Telling Tales by William Taylor

Author:William Taylor [WILLIAM TAYLOR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730450931
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

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 monitors 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

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