Meredith Jones was a schoolteacher, passionate, fluent, something of a scholar, roughly gentle, of remarkable vitality and afraid of nobody. His stage was an elementary school in Wales, leaky and many years condemned, with buckets and bucket-boys always ready for ever threatening rain. He worked hard. All day long he taught boys the rudiments of Arithmetic and English to prepare them for entrance into the local Grammar Schools and at night he presided in the same school over a Youth Club. And always he talked and couldn't bear to stop. At night when the club was shut he would invariably say, 'Walk home with me, boys,' and delightedly we would for we all knew that some lecture to be delivered would be only half completed by the time of our arrival at his house, which would mean a further half hour of talk while he offered to walk us back home. A further walk even might be necessary while he talked and talked. His subjects were legion. His impact on me was decisive but not immediate. I felt that with him my mind broadened with every step I took. I couldn't believe this week that I was so ignorant last week, or this year that I wandered for twelve months in the darkness last year. He taught me to love the English language without actually talking about the English language. He taught me to be a reader without actually being much of a reader himself. I became, indeed, an under-the-bedclothes-with-a-torch-reader, leaving to myself, no doubt, a legacy of bad eyesight in my middle age. Since I left Meredith Jones's circle I have enjoyed the talk of many pretty talkers. They were threepenny thinkers all, none had the huge personality of this man, or possessed the dark-eyed insolence to take on an opponent in the opponent's special subject and destroy him. To his death, and lamentably he is dead now, I never saw him matched. My debt to this man, and my devotion to his memory are, I hope, apparent in this article. Without him I would have missed a large slice of life: I would not have gone to a university and I would probably not have become an actor. I would, I suspect in some unpleasant job, have become morose, suspicious, bitter and impossible to live with. The author wrote this article to ______.