Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  Charlie is not a klutz, even though Alice Pepper may well frequently outwit him, take him down or trick him. But he has the lady’s measure, and frequently it is her pride that comes before a fall as with quiet determination he works his way through and round and over various pitfalls. It is this quiet determination that sees him win the day, possibly more often than he should. Alice Pepper is truly a force to be reckoned with, a worthy adversary if ever there was. Of course I have taught them both—many times over!

  In part, Alice is based on a ten-year-old girl I once taught. A girl who knew she knew more than anyone else in the classroom—including, needless to say, the teacher. A girl who never kept a shut mouth if there was the slightest occasion upon which to open it up. She challenged everyone and everything. She may well have been a regular pest and an absolute bane in the lives of those who surrounded her, but she managed to compensate for her shortcomings with an abundance of good humour and, of course, an inordinate faith in her own ‘rightness’. She stood up for herself and defended her views whenever those views needed defence.

  I made no secret of having used this particular living young woman in these three books. Years afterwards whenever I saw her in town, she would stop, we would chat, and, inevitably we would come back to something or other about ‘her’ books. She loved them. I imagine that by now she is probably reading them to her own kids—or, more likely, making them read the three books themselves.

  The long-suffering teacher of Charlie and Alice is the very tough Ms Mason-Dixon, a close friend of Charlie’s equally tough grandmother. Ms Mason-Dixon, if driven beyond endurance by any of her charges, resorts to ‘put-outs’. This involves the good lady picking up the miscreant, desk, chair and all, and depositing them in the corridor outside the classroom. Twenty ‘put-outs’ and you qualify for ‘the big one’. No one knows what constitutes ‘the big one’. No one, that is, other than Charlie’s own dad, in his turn having been a pupil of the good lady—and he refuses to disclose the horrors he may have experienced. Alice has now reached number nineteen; Charlie, second in line and well behind, has just seven.

  Spikey reckons the big one for Alice Pepper is probably going to be capital punishment from Mrs. Florence Allan, our principal, even though it’s against the law. Mrs. Florence Allan is a lady we don’t see very often because of the paperwork. Whatever the big one is, we all want to be around to see it and enjoy it when the axe falls. Kids are now coming to school when they’re sick as dogs just so’s not to miss out on Alice Pepper’s big one. Alice Pepper has now been on nineteen for nearly two weeks. I think she’s worried.

  ‘She can’t do nothing to me,’ Alice Pepper told me.

  ‘Yes she can,’ I said. ‘She can do heaps.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like torture,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

  ‘Yes you do.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘I know you do,’ I said. ‘You’re damn worried underneath. I can tell.’

  ‘I am not so. How can you tell?’

  I looked at her with a sly look. ‘Because you haven’t had a put-out for nearly two weeks. Most of the time you get one a week. Sometimes more’n that. You’re scared, all right. You’re dead scared of what’s going to happen to you.’

  ‘I’m not scared of old Mason-Dixon.’

  ‘I bet you’re scared of Mrs. Florence Allan.’

  ‘Her!!’ Alice Pepper said three rude words. ‘What can she do to me?’

  It would be several years after the books came out that my good friend Ellen Gould, teacher, and my successor as principal of Ohakune School, realized that she was, in all truth, Mrs Florence Allan. Even then it took one of her own daughters to point out the similarities. A bit dumb, really, because Ellen’s own first name is Florence! I dedicated a later title to Ellen. Knitwits is dedicated to a couple who have been my close friends now for over half my life: Anthea and Bill Tidswell, formerly of National Park and now living in Turangi. They have seen me through good times and bad, were there for me when my brother was killed, when my marriage failed—and for many good times as well as bad. The title of the novel is in no way descriptive of them! Anthea and Bill, along with Virginia ‘Ginny’ Taute, an indomitable fellow teacher at National Park and character in her own right, did everything in their power to help me into my new role as solo-parent, although I do dispute my sons’ assertion that Ginny cooked better dinners than I did!

  Knitwits was a compromise name for the book. Originally it was to be ‘A Bit of a Knit’. Scholastic in New York did not like this title, even when I spelt out to them that it was, very slightly, a play on a word, and a moderately-used expression. They needed another title and awaited a list of my possible substitutions. I didn’t submit any. Couldn’t think of anything better than the one I had given the story. This was nearly a dreadful mistake on my part…

  Charlie’s pregnant mum has been a part-time model. A photo model, more than of the catwalk ilk. Her work has been of significant help over the years when Charlie’s dad, a carpenter, has been out of work for a while, or resting between jobs. Grandma, of course, considers that her son-in-law does far more resting than hammering!

  I changed the title of the book with great alacrity when Scholastic NZ informed me that Scholastic NY had come up with their own preferred alternative: ‘My Mom’s a Super-Model’!

  Writers foreign to the United States frequently come up against elements of ‘cultural imperialism’ when their books are transported and ‘semi-translated’. Not even JK Rowling has escaped this! I guess I have been luckier than most. Haven’t won all the battles, and occasionally an American publisher will do the dirty, make a change and hope the originator of the work fails to pick up on it. I was luckier with Knitwits than I thought I would be. ‘Nappies’ did not change to ‘diapers’; mum stayed mum, not mom. Changes were made to Agnes the Sheep without any consultation. Most were OK—noughts and crosses to tick-tack-toe, ghetto-blaster to boom-box—but one has always slightly amused me. Near the beginning of Agnes, old Mrs Carpenter informs her two young interviewers that ‘I have had a good innings’, a term that’s obviously come into the language from the sport of cricket. In America, Mrs Carpenter gets to say ‘I have had a few good innings’. Baseball?

  I was delighted when Alyson Books, the US publisher of The Blue Lawn, Jerome and Pebble in a Pool told me they would make no language changes whatsoever, commenting, ‘It’s about time American kids were encouraged to come to grips with at least minor cultural and language differences in other parts of the world.’

  Knitwits and its two fellows are told in the first person. It is the story of Charlie, and Charlie tells the story. I am frequently asked how I decide whether a story should be told in the first or the third person. The simple truth is that the tale itself tells me how it needs to be told. I simply cannot conceive of having to tell the story of Charlie’s adventures in knitting from any other perspective. It wouldn’t work. His thoughts and feelings as he struggles over those first few grubby, knotted stitches can only be fully mined as the boy himself articulates his despair, desperation, and, ultimately, triumph. His first-person perceptions of his mother’s pregnancy are far more effective coming from his internal monologue than they ever could have been from an all-seeing eye looking in on the events. Also, the story has a single lineal structure. It is Charlie’s story of his knitting, of the birth of his sibling, and of his competitive/ combative relationship with his next-door neighbour, and his relationships with his parents, his teachers, his friends and his grandmother.

  I have no preference for one way over the other. Agnes the Sheep is a totally different skein of wool. It is told on many levels with a constantly shifting cast of significant characters and from multiple perspectives. Definitely a third-person narrative was essential. In all truth, no more than a quarter of my output has been narrated in the first person. I certainly have no r
egrets about the choice that was made for any of them.

  Knitwits is one of my interleaved, inter-woven stories. A chapter on knitting is followed by one on something else. It’s a ploy I have used in several of my books. A 25,000-word diatribe on a ten-year-old boy hiding away in the loo and struggling to learn to knit and create a garment would be somewhat deadly in itself. Odds and ends of what else is happening in the world around him and how he copes with those happenings had to be used to supply a measure of leavening.

  Charlie learns to knit in secret. He cons his teacher, the long-suffering but very tough Ms Mason-Dixon, to instruct him in knitting’s mysteries. The good lady demands her pound of flesh in return for the private instruction.

  ‘Charles,’ said Ms. Mason-Dixon, who was on her second beer. (We no longer bother much with the tea.) ‘You’ve got about as much chance of becoming a knitter as I have of becoming a bullfighter.’

  ‘Gee, Ms. Mason-Dixon, you really going to become a bullfighter? That’s very, very interesting.’ I now find it helps to chat while you knit. The chatting soothes the knitting. ‘A bullfighter? Very interesting indeed.’ Poor bull!!

  This was my fourth visit and, strange as it may seem, Ms. Mason-Dixon and me are becoming quite close friends—in a knitting sense. The great art of knitting is the thing we have in common and it has pulled us together in friendship. She has been a great help to me. ‘You’ll have to go to Spain, Ms. Mason-Dixon. That’s where the bulls are for the fighting,’ I said to her. One part of me jumped with joy. This sure was a great way of getting rid of Ms. Mason-Dixon from our school for good, specially if the bull won. The other part of me felt a bit mean. In her own home, with all her own things around her and just me and no other kids, Ms. Mason-Dixon was certainly a top-quality knitting teacher and almost a human being. She drives a hard bargain! I’m now up to ten lawn mows.

  ‘This is it, Charles. After this you’re on your own,’ said Ms. Mason-Dixon. ‘You won’t knit a jersey for your baby in a month of nonhockey-playing Saturdays. Why don’t you settle for knitting a nice hankie—for its teddy bear. I’d help you.’

  ‘I’ll knit him a sweater. I really will. You must have faith, Ms. Mason-Dixon,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll take more than faith, Charles. It’ll take a bloody miracle, excuse my French,’ said Ms. Mason-Dixon.

  VI

  Dear Sir,

  I are sorry I cold you a donkey.

  Yours faithfully,

  RP Bayly (signed)

  I no longer remember why Rodney had ‘cold’ me a donkey. I suspect he had every good reason. Clearly my teaching of spelling had been none too hot! Indeed, distinctly cold. As was my teaching in just about every other subject in the curriculum. I had every good reason to lack any degree of confidence in my teaching ability or my preparedness for the job. Now, here I was, fronting up to the thirty little trusting nine-year-olds who had no reason to feel any faith in me at all. It didn’t seem to worry them unduly. It should have.

  Trentham School, 1959. A very big school indeed. Well over a thousand pupils crammed into premises built for half that number. A sea of prefabs housed many of this overabundance. Only two classes of fewer than forty-five or fifty kids; mine, and that of the other probationary assistant. We each had the statutory thirty allowed for beginners—but we were only allowed that concession until the day after our inspection by my new God, the inspector from the Wellington Education Board. After that dread day we would be topped up to at least forty-five.

  The school was ruled, almost as iron-fisted as Paeroa DHS under Shorty, by Headmaster Quigley, a gentleman in the last year of his service before well-earned retirement. Mr Quigley was a no-nonsense boss. You did what he said. He had been an army officer in the war; World War I, I think. It couldn’t have been the Boer War! Whatever, he seemed to have been well-trained for giving orders. You didn’t say ‘no’ to Mr Quigley, and certainly not if you were a probationer. Without a school caretaker for a period of time, he ordered me back to school one weekend to help him clean the place. I imagine I would have been quite within my rights to refuse his ‘invitation’. I didn’t. He and I cleaned the place. He worked as hard, if not harder than I did—and probably did a better job.

  Mrs Sandbeck, also at the end of a long career, was my immediate supervisor. Apart from the Infant Mistress, she was the senior woman teacher on the staff. Mrs Sandbeck was another tough customer. I caused her despair and a few additional grey hairs on many occasions. When she discovered I didn’t see the need for an attendance register, and had failed to mark it, twice daily, for the whole of my first month of teaching, the old lady almost wept; ‘What are they doing with you in teachers’ colleges these days?’ She had learnt such fundamentals as a pupil-teacher back in the 1920s, before ever entering an institution to learn the job.

  I curled her hair even further when she discovered my method of teaching ‘Arithmetic’. Maths, mathematics, was of course still a few years away from becoming part of the primary school curriculum. My Arithmetic planning for my class was, I thought, perfectly sane and reasonable. Monday, I gave the kids adding. Tuesday, we did subtraction (‘take aways’). Wednesday, we did multiplication (‘times’). Thursday was set apart for the hardest one—division. Friday? Stood to reason—I mixed ’em all up in a sort of a test. ‘But what about problems? What are you doing about problems?’ Mrs Sandbeck enquired, in her increasingly steely, tight-lipped fashion.

  ‘What do you mean, “problems”? I’ve got no problems.’

  The expression on her face indicated otherwise. At least it illustrated what she knew her problem to be! Mrs Sandbeck and me? Ms Mason-Dixon and Charlie Kenny.

  Bloody problems. If father plants a row of twenty-seven cabbages and four of them die for lack of water, how many has he got left? Answer: Still too many cabbages.

  Mrs Sandbeck also indicated that I should give some thought to weights, measures and money—both simple computing and, of course, put into ‘problems’. Well, I don’t think I ever got around to putting them into very many problems. Just teaching the simplest of computing of pounds, shillings and pence, and of ounces, pounds, stones and tons, much less fluid ounces, pints and gallons. Oh dear God, the agonies that faced not only the poor kids who had to learn this pantheon of pre-metric jiggery-pokery, but their poor teachers as well!

  When my mother was felled by a massive series of strokes near the end of my first teaching year, every two or three days Mrs Sandbeck would bring to school a homemade cake or tins of biscuits to take home with me. She was a lovely lady who in no way deserved the headaches I must have given her. Had she produced an end-of-year report on my progress, I think she may have written: Shows slight improvement.

  Registers and ‘problems’ aside, in no time at all I had fallen in love with the job. I loved that little group of nine-turning-ten-year-olds: Kristina, Joan, Rodney, Pamela, Melvin, five Brians and about twenty others. I still see them in my mind. I learnt the job with them. No one could have taught me how to teach—I had to find out for myself. Later on, no one could have taught me how to write. Whatever skills I have in that respect I have developed through trial and error, and by getting on with the job. I have always maintained that the more you write, the better you write. Well, so it was back in the days of my teaching. The longer I taught, the better I taught. I think!

  While enthusiasm in itself is not really enough, a dollop of it sure helps. I was certainly an enthusiastic young teacher.

  My willingness to help out whenever help was called for soon reaped its own reward. Mr Quigley put me in charge of school milk—my first promotion. I’m sure no one else wanted the job, but it was a job that had to be done. Delivering up to a thousand of those wretched little half-pint bottles of warmish milk to every room in the school, and later collecting the empty bottles—minus the milk and the cardboard caps and straws—took quite some organization. It must have been a period of agricultural abundance and State generosity, because for at least two years my team of milk monitor
s also doled out the apples. Oh yes, not only enthusiastic, but efficient as well. Milk and apples: who needed a collection of 500 health poems?

  I taught at Trentham School for four years, and a core of my original class stayed with me for each of those years. We certainly got to know each other well! A lot of others joined in along the way for at least part of our four-year journey. In the three years that followed the first, the number of pupils in my class did not fall below fifty.

  This was a tough period for schools in both the Lower and Upper Hutt valleys. Schools were over-large and class numbers were significantly high. Teachers were in short supply—at any one time, a good half of the staff at Trentham were relieving teachers. From time to time we had another Mr Taylor on the staff. He was ninety-six years old and he travelled out each day on the train from Wellington. The guards on the trains all knew him well, and would wake him up and shunt him out of the train at Trentham station where someone would meet him and drive him to the school. There was also Mrs Turner, a relative youngster of eighty-five. She needed regular snoozes during the day, and would sleep in the sick-bay during morning break and again through the lunch hour. Mrs Turner always wore a hat, secured by a good half-dozen long hatpins. Sort of a desiccated and somnolent Mary Poppins! She would remove all the pins, line them up neatly, take off the hat, and then settle down for her doze. Occasionally, an ailing child might uncomfortably come into contact with one of Mrs Turner’s hatpins hiding away in the folds of the sick-bay blankets.