Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  Within a couple of weeks, I was accepted. One slight problem was no problem at all to me: the Wellington Teachers’ College quota was over-subscribed—would I mind going to Christchurch? Would I mind? Not a bit of it! I was well and truly ready for my first taste of overseas travel.

  I handed in my notice to the ANZ. They did genuinely seem a little bit sad to be losing my services. My parents accepted my decision. Dorothea was not too keen on my particular choice of teaching as a career. She had always held rather acerbic views in regard to teachers—particularly the male of the species. It would have been much nicer for everyone had I stayed in the world of finance, and in the fullness of time flowered into a bank manager.

  A couple of years ago, the 1957 intake to Christchurch Teachers’ College held a reunion to mark the half-century that had elapsed since all of us—young, full of hope and full of vigour, indeed full of life—had entered those not-quite-hallowed halls on the corner of Montreal and Peterborough Streets. The ‘not-quite-hallowed halls’ are now a distinctly up-market block of apartments. It was a great reunion, the main problem being that everyone there was so old. A few had already fallen off this mortal coil, and clearly that elapsed half-century had inexorably taken its toll on many of us present for what proved to be a great weekend of ‘remembering when’.

  These days it appears to take the best part of a half-century to train, certificate and register a teacher. In 1957 it took just two years. Whether or not we were sufficiently or suitably trained to be plonked in front of a class of thirty, forty or fifty kids is a moot point. Yes, fifty kids! The biggest class I ever taught had fifty-five pupils—eleven- and twelve-year-olds. There was never any idle movement around my classrooms because, quite simply, there was no room in which to idly move.

  Those two years of my teacher training stay with me as being among the happiest of my life. I didn’t know whether or not I had found what it was I wanted to do in my life. I can’t remember if I ever considered those two years as preparation for anything. I just simply enjoyed living them. Maybe I enjoyed them more than most because of the peculiarities of my secondary schooling. For the first time since childhood, I didn’t feel an outsider or a loner: I was part of a group I enjoyed being with and who gave every indication of enjoying being with me.

  We boarded, four of us—Marlene and Ron, from the West Coast, Jacqui from Raetihi, and me—with Mrs Arnold of 88 Tancred Street, Linwood. A wonderful lady indeed! Back then you didn’t pay to become a teacher—a grateful state paid you. Roughly £5 a week. Three of those £5 went to Mrs Arnold for our bed and board. Margaret Arnold was a staunch Methodist and a great surrogate mother. From time to time, Marlene and I would trot along with the good lady to the Methodist church around the corner. Jacqui wouldn’t have been out of bed in time, and Ron was a good Catholic. Mind you, over our two years I think we tried out about every other church in the city in search of spiritual enlightenment—a cheap form of entertainment, and Christchurch certainly wasn’t short of churches!

  Mrs Arnold was a superb entertainer and storyteller, regaling us with the probable, the improbable, and pure fantasy, and, very frequently, AA Milne. She seemed to have remembered every snatch of verse and every advertising jingle she had come across over the years.

  The devil sat on his doorstep,

  Wiping a tearful eye,

  Curling his tail on a red-hot nail

  And sighing to passers-by:

  ‘Oh for the days that are no more,

  When on the River Styx,

  Friend Charon rowed his boat across

  From eight o’clock to six.

  But on earth they’ve given up dying,

  And I hear by this morning’s mail

  It’s all because Wood’s Great Peppermint Cure

  Has found a ready sale.’

  These immortal words have stuck in my mind ever since. Most recently they appealed enormously to Mathis, my German AFS ‘son’ for a year. He tells me he has since recited them to any poor German who will listen. When you think about it, it’s rather a pity that Wood’s Great Peppermint Cure is a thing of the past. Mrs Arnold did her best to promote the fine product, but it was probably too late to resurrect it even fifty years ago.

  Mrs Arnold also provided us with a cut lunch each day. We got quite a lot for our £3. The good lady demonstrated enormous flair and originality in sandwich fillings. One of her favourite fillings was Marmite, tomato sauce and a sprinkling of chopped walnuts. Well, it may not have been a favourite of hers, but it became so when she asked me how I liked it. Obviously, fond as I had become of Mrs Arnold, all I could do was praise it lavishly. Over-lavishly. Oh, how I paid for that moment of insincerity!

  The four of us, and about three dozen others, were in Group Six—the Ss to the Zs. No originality in our groupings, all were ordered alphabetically. The only change in our second year was that we were then titled Group F. I think I was one of the older members of the group. You only had to be sixteen years and nine months to get into a teachers’ college in the olden days. A bit frightening by current standards. It meant you could actually end up fully responsible for the teaching of a class when you were still a teenager yourself.

  I must have done some work, because in the fullness of the two years I graduated from the institution. I still have a few of my textbooks on the psychology of teaching, its principles and practices, and child development. None of them show much sign of ever having been opened. During our two years we were required to study four selected subjects, two in each year, in some ‘depth’; ‘credits’ they were called. A wide range of choices were on offer. Naturally my selections were those that required a minimum of hard work. One of your first-year selections had to be taken on to an even more advanced level. For the latter I did Pottery. I still have two of the pots I turned on the wheel and then glazed and fired. They will last a long time yet and are very heavy indeed! It was good doing Pottery, because the little Pottery Department was tucked away, isolated in an old house near the main campus and away from the prying eyes of authority. I can’t remember the Pottery instructor or tutor turning up very often—generally only when a firing of our artistic endeavours was about to take place. Indeed I don’t think we did a great deal of pottery, but we did do a lot of other things.

  My other two credits were in English and in Health. My sole effort in Health Studies was the compilation of 500 ‘health poems’ that would be useful in the classrooms where, hopefully, we might end up. My poems never did get much use. Well, it didn’t matter; after all none of them were my original work.

  English was a different matter. Possibly the best lecturers in the college were on the English staff. We were free to select which writers we would individually like to study: I chose the works of Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf. We were also encouraged to interest ourselves in New Zealand writing and writers. Among my very real treasures is a copy of the first edition of Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry, published by the Pegasus Press in 1957. Our English lecturer had urged us to buy it. We talked about it, about the writer, about the small local publisher of the book. I think many of us bought it. The pencilled price is still in the front of my copy—fifteen shillings.

  I guess that Christchurch Teachers’ College, 1957–58, was really little more than an extension of the high schools of the time. Apart from our ‘credits’, there was no pleasing ourselves in what we did. There was compulsory Physical Education and compulsory sports, although, with sports, you could select from a fair variety. I did table tennis and fencing, representing the college at table tennis, and winning a sports ‘blue’ for my efforts. We did Maths, Geography, History, Art, Speech and Drama, and the Sciences.

  Science itself was OK, but we also had to ‘do’ the nature table. Nature tables were what we would have to establish in our classrooms when we started teaching. A splendid nature table might have birds’ nests, a stuffed morepork or something similar, a papier-mâché model of a volcano, a white mouse or two in a cage, a wheat man growing wheat
hair from his head if the kids were little, a dissected sheep’s heart if they were bigger. Oh, and of course, plants and grasses and flowers and stuff. Everything labelled. Naturally, you would have to change your classroom nature table weekly—dissected sheep hearts don’t last too long! In all my years of classroom teaching I often didn’t have a nature table, quite simply because there wasn’t enough room.

  The Christchurch TC nature table was another matter entirely. It did change every week. We were supposed to record the substance of these changing tables and, when the table ordered you to, get out and collect grasses, weeds, seeds, leaves, and other odds and ends…This was all to be assembled in a ‘nature study folder’ and be submitted for marking near the end of your second year. Indeed, if you didn’t do this, you would not pass the Nature Study/Science course, and subsequently be prevented from graduating.

  I managed to conveniently ignore the nature table and its contents for almost the whole of the two years. Thank God that Marlene didn’t. Bless her heart, she helped Jacqui and me not only to write up the best part of two years of ignored work, but also assisted in ironing and aging our hastily assembled collections of grasses, weeds, seeds and leaves—the night before they were due to be submitted.

  It is true to say that I still lacked a work ethic. If something appealed to me, as did the novels of Evelyn Waugh, I would pull out all stops. If my imagination was not engaged, or became disengaged, I would avoid any real effort like the plague. I certainly became adept at working out short-cuts, and also developed a few tricks that helped me through my training, and equally would stand me in good stead during at least the first years of my teaching. I quickly discovered that you could compensate for lack of substance in any assignment if what you presented was exceptionally neat. If it looks good, well, then it must be good. Whatever work I couldn’t otherwise avoid doing was always beautifully neat. This may well say a helluva lot about my shallow nature, but it also says a fair deal about a lack of rigour on the part of the assessor.

  It was a very full two years. Along with college work, or working to avoid work, there was also an over-full social life. Of those you trained with, most, like yourself, were away from home for the first time, and so became your friends and to some extent your substitute family. We went dancing very frequently. These were the days of dancehalls, and there were also church dances and socials—the Catholics had the best—and the college itself held a fortnightly dance. I am probably lying when I say that I was rock’n’roll champion of Christchurch TC, but I wasn’t far off it. There was the annual ‘dress up’ college ball at the Wintergarden, and, if we ever managed to save sufficient, the occasional formal dinner.

  The old Clarendon Hotel was favoured for the latter. There were no such things as licensed restaurants back then, and pubs still closed at six o’clock. While none of us was anywhere near the drinking age of twenty-one, it didn’t seem to stop us. A flagon of beer was cheap, a flagon of sweet sherry wasn’t much dearer. The social and poker-playing set, of which I was frequently a member, imbibed a lot of both. Driving whilst under the influence was not a problem: only one of the thirty-five or forty members of Group Six possessed a car. We biked, bussed or walked. Smoking to excess was a perfectly acceptable social habit, on campus as well as off.

  In the dead of one night many of us lay, stretched out on the banks of the Avon in Hagley Park, and marvelled at the efforts of man’s first foray into space as Sputnik flickered across the sky.

  Our second year was a happy repetition of the first, although I did take on a role that involved a modicum of work. As a result of my previous stellar career as a banker, I was made treasurer of the Student Association. The job did have a few compensations: you were given some leeway in attending lectures if you had to attend to association business, meetings and the like.

  A teacher should be a well-rounded person, an individual with a broad range of interests. It could be said that high finance, table tennis, throwing the odd heavy pot, poker-playing, drinking and smoking, as well as an understanding of the works of AA Milne and Evelyn Waugh—but not Virginia Woolf—was broad enough. But why leave it there when opportunity knocks? The stage beckoned. I landed a role in the annual college drama production of The Madwoman of Chaillot. Not the leading male role. Certainly not that of the mad woman herself! I was the waiter. A small beginning, admittedly, but we all have to start somewhere. I think the waiter had at least half a dozen lines.

  It’s important to build on small beginnings and to not let grass grow underfoot…I moved from almost dumbwaiter to director. I directed the Ss to Zs in our production of the slightly less-than-immortal The Man Who Wouldn’t Go to Heaven for the inter-group, one-act play drama festival. I think it was a competition, and if we didn’t win it, we should have! I then extended my stage experience to film when the movie Before They Sail, starring the late Jean Simmons, was shot in Christchurch. No words this time; I was in a crowd scene. I am pretty sure I ended up on the proverbial cutting-room floor. The film was resurrected for television recently, possibly for a festival of historic almost-New Zealand movies. I couldn’t spot myself in any of the crowds.

  All good things really do come to an end. A wink, a blink in time and two years had gone…It was possible, back then, to extend to a third year of study in a selected field of speciality: Art, Science, Physical Education, Speech Therapy, and Education of the Deaf. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and three years could only be better than two. Colour-blind or not, I applied for a third year in Art. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t get it. I can remember the very nice guy who was head of the Art Department smiling at me when I asked why my application had been turned down: ‘You might have had a chance, Bill, if you had managed to complete just a little more than half the course. Have you thought of Education of the Deaf?’

  It was time for me to get to work and teach a class. Thirty unsuspecting little nine- and ten-year-olds at Trentham School in Upper Hutt were waiting for me. The very school where, back in 1943, I had started as a five-year-old.

  Our cat croaked this morning.

  I got tossed out of our hockey team this afternoon.

  Then, to top things off, Mum told me she was going to have a baby.

  It was one of those days!

  It started with the cat.

  ‘He got hit by a truck,’ I told the guys. ‘It was speeding.’

  ‘Wasn’t speeding fast enough,’ said Spikey. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘The truck was speeding,’ I said. ‘Not the cat.’

  ‘Yeah. Reckon the cat wasn’t,’ said Spikey. ‘Was it traumatized?’

  ‘No. It was squashed flat.’

  ‘Yep. That’s traumatized, I think. Was its guts hanging out?’

  I did little bites on my tongue and my lips. ‘Yep. They sure were.’

  ‘Where is it?’ asked Jacko.

  ‘In our garden. We buried it.’

  ‘Can we come home with you after school, Chas? So’s we could dig him up and have a look at him?’

  ‘Nah. Mum wouldn’t like it. She got all upset. She’s planted a tree on top of him now.’

  ‘Lucky tree,’ said Spikey. ‘Sure gonna have a good feed, that tree.’

  So runs the opening of Knitwits, written in late 1990 and published by Ashton Scholastic here, and in New York in 1992. It’s most recent New Zealand edition was in 2006, and it continues in print, along with the two other books in the series, Numbskulls and Hark. No trauma at all in writing these three titles. I was well and truly over falling out of the Himalayas.

  The book was written while my younger son, Julian, and his then partner, Maria, were awaiting the birth of my grandson, James, born January 1991. Babies were dominant in the family at this time—my sister Margaret’s grandson, Jeremy, was born a few weeks later. I enjoyed every moment of writing the story and can still remember finishing the last chapter with a smile on my face.

  These days I sometimes harbour slightly more acid feelings about Chapter One of Knitwits.
It is possibly the very best first chapter of any of the books I have written. Certainly the most useful in that it stands alone, a complete short story in itself. I have read it to audiences, young and old, here and abroad, probably well over a thousand times. It is the only chapter of any of my books that I know completely by heart. When I begin to read it aloud, yet again, I know precisely how long it will take, where to pause for the laugh lines, which odd words to add or delete here and there—and, these days I read it with a mildly sinking feeling. I can empathize with any singer who has made one record that is more popular than all the others and is required to sing that one song over and over and over again. It’s my own fault of course. I needn’t read from Knitwits all of the time. After all, I have written plenty of other books, one or two of which have been more popular than this one. But this one is the most useful for reading aloud, in that I don’t have to do any explaining or setting of the scene.

  It’s a humble little story. Very ordinary. Easily related to by anyone reading it or, indeed, listening to that first chapter. Mrs Sylvia Freedland of Pennsylvania may not have liked it, but she is certainly in the minority.

  Consider the opening few lines. A three-point, sort of triangulated opening—a good way to begin a story. Set it all up, and then explore. Family pet dies. Boy gets tossed out of his sports team, unfairly blamed for bad behaviour. Boy’s mum and dad try to find the right words to tell him they are expecting a new baby.

  I am very fond of Charlie, Chas. He is a young man of good faith—faith generally in the world around him doing the right thing, and also faith in himself and his own abilities. Like very many young males, he is certainly in danger of over-reaching himself. His best mates, Spikey and Jacko, both support him, complement him and compete with him. But the age-peer with whom he has the closest relationship is his nemesis and next-door neighbour—both at home and in the classroom—the ubiquitous Alice Pepper.