his own approaching end, and determined not to show that he was scared.

Because I had a degree in Biological Science and had been an NHS administrator he regarded me as if I was a nurse of sorts, and had me translating his medical notes into intelligible English for him. All of my friendship with him spanned this period of his sickness and dying. He had been in more or less serious pain all the time that I knew him and had simply endured and kept going; but as the whole of Britain struggled under a deep blanket of snow which persisted for many weeks he developed a sinus infection which kept him from sleeping and which was made worse by the bitterly cold air, and he became so tired that at one point I really thought he'd had a stroke because he was typing gibberish. Yet he was still entirely himself, dry, witty, enduring: all he wanted was to walk in his garden and be peaceful.

The carol service at Caerwent church, where John was accustomed to sing with the Netherwent Singers on the last Sunday before Christmas, was cancelled because of severe weather. Ominously, for the first time in many years he was also unable to get to the Christmas Eve service at his other ecclesiastical love, the church of St Peter at St Pierre two and a half miles east of Caerwent. This tiny church, Norman in origin but substantially rebuilt, along with a 16^th C gatehouse, now sits at the heart of the Marriott St Pierre Country Club where the original tree which whomped was, and where Jo Rowling and her sister Di and John's friends Anne and Peter used to go swimming. John's failure to reach the service that final time was only partially due to poor health: four miles of heavy snow between Five Lanes and St Pierre also had a lot to do with it.

Nor could he climb Gray Hill to watch for a cold sunrise, for the first time in many years. By January the snow had receded: but by then the tumours were in his lungs and I could not convince myself fully to will him to live, for he was suffering so much, and was so very tired, and it wasn't clear whether an increased lifespan would mean an improved quality of life or just more of the same. By now I was serving him as a kind of press agent, to keep The Sisterhood apprised of his unsteady decline.

It wasn't until after his death that I thought of him in connection with the story of the Fisher King, a rare male expression of the Sovereignty of Britain, whose unhealing wounds reflect the condition of the land. While he was alive there was not time to think of such things, my mind was entirely taken up with anxiety and anticipatory grief, but the Fisher King intersects with Nodons, who probably gave his name to the Nedern Brook which flowed out of John's magical coming-and-going lake.

Swedish Sandra the small medium, a late addition to The Sisterhood, wrote: "And as for John and the HP books, anyone who can be the model of such a, at least to me, wonderful, funny, snide, brave and lovely character has got to be one hell of a guy, no doubt about that. I hope he knows that." I passed this message on to John and I hope that he read it: it was one of the last few messages that I sent to him, and probably the last or last but one that he was well enough to read, for he declined with frightening speed at the end.

I myself said to him that he had been an excellent husband and father and had had a wonderful marriage, had loved and been loved, had inspired many students, had both been and had a lot of fun, had found one of the lost Wonders of Britain - and I knew that he would see it as a valediction but he was far too tired by then to want to be pressured to try to live, even though I wished that he would. He had done much, seen much, been much. He had had his faults as everybody does, but they were not many or very great, and they were enormously outweighed by his virtues and gifts.

He should have lived to be old: he should have got the chance to dry out and whiten and turn into Cohen the Barbarian, knobbly and spry. But although in the end he died fairly young, by modern standards, and although he suffered a great deal in his life, still he did a lot better than his alter ego: he had a great capacity for enjoyment and his life was, overall, a happy one - at least once he met Shirley. He died peacefully and contented, since he had Shirley to nurse him and he knew all about the hurt/comfort scenario. It was in obituaries that Dr_J_R remembered the inspiring, supportive, charismatic and slightly lunatic teacher whose example had informed his own career; that councillor Armand Watts (who was also John's barber) recalled the kind and inspirational mentor who had watched over his first forays into local politics; that councillor Tony Easson called his death "a terrible loss for the community, the Labour Party, and for many people in lower Monmouthshire" and the current proprietor of the Chepstow Bookshop, formerly Merlin's Bookshop, called him "a lovely man" who would be "very much missed".

Ivor Cavill, Chairman of the Shirenewton Local History Society, senior lecturer in Haematology and old friend of John's, spoke about John's extensive historical interests and research, and reported that "We are all grateful for his life, and saddened by his death". Four months after John died, I looked at the Caerwent Historic Trust website to see what was being said about his death, but nothing seemed to have been updated anywhere on the site since January 2011, and no newsletters posted since John's last entry in April 2010. A few weeks later at the end of July the site was updated - but apparently only to remove John's details as the Trust's contact and replace them with a placeholder - 12 The Place, Another Place, County, Nr. Somewhere, ABC1 DE23 - and an imaginary 'phone number, 01234567890. The general Caerwent Community Website continues to add monthly reports of council meetings but nothing else seems to have been done with the site since John died - it looks as if the mainspring of the community has died with him.

Reporting on his death, the local Free Press said that "South Monmouthshire has lost one of its characters and real campaigners and someone who touched the lives of many". It quoted Shirley as saying: "He was a real advocate for people's rights, especially for women's rights. He was a dedicated campaigner for the Labour party and always believed in fighting for the underdog", and recorded her "immense pride" in him - and there was so much to be proud of, in John. The article was headed "A man of many talents". The funeral notice called him "dearly loved by his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren".

Rowling initially attracted criticism when the South Wales Argus reported on John's death and finished with "A spokesman for the author said: 'JK Rowling has stated that she does not wish to comment'": but, fair enough, it was in the context of an obituary which leaned heavily on John's theories about the local Chepstow origins of people and places in the Potterverse. In that context, "No comment" was really all she could say: she couldn't say John was wrong because that would be a) disrespectful to his memory and b) a lie, and she couldn't confirm that he was right either in case she got into trouble over it, since not all her models were as happy about it as John was. She did express condolences to the family later.

His students chattered back and forth, passing the news around:
Kevin Cole: ... If there was any thing that I remember about my school life it was him. What a character he was ...
Caroline Acheson: Double Chemistry with Stinger, always dreaded it but always had such a laugh!
Charlotte Olive Westwood: RIP Stinger (he still freaked me out though!)
Catie Reader: ... Many a funny memory will stay with me :)
Kelly Holtham: Just found out as I was Googling him, telling my friend about the time I stabbed him up the bum with a pin in chemistry class! Can't believe he is dead! RIP.

Sigh.

Among the fen, there was much comment. Since he had told me to spread the photographs of his Snape-hair around I posted some of them with a memorial notice: fans exclaimed that he was "gorgeous", which would have pleased him greatly - which I'm sure did please him greatly. Many condolences were thought of for his family. Olwen at the HPN Network said that "he will be remembered for being the inspiration for one of the most fascinating and misunderstood characters in modern literature": less formally, deatheaterdisco commented "Oh, wow, rest in peace, man. Thank you for living and inspiring JK. WE WILL NEVER FORGET." The Chamber of Secrets wished him "R.I.P. dear Sir".

His funeral was held in the ancient church of St Stephen's and St Tathan's where he had often sung, and a recording of his beautiful baritone was played during the service, just as eight months previously he and I had arranged for Phyllis Lewis to be heard singing at her own funeral. He was buried in the churchyard at the foot of Highmoor Hill, the slope he thought was the centre of the world, in the burial-ground where Arthur laid the twelve rebel kings, and so he became part of the history of Caerwent. He had lived just long enough to see his wild daffodils in bloom one more time, Dydd Dewi Sant, and they were laid on his grave. I sent him white roses.

In the very last email I had from him, just seventeen days before he died, he apologised for the certainty that we would never now meet,

John showing a party around Hocker Hill Street, Chepstow, a possible part-model for Diagon Alley - photograph © Bob McCaffrey, 2003

thanked me for my friendship and asked me to tell The Sisterhood that his doctors had given him one to two months to live: although sadly that proved to be over-optimistic. He must have felt in his heart that it was over-optimistic, for he wrote to me as if he knew it was the last time he would speak to me. He finished with a kind of final manifesto to the fandom, a statement of two of his ruling emotions: devotion to his wife, and admiration for Jo Rowling. And love, and kiss-marks, because he always signed himself with kisses.

"I think the Harry Potter stories are truly mind blowing, a wonderful intellectual achievement. Also that between the threads Joanne has woven in my love for my wife Shirley."

Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

In memory of John Lawrence Nettleship
01/08/1939 - 12/03/2011
Dearly loved.

Author's notes:

The major polio epidemic which struck Britain was in the 1950s, but some epidemiologists say that the pattern of infection suggests that there had been a milder strain of the disease affecting children in the 1940s, and conferring some immunity. In the mid 1940s, when he was five, John was so weak that he said that being able to kick a small ball a few yards was a major achievement.

I think John must have told me about the Master's degree he had been going to do, but didn't, on the 'phone, because I can't find it in his emails. Consequently I can't swear that it was called "Philosophy of Education" - it might equally have been "Theory of Education" or "Educational Philosophy". But it was one of they things.

I wish I had asked John to sing me The Wizard: I would have loved to have heard him putting on the Goth, and it was only after his death that I looked it up and found out how obscure it was. After months of sleuthing and with assistance from other researchers I managed to identify the composer as Peter Jenkyns: full details and music can be found here.

The hunt in the dark refers to one of my favourite creepy quotes from Dr Who, from an episode in which various characters transformed into cheetahs - "You can run and run and hunt in the dark forever" - and the sweet voices lisping in the fire paraphrase and slightly misremember a passage from The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle: "... the retorts full of elixirs and essences, the powders and herbs and banes, the padlocked books of gramarye bound in skins better left unnamed, the muddy mist darkening in the chamber and the sweet voice lisping therein ..."

John had originally toyed with the idea of making available a video of himself performing the song Passing By at a friend's wedding, since public singing was one of his hobbies. The bride decided she didn't want images from her wedding to be uploaded to the net so John was vaguely planning to edit the tape to remove the audience, but he died before he was able to do so. I have separated out the soundtrack and included it here as I think this would be what John would want.

Modern Mari Llwyd, from Folkwales

All pieces of music linked to this article have several seconds of blank play added at the end, to counteract Quicktime's nasty habit of cutting off the end of tracks.

The Mari Llwyd, called in English the Grey Mare or Grey Mary, is an actual or wooden horse's skull, supported on and operated by means of a pole, hung about with bells and ribbons and attached to a white cloak or sheet underneath which the operator hides, walking the Mare about and opening and closing her jaws. The custom is now rare and dependent on deliberate revivals, but up to the mid 20^th C many villages in South Wales had a Mari Llwyd who was paraded around at Christmas or New Year accompanied by parties of carollers who would engage in musical sparring, singing verses back and forth with the householders they called on, making the songs up as they went along. The word "grey" in this sense, John said, meant a thing of the Otherworld, as it does in the case of Gray Hill.

Orac was a meta-computer in the British science fiction series Blake's Seven, who (not "which") had been given character and intelligence by having the mind of the crabby, bloody-minded old scientist who created him copied into him and used as a personality-template. Rowling said in an authorial comment somewhere that talking wizard portraits were mere simple recordings of their subjects, but this has to be discounted because it directly clashes with what's in the published books, where the portraits are shown to have independent social lives. My own theory is that they're a sort of partial cul-de-sac incarnation of the subject, a small loop of their soul existing in a specialised pocket of the astral realm which has been shaped by the artist and fixed to their frame: but if they are not truly part of the subject's soul then they are at least a copy of it full enough to have a semi-independent existence.

Cohen the Barbarian is a character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series: a barbarian warrior-hero who is so good at his job that he has never been defeated and is still fighting in his nineties, despite suffering from lumbago. Cohen is desiccated and scrawny but also sprightly and full of energy, and is both practical and, in a somewhat nihilistic way, romantic.

"Into many a green valley" - from the poem As I Walked Out One Evening by WH Auden.

Cheshire Cat by John Tenniel, from Wikipedia: Cheshire Cat. Leaping salmon clipart created using clips from FotoLibra and Chemex. Tigger from Michigan State University. Roman cavalryman (in Appendix) from BigStock. Fisher King from Quintessential Publications. Oldest creatures (in Appendix) heavily adapted from various bits of free clipart. Alchemical whatsit found on a random clipart scam site which tried to give me a virus.

Images from Wikipedia/Wikimedia and from Geograph are used and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence.