A friend of mine in the pipe band is a school teacher by trade and at a recent performance was more than a little embarrassed to see one of his students in the audience. She and her mother both waved vigorously and shouted hello as we passed so we all got a lot of mileage out of hearing him called “Mister”.
"What do they call you behind your back" I asked, to which he responded "Nothing, they don’t have a nickname for me". Which, I thought, displayed a rather touching naïveté on his part. He may not know what it is, but it’s almost certain they have a nickname for him. School kids are like that.
When I was eleven and preparing to enter the "Big School", my mother cautioned me about the husband of one of her acquaintances who had been teaching there since the school opened in the 17th Century.
"You’d best be careful," she warned "the boys call him ‘The Rock’, because he’s so tough". Well, maybe in his dreams they did. During my career I never heard him called anything but ‘Bill’, that being his name. And once you got past his pseudo gruff demeanor, he was one of the biggest softies on the block.
He was in fact, one of the better teachers at my school. With a remarkably small number of exceptions we were blessed with a ragtag crew of psychopaths, nutcases and other assorted incompetents. Fortunately, several opted for retirement before I left the school and when it went co-ed a couple of years later, the school-board used the opportunity to decontaminate the place of several more.
Presiding over the bunch was ‘Slimy’ the head-master, an oily little creep of a man who glided rather than walked and was blessed with the skill of always appearing at the most inopportune moments. During the first drag on a shared cigarette, or moments before a smaller boy was separated from his lunch money for example. In later life I spoke to people who’d known him years before, as a junior teacher and he’d been known as ‘Slimy’ then too, so I imagine it was ingrained.
The assistant head, ‘Zan’, was a giant monolith of a man. Picture an Easter Island statue brought to life, although not totally. His style of teaching was to set some tedious assignment, before settling down to read from one of the huge books he habitually carried under his arm. Someone once snuck up on him and saw, buried in the pages of the gargantuan tome, an Ian Fleming paperback.
‘Taffy’ hailed from the valleys of Wales and was inevitably, if unimaginatively saddled with the traditional moniker of his countrymen. The story was that he’d had a lung shot out while serving as a rear gunner on a WW2 bombing run over Germany. That may have been true but it didn’t prevent him from inhaling some three packs of cigarettes a day, causing the nicotine stains to reach up his hands beyond his shirt cuffs. Theoretically Taffy was a Latin teacher although it only took a few minutes for each class to degenerate into a shouting match as he ejected one pupil after another for blatant insubordination. The record was 19 out of a class of 32 in one half hour lesson.
There was ‘Geoff’, a 6’ 6” Yorkshireman who taught mathematics to finance his true love of mountaineering. He was actually pretty good (at the latter) and had taken part in a number of high level expeditions. We loved his lessons for the simple fact it was easy to get him off the subject and onto something more interesting.
“What would you say is the average angle of the North Face of Everest Sir?” we would ask innocently and in moments he would be off on a rambling tale of his climbing exploits.
Then there was ‘Fred’, who was of the old school in every sense; in that he had once been a pupil there himself. He had strong views on how teenage boys should deport themselves and rarely got around to teaching French, his chosen subject busy as he was, lecturing us on how we should dress when out of school uniform; doff imaginary caps when meeting a teacher in the street, that sort of thing. Fred had a pathological hatred of boys whistling, a remnant we were told, of a day many years before when the class had locked him in a cupboard and whistled loudly to cover the noise of him banging on the door.
And who could forget ‘Trevor’, a beloved art teacher who had to retire at a relatively young age after succumbing to crippling arthritis. Trevor took his own life some years later, choosing a rubber hose and a monoxide filled car rather than the daily agony which drugs couldn’t touch.
He wasn’t the only teacher of mine to choose suicide as an escape. ‘Short Mort’ the chemistry teacher, also went that route although it has to be said, few mourned his passing with the same intensity. We knew Mort was married but used to joke that he and his wife had a communal pool of clothes and whoever got out of bed first, had the choice. Nothing else could explain the button-on-the-left ‘shirts’, pants with no fly but a zipper at the side and suede shoes with tassels. And if this left you in any doubt as to his orientation, there was also his blue rinse hair, which wasn’t common on middle aged men in the 1970’s. Not in our small town it wasn’t.
There were others of course, too many to mention. ‘Lenny’, who’s hairpiece would slide backwards on his head as he wrote on the chalkboard; ‘Ma’ Mitchell who looked like Freddy Mercury in drag; ‘Stormy’ Whitehead, who was deaf as a post and a whole herd of history (alliteration) teachers who seldom lasted more than a term. I wonder where they all are now. Well no I don’t. I don’t really care.
Although there is an exception. One of the biggest regrets of my life is that before immigrating to the US, I should have made more of an effort to track down a certain Mr. Starkey, who taught at my junior school. What a nasty little sadist that guy was. If ever we should meet again Mr. Starkey, there’s a head butt with your name on it. You know why.
Schooldays are the happiest days of our lives, or so we’re told. The day I walked out of my school for the last time, I made the vow “Those are not going to be the happiest days of my life!”
And I’m pleased to say, they haven’t been.
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