Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  Mr Smith, of similar age, retired headmaster, very distinguished and quite stately in demeanour, cycled to the school when his services were required—which was frequently. He had little time for the new-fangled education of the 1950s and 1960s. He would teach only the older classes. To the best of my knowledge and observation, he taught them just two things: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, off by heart, and cricket. In view of the latter, he restricted his times at the school to just the warmer months. There was also another gentleman who suffered dreadfully from malaria. It was somewhat awkward when his stints of service coincided with those of Mrs Turner. There was only one bed in the sick-bay.

  My favourite relieving teacher, however, was Mrs Rokk. When she first arrived at the school, a refugee from Europe who had spent some time in refugee camps after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, Mrs Rokk could not speak a word of English. This is likely a slight exaggeration, but only very slight indeed. I felt duty-bound to help her to the best of my ability. ‘I do not know, I do not know,’ she would say over and over in the staffroom, waving her hands around in her inimitable European way. What the poor lady didn’t know was what to do with her class of approaching sixty-five six-year-olds.

  ‘Say slowly after me, Mrs Rokk. Say: Sit-down-and-shut-up!’ I probably smiled in a kindly manner.

  ‘Sit…down…and…shut…up.’ Mrs Rokk was a willing learner, albeit with a thick accent.

  ‘And now: Sit-on-your-little-bums.’

  Mrs Rokk quickly absorbed these morsels of educational theory and practical pedagogy. Well, she must have, because in no time at all she scored a permanent job on the staff.

  By the time I finished my teaching career a quarter-century later, there were many things we took for granted that had not been in existence when I had started out. Advances between then and now have been even more remarkable.

  For all its thousand-odd pupils, Trentham School did not have a library. There was a little storeroom, euphemistically called ‘the book room’. It certainly did not hold many books, and those that it did hold looked as though they had been stocking the shelves since before Headmaster Quigley had commenced his teaching career. As teachers we were able to draw upon the School Library Service (SLS) and get a box of books for our own classes. I think I am right when I say we were allowed one book per kid. It had to be a mix of fiction and non-fiction. A loan from the SLS was expected to last for a term, and God help you if you lost any books! If you lost too many you wouldn’t get another loan.

  I wanted my kids to read. I supplemented my SLS loans by buying books myself. I still have a few of them on my shelves: Perrault’s Fairy Tales, Anansi the Spider Man, and others. I tried to buy ten or a dozen books each term. There may have been few books in the school, but we sure had plenty of milk and plenty of apples. Not much Physical Education equipment, to be sure, but it’s amazing how much can be achieved with a couple of Swedish benches, half a dozen hoops and a goodly supply of old cricket wickets discarded by Mr Smith.

  Ah, yes, the olden days. Back then, when I started out, women teachers were not even paid on the same scale as men. It would be about five years into my service before the girls achieved pay parity with the boys, which must have saved the State quite a whack given that the ladies made up a good 80 per cent of the service.

  These first years saw me develop the following few principles that would guide my teaching for the whole of my career. You learn something when you see a need to learn it. You learn even better through actually doing it rather than being told about it. Build upon what the child can do, rather than for ever harping away at what they can’t do. Yes, competition is OK, but so is co-operation! And this one is so old-fashioned and well and truly gone from favour in this present day and age: testing isn’t teaching! I will repeat it: testing isn’t teaching! Even if I were thirty or forty years younger, I guess I would never score a job in teaching these days. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t even know the jargon.

  Those first few classes with Rodney, Joan and Kristina—well, we laughed and we cried, we sang, danced, acted, painted, made puppets and used them for acting, singing and dancing, and as a mask or a substitute for our own inner selves and feelings. We went for walks, we went for school trips, we raised money. We read books together, alone, in groups, inside and outside. We talked about the books we read. Indeed we read and we read and we read. You learn to read by reading—not by doing bloody worksheets. Well, we didn’t have worksheets because this was back at the dawn of time before photocopiers, and poor Mrs Burke over in the office surely didn’t have time to type them out and run them off on a Gestetner!

  From my second year of teaching, and then right on until I gave it up, we did an annual major drama production. This was my first real experience in writing. Adaptations of the old fairy tales, made as relevant as possible. Perrault’s Fairy Tales got well used. Cinderella had seven ugly sisters—there was always a long list of applicants for those roles. Snow White had x number of dwarfs.(Twenty-seven of the wee fellows was my record.) ‘My’ Snow White has since had x number of performances, the most notable of which was probably in South Pacific Pictures’ All for One production, based on my Worst Soccer Team Ever and Break a Leg! books. It was necessary to have large numbers of dwarfs, ugly sisters, etc, because it is just so important that every kid who desires gets the opportunity to strut the boards. I don’t think I wrote these pieces because I wanted to. Quite simply, I wrote them because I couldn’t find anything that anyone else had written that quite filled the bill, chiefly from the perspective of cast-size.

  These annual shows provided the money necessary for our class trips, and, by the time I finished with them, my class were widely travelled. Too widely travelled, really. At the end of my first year at Trentham, Mr Boon succeeded Mr Quigley as headmaster. Ernie Boon was one of the nicest people I ever met in teaching. Hard-working, generous and very kind. He spoilt me rotten. Anything I wanted to do, I was allowed to do. Whatever proposal I came up with, he would accept. I know that he appreciated what I seemed to offer kids. I suppose I caused him a few headaches, but I had mastered the marking of registers of attendance, I was free of malaria, I wasn’t ninety-six years old, I could speak English reasonably well, and I was willing to do whatever extra duties were required to be done that no one else wanted to do.

  For all that, I really don’t think Ernie should have OKed some of the class junkets we made. It’s a helluva long trip from Upper Hutt to Waihi Beach, especially when there are quite a few very good beaches much nearer Wellington. Waihi Beach could have wiped out half my class on the day I said they could all go for a swim in the somewhat wild surf. Within two or three minutes, my little ones, including of course those who couldn’t swim at all, were stretched out over a good half-mile of very white-capped waves. Possibly because we had the foresight to be staying at the Anglican youth camp, God was on our side and I managed to haul them all in.

  We toured a goodly chunk of the South Island on one trip. On the old Union Steam Ship Company Maori from Wellington to Lyttelton, a couple of days in Christchurch and then off on the train to tour the West Coast…I remember this as being a winter trip, so swimming was not on the programme.

  We did do our local trips, too. Old Walter Nash, at the very end of his prime-ministership, showed my class around Parliament and shouted them morning tea. Walter was my MP. He seemed to have forgotten kissing me as a baby, around the time I was about number five or number seven Plunket baby of the nation.

  I know that Ernie Boon understood what I was trying to do with the classes I taught, and the more or less activity-based programmes I was developing. Looking back, I would seriously doubt that he agreed with everything I was doing, but he was willing to support my efforts. I frequently enjoyed the generous hospitality of both Mr and Mrs Boon. I often stayed overnight with them if I needed to attend a school function or evening meeting. I do know that, twenty years later when I was principal of a large school, I was far less liberal with teachers who came up
with hare-brained schemes involving the kids in their care. I never forgot that half-mile stretch of Trentham kids in the surf at Waihi Beach!

  I left Trentham School after four years. Rodney, Kristina, Joan and all the Brians were off to high school, and I didn’t fancy starting out with another lot. I took off for a couple of years of Overseas Experience (OE) in London. Two or three years later, Rodney, Joan, Kristina and one of the Brians came to Delia’s and my wedding. Thirty-something years further on, Rodney and Joan and quite a few others of my original class had drinks with me when The Blue Lawn was staged as a play in Upper Hutt. It was great catching up with these by then middle-aged former pupils of mine. The years had treated them kindly. Equally important to me was that they seemed to retain very happy memories of our years together.

  After about a year in London, I came home because I was homesick. I loved London and have been back several times. But it wasn’t home. I did teach there: for most of my stay I taught at Gorringe Park County Junior Mixed in Mitcham, Surrey. My class there was similar to my class at Trentham. One or two of them continued to write to me for several years. I also did half a term at the Star Junior School for Boys, which in no way at all resembled Trentham.

  I taught at the Star Junior Boys for one very good reason: the school had its own kitchen and served superb school dinners. Well, ‘superb’ is a relative term. The dinners were next-to-free for teachers, and absolutely free if it was your duty day. Surrey County Council failed to pay me for quite a while, so free food was a distinct plus. I had no money and was skirting around the edges of starvation! The Star Junior Boys was my salvation. The institution was a preparatory establishment, probably for Wandsworth Prison, not too far away. The high brick walls surrounding the premises were studded with broken bottles. Not only were the gates locked after the inmates were admitted each morning, but so, too, were most of the classrooms, after class and teacher were herded inside. The little sods had to be contained, and their teacher denied an escape route! Since the establishment of the old Eleven-Plus examination, years earlier, the school had achieved the dubious record of a single pass. Obviously, almost to a man, the wee demons graduated to the Star Senior Boys—up on the top floor of the school—from which I would think most did not pass ‘Go’, but did go directly to Wandsworth. ‘Star’ was not even its proper name, and was certainly not in its nature. It had adopted its moniker from the Star public house, directly across the road. The school served a sad community of largely Romany; restless gypsy folk, who had been more or less forcibly settled there between the world wars. The housing was sterile in design, unloved and uncared for.

  I am told, although I didn’t actually spot them because I was locked into my room, that the head and his deputy had long given up the ghost, much less any pretension to education, and spent their days drinking whisky in the headmaster’s office. Who could blame them? It could hardly be said that I further developed my activity-based approaches to classroom teaching. I found one thing, and one thing only, that would hold the attention of the little buggers: quizzes. That my boys seldom knew the answers to any of the questions was quite immaterial; I would award points and subtract points at complete random, quite arbitrarily, and by the time I staggered out of the place some six weeks later, the leading team had accumulated around 1,500 points. ‘What is the opposite point from South on the compass?’ Naturally I would accept a wide range of answers, including South itself. ‘What colour is a buttercup flower?’ Every colour of the rainbow, plus a few others, obviously. They were quite good on capital cities, providing the answer was London.

  Foolish and headstrong youth that I was, I did take them out twice, although I was warned against such lunacy by the more experienced on the staff. It was necessary to book a ‘going out’ time with ‘authority’. Either the head or his deputy would take a break from the bottle, unlock the door and release you. Once we went out for Phys Ed, which they really and truly loved…and only about half the class ended up injured. Going stir-crazy myself, one fine day I took them to a nearby common area for a game of football. It was before the midday dinner time. None of them was seen again until the next day.

  Gorringe Park County Junior Mixed was a breath of spring, summer and heaven after the Star Junior Boys—even if the dinners were putrid.

  I came home near the end of 1963. There was a job at Trentham, but commonsense told me it wouldn’t be a good move to ‘go back’. Besides, Mr Boon was no longer there—he had died of a heart attack in his office at school a few months after I left Trentham School. A sad loss. I visited the school and it was a different place. So I moved on further up the valley to Oxford Crescent School for a very happy couple of years, and my first experience in a senior position: I relieved as first assistant for a year.

  Roughly halfway through my teaching career I arrived at Feilding Intermediate School in the Manawatu for little short of a three-year stint. It was a promotion. I was now a ‘senior teacher’, responsible for the work of a group of classes in addition to my own. I came to the school following a brief stay at another intermediate school, Normal Intermediate, Palmerston North, as probably the only colour-blind Art teacher in the country. It had been a somewhat boring job teaching just one activity, no matter how creative. I had done what was expected of me, which was really no more than providing a steady stream of decorative displays of artworks, designed to adorn classrooms and corridors in a school that regarded itself as avant garde and certainly knew itself to be somewhat ‘up-market’.

  There was nothing boring about Feilding Intermediate, a school serving the families of freezing workers and those employed in the industries serving the agricultural hinterland, and run along lines conventional in such establishments at the time. The kids could be tough, and indeed matched those I had taught at Trentham and Oxford Crescent—but not quite the equal of those at the Star Junior Boys! A class of the very bright was creamed off to be taught by a terrific teacher, Mrs Barbara Kingi. Barbara’s room had not only the ‘brightest and best’ kids, but also seemed to get the best furniture and fittings—although this may well be because she taught the sort of kids who looked after the furnishings and preserved their spit and polish!

  But one of the classes I taught at Feilding was a class to beat all classes. I taught them for a year. They drove me mad. They made me wild. I slaved my guts out for them…For them, I came up with the best teaching of my career. Ludicrously, I set out to prove that they were the ‘brightest and best’. I succeeded. They were just that.

  I have never kept a diary at any point in my life, other than for one term when I taught this class and recorded my thoughts and feelings, as well as their expressed thoughts and feelings—and I was never short of these! I also harvested their written work and artwork and kept a diary of the term’s worth of events and activities. From all this came my little book Burnt Carrots Don’t Have Legs, published by the Dunmore Press of Palmerston North in 1976, some three years after I’d taught the class. By this time I had moved on and was principal at National Park School. My Burnt Carrots class were now Fifth Formers and in their School Certificate years. John and Joyce Dunmore, and their daughter, Pat, editor of the book, were enormously generous and invited as many of the class as could be found to the launch of the book. I hardly got a word out of any of this motley crew of ‘young adults’—oh no, they were far too busy, hiding away in nooks and crannies in the Dunmore premises, avidly reading the book, and checking up whether or not I had mentioned them. It wasn’t to be the last time they came together for a Burnt Carrots gathering.

  Times have changed in the intervening thirty-odd years since I wrote the book. I doubt that privacy legislation enacted in the years since would allow for such invasion if I decided to write a similar volume today!

  I’m tired. Trouble hovers. Maths, and Lionel sits with his raincoat on. Does no work—or so I think. Frayed ends of temper, or temperament. ‘Get your coat off and work.’

  Lionel mutters ominously.

  ‘Get o
ut. Get out.’

  He lowers his lip.

  ‘And come back in when you’re feeling less of a sulky Sam.’

  He stands up. Almost stands up to me. He whispers something. I think it’s ‘Fuck you.’ It’s very soft and I can’t be sure.

  ‘Get out. Go on, get out.’

  His eyes blaze. The others, college teachers included, goggle. He goes.

  ‘Come back in when you’re ready to apologise.’ Which isn’t a loophole because he won’t. He’s bright. Quick, bright and fiercely Maori. Radical. Lead him and he’ll hum and purr along. Drive him and he’ll go berserk.

  I have driven him; irrationally and unnecessarily and because I am in a bad temper. It wasn’t the boy at fault, it was me. Into the corner I work so hard at avoiding. Avoid at all costs because it means confrontation and confrontation leads to loss of communication and without communication on the level where we’re all people I might as well give up.

  I’ve nailed Lionel to the mast of my pride.

  Half an hour and I’m all right. Lionel still sits outside and I hate him and I want to hate the rest of the class but I can’t. They feel for Lionel. I feel for myself and him.

  It certainly wasn’t all sweetness and light! Mining their creativity also had its own perils.

  The boys have made knuckle-dusters at metalwork yesterday. I confiscate two. Christina complains that Timothy is going to ‘carve her up’. It’s a needle-sharp spike on a metal band and the carving is a distinct possibility. I know the man means well but words will have to be had. The boys, hypocrites, complain that he swears at them. To some extent I sympathise.

  My reading programme was simplicity itself: they simply read books. I didn’t really mind what they read. Voracious readers, almost all of them, their tastes ranged far and wide. The school had a fine library and they made the most of it. They supplemented library fare with a sometimes hairraising array of titles purloined from mum, dad or older sibling. The reading tastes of the Feilding community were nothing if not eclectic! We had frequent book reports. This was not a class of shy and shrinking violets; they were more than happy to talk at length to the rest of the class about books they had read. I encouraged originality—and got it. My only stricture was that I hoped a book report would be more than a regurgitation of the plot. I need not have worried.