Some years ago, when the trees had grown small buds and there was the first breath of spring in the air, I saw Mr D, a teacher from my old all-boys secondary school.
Geography, I think, he taught. Maybe Classics. He never taught me directly but he was part of the furniture at my school - once a Grammar School but deregulated to public status. It was staffed by a range of mildly eccentric but dedicated middle aged men that belonged in Edwardian novels. Mr D was a small, quiet man who walked as if having a constant battle with gravity or a gale pushing him from behind. The kind of teacher that fills black holes, staying the same for years as the school evolves, fossilized from a fading time of scholarly seriousness. Suddenly I realized – here is a man who never once got angry, never raised his voice, never appeared frustrated or disappointed or disgusted - all of the common emotions when teaching teenage boys, many of them taller than him. I had seen him from time to time, walking the streets in his grey coat, in our joint home town of Epsom, his eyebrows gaining the hair lost on his head. Every time he appeared a little older, the walking style more stuttering, his face more lined, the eyelids drooping deeper into old lore. On this particular day I was shocked: he was now an old man. His body shook softly, his face hung decrepit, the eyelids drooping as if he was sleepwalking. I gulped down a gasp. His decline was proof of how far I had come from being a teenager, how quickly time flies outside those forever-school days. I felt angry for him, for this passive stumble into the night - no raging for him. But perhaps he was happy; there was no way of telling. Mr D passed and I lost site of him amongst the other, much taller people in the street. On the way home I noticed the opening buds on the trees again but spring did not move me. I breathed in and tasted autumn. Teachers, like your parents, should never be allowed to grow old.
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At assembly one day, Mrs Hanlon, our Elementary headteacher, announced there would be a new violin lunchtime club: girls and boys welcome. Here was my chance to get away from the playground where mocking my name was music to many ears. I needed new sounds other than people laughing at the fun made out of ‘Friday’.
I was attracted by the violin’s elegant body, the horse-hair bow, the curl of the head like the prow of a Homeric ship. A new destiny was awaiting this young Odysseus. That lunch time I went in search of the club and found just girls, staring at me, the only boy. I wondered if it was the wrong door. Nope, right door and no boys - none so brave or bullied. Too late to turn this ship around, I was beckoned in the divinely smiling violin teacher. She gifted me a second hand, chipped violin with the prophecy: take good care of it or you’re out. Raised eyebrow from Miss and every acolyte girl striking the same smirking chord. At home, in my bedroom, my first attempts to play sliced the air. My cringing parents closed my door, and then all the other doors. I tried for a whole weekend, the stained wood a growth under my chin. No growth in ability, just synthetic strings screeching. Then disaster: my yapping brother tumbled into my room, panting about playing outside. My semi-Cerebus relative fell and sat on the violin. In my memory a tragic epic: a crushed caldera of wood, bridge stuck out like a broken tooth, strings twanged open like sprung ribs. In reality there was a small crack, maybe a broken string, but I had to hand it back to the Oracle on Monday. I mumbled apologies, head hung in shame at my failed adventure as Miss glared at me with her cyclopean disappointment. The young sirens giggled - what do you expect from a boy? Medusa gave an orchestral sigh and ordered me to leave. I scuttled away before I turned to stone. Whenever I see someone playing the violin, I wonder if that could have been me, if I had been a little braver or quicker. Remembering Elementary School has many mixed memories for me, but I was lucky to have one special protector who motivated me to become a teacher in her nurturing image: my Grade 2 teacher, Mrs Mathewson.
The year leading to Mrs Mathewson is a corrupted film reel of fleeting memories with the occasional clear image. The story begins with hesitation. For the first two weeks of September 1980, my mother tugged me to Stamford Green School. I was a shy, quiet boy, reluctant to leave the company of my only friend: my younger brother who still had a full year at Play School. Going to Reception Class (Kindergarten) felt like being thrown to the wolves. In reality, it was a blur of alphabet songs, basic mathematics, singing around a piano with an elderly female teacher whose name I sadly can’t remember. I have a faint sense of lonely hovering in the playground. Having already learned to read, and with books an easy form of escape, I soared ahead of my peers. This led the school to take an unusual decision: I skipped Year 1 entirely and was dropped into Year 2 and Mrs Mathewson’s class. Being tossed into a class without friends and with peers much bigger and more confident than me was traumatic. I had to be dragged to school again, crying and pleading to go home. Luckily, Mrs Mathewson provided me with one of my first enduring memories: cuddling me in her teacher’s armchair and privately reading with me while the rest of the class busied themselves in lessons that I would eventually catch up with. I spent the next two years with Mrs Mathewson, under her special care - her undersized book-loving favourite who slowly found the words to talk. I’m sure Mrs Mathewson would not have permitted the mockery of my surname that I remember starting in the class after her. A couple of years ago, my mother met Mrs Mathewson in Epsom, our home town. Now a happily retired grandmother, she recognised my mother and quickly recalled me. She was delighted that I had become an Elementary Teacher. I hope to be remembered as fondly as I remember her. One of my fondest memories of summer holidays, my mother and living on the edge of Epsom Common woodlands, is when my mother, brother Cliff and I collected blackberries.
It began with the summer holidays waning and feeling that creeping dread of The Return: to school, routines, early nights, homework - reality and time itself. As the late August sun lazily emptied the evenings, Mum took Cliff and I on a tour of the Common boundary: the borderline between meadows and suburban gardens, where a snaking path took us to scruffy patches of No Man's Land. The best spot was the Ebisham railway embankment: a rarely visited zone of unkempt undergrowth, a scruffy wilderness. In all of these places grew wild patches of nettles, untrimmed grass and weeds, immature trees creaking as they reached for light. Here also we found the Holy Grail of the Common’s edible fruits: the blackberry bushes. Gathering blackberries took patience and dexterity as we plucked the small black jewels from their thorny safes. The thorns themselves were not the problem but rather the trailing limbs that flailed around as the plant spread and grew. These had to be gingerly eased aside or gently pressed down so we could reach in and claim the prize. Care was also needed in tasting the prize. The rule was that gathered berries went into the opaque plastic tub, the same one used year after year, an oddly reassuring cuboid of plastic. A few exploratory bites revealed pulsating white maggots that we spewed out in disgusted learning. At the end of the process, hands bleached with bloody juices and the declining summer sun sighing, we returned home. Mum soaked the blackberries in hot water overnight. The next morning the water’s stained surface looked like the sea after a shipwreck: bobbing on the surface where dead maggots, sometimes still squirming when pressed; sailors with a few remaining breaths. Only when drained, could the real tasting begin. We were given a samples but the majority of the fruit was fated for something far grander: a blackberry crumble pudding. The crunch of biscuit topping over the slab of sugary fruit truly marked the bitter-sweet end of summer. After a long time away, I see Him again in Portland when crossing the Marquam Bridge (built 1966). There’s that the same gasp of disbelief: surely He’s painted on the background, the backdrop of a geological magician’s prop, a copy of Mount Fuji's perfect point. He’s dressed in a year long white silk kimono dangling over a hairy belly of vascular gorges, time-knuckled hill, firs, fast flowing water.
Seen again from a street in White Salmon, Washington (est. 1852) He's now a bent-back Iguanodon's thumb poking time, hitchhiking half a million years. From the back deck of Everybody's Brewing in the High Street He's the tooth of a frosted megalodon biting heaven's breast – four times since the Ice Age he’s torn at the darkening flesh. Now He’s still-jaw and mumbling about the next cataclysmic meal. Long before my white-faced arrival, the Multnomah tribe molded basalt into their myth. Now He’s Wy’east, son of Great Spirit Sahale. He threatens with thunder and strikes lightning spears at Pahto, His rival mountain brave. For the love of La-wa-la-clough, He and the Pahto burn forests and villages, and their feud ends with sundering of The Bridge of the Gods. Enraged at destruction and disgrace, The Great Spirit decides to teach all three mischievous children a lesson. La-wa-la-clough’s not given any chance to protest, she’s just struck dumb. Pahto strikes all three children into unforgiven stone, leaving behind the mountains as memorials. For millennia, Wy'East stares north at his old enemy, now known as Mount Adams; dreaming of his old love, now called Mount St Helens. Her Hellenic face has fractured and fallen, still frail. We choose Him to be in the background of our wedding, to be the natural wonder of our single day that is not even measured in stone or dormant magma. But measured by us with Him as a sharp, ancient, always active point of reference. Then I am back in Portland, five years since I started this observation; a few tides of snow and bird lifespans. He fills the view from the plane window: frighteningly close and massive in his tectonic contours and tone of long-time. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
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