7A and 7B

 
 - a tale of two teachers -


Why do people write about their teachers?

Sometimes it's a sign that the writer is ageing, and consequently growing more nostalgic, less image-conscious, teachers not being a glamorous topic. Perhaps it's also a form of escapism, evoking a time of relative innocence. And in many cases it may be an acknowledgement and awareness of what one receives from teachers, a belated tribute to what they gave.

My reason is a simpler one. During a bout of insomnia, two teachers from primary school days appeared in my thoughts. Not my favourite teachers, either, but there they were, projected on the insomniac radar screen like a quaint old movie, but with a preternatural clarity and vivacity films don't possess.

The teachers had once occupied adjoining classrooms: 7A and 7B.

Mr M. held sway in 7A. He was short of stature, with the sanguine complexion of a turkey gobbler, an exceedingly dour face with a prominent, beaky nose, and an almost unshakable aplomb. He always wore long-sleeved white shirts with a tie, and grey trousers. He cycled to and from school, wearing bicycle clips on sleeves and trouser-legs.

Miss E., from 7B, in her mid-forties and therefore his junior by more than a decade, also cycled to school, but no bicycle clips could have restrained the long, billowing floral skirts she favoured. Her bicycle would wobble alarmingly as she struggled for equilibrium, while attempting to tame her skirts and balance her avoirdupois.

Miss E. wore her flaxen hair cropped sensibly short, just below the earlobes. She was a very capable woman whose lips were more or less set in a smile that was half a grimace of determination.

What I remember best about both was their taste in poetry.

Mr M. preferred a sombre line in elegies. His favourite seemed to be "Ginevra", a macabre piece by Samuel Rogers about a girl who conceals herself in a chest in the attic during a game of hide and seek, accidentally locking herself in, and is not discovered until she is (literally) a skeleton. It struck me then as a particularly ghoulish poem, gratuitously so, but Mr M., in a voice as rough as gravel from decades of use and abuse, would read it aloud, sonorously, sententiously, with great satisfaction.

Miss E., on the other hand, bore all the hallmarks of one who had attended speech and drama, or elocution classes, and was eager to pass these benefits on to her less fortunate charges. Accordingly, she'd stand on a wooden chair in front of the class to be clearly visible to all, and conduct them, wobbling and teetering precariously at times as she did on her bicycle. With eloquent grimaces and gestures, she'd galvanise the reluctant 7B into reciting her favourite performance pieces:

 Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?
 Do you remember an Inn?
 And the tedding and the spreading
 Of the straw for a bedding,
 And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
 And the wine that tasted of tar?…

[from "Tarantella", by Hilaire Belloc]

and also:

 The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
 The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas,
 The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
 And the highwayman came riding -
 Riding - riding -
 The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door…
 [from "The Highwayman", by Alfred Noyes]

Inns, albeit flea-ridden, or even as the scene of lurid assignations, certainly seemed more enticing fare than claustrophobic deaths in musty attics.

Mr M's class from 7A, who had heard it all through the wall anyway, was sometimes invited in as audience.

In even the most cursory investigation into the forensics of one's own development as a writer, one recoils from the realisation of how one can be marked, with the best of intentions, by the most self-sacrificing of souls, in ineluctable ways.

I had them in my room last night, Miss E. and Mr M., reciting their set pieces with undiminished zeal, while I listened with affection and dismay…