Thirty years passed before I remembered this teacher.
I think many of us have memories of a teacher or teachers from our schooldays who have had a positive or sometimes negative effect on our lives. They occasionally drift into our memory from time to time in our later lives before melting back into our unconscious mind. However, there was one teacher I had completely forgotten about for over thirty years before he re-entered my memory.
This teacher, I will call him Mr. South, not his real name, had a formidable reputation for being extremely strict with a violent, almost uncontrollable temper. That’s how he appeared to the pupils aged between seven and eleven of my primary school. To us, he was a man to be feared.
I was in the last year of primary education and one of the perks of being in the top year was you could be chosen for ‘tea duty’.
Tea duty meant two pupils being selected to make the morning tea for the teachers using the kitchen in the staff room. The benefit of this was you were allowed into school earlier than the rest of the school.
The incidents that created this memory occurred during my time on tea duty.
My companion in the tea duty was my good friend Kenny Wilson. Our job was to have the tea ready before the teaching staff arrived. We gave ourselves about thirty minutes before the first one arrived.
However, on this particular day, one teacher arrived early.
It was the formidable Mr. South.
But it wasn’t the fearsome tyrant we were used to, but a subdued quiet gentleman.
He said, “Good morning boys, how are you today?” And then he began to pace quietly up and down the staff room, obviously deep in thought.
This scenario was repeated the next day. Mr. South quietly pacing the floor, his hands deep in his pockets and staring down at the floor while he walked.
This day, Friday, was the last day of our tea duty and the following Monday, we were back in class as usual. But I hadn’t heard the last of Mr. South and his quiet floor walking.
A week or two after the end of our duty, Kenny came up with some news.
Apparently, Mr. South’s wife had been diagnosed with cancer and was dying. This was why he was quietly pacing up and down. He was trying to come to terms with the terrible news.
I remembered Mr. South some thirty-four years later when I was pacing up and down the floor facing the same devastating future he had been facing.
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