Encounters with Mrs L BA(OXON)
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Helen Elliott
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About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position....
– W. H. Auden
About glamour they were also never wrong, the Old Masters. Not that I'd seen an old master when I first set eyes on Mrs L, yet instinctively I knew what she was. The finely hinged bones, the summery skin, that glacial voice were all part of it, but the glamour was nailed in the remoteness. While everyone else flickered uncertainly in the world, Mrs L was steadily lustrous.
And as if her personal glamour were not enough, she trailed something even more glorious: the caption matching her photograph in the school magazine said "ba(oxon)".
1960, the year a plump black singer in a tight suit had the world swivelling to The Twist, Brenda Lee sobbed I'm Sorry across waves coming from new "transistors" and Albert Camus was killed in a car crash, was the year I turned thirteen. If people who had been overseas were as rare in my life as tigers, people who had gone to university were as rare as unicorns. But I read books, so I knew what "Oxon" meant: a world where tigers and unicorns, in collars studded with diamonds and rubies, gambolled on emerald lawns. I was dazed. How did Mrs L, ba(oxon), come to be teaching at a bursting, garrulous high school in an outer eastern Melbourne suburb? It was marvellous to me that the eyes which looked upon this school every day were the same eyes that had looked upon the tigers and unicorns of Oxford. Marilyn Monroe might have swayed along the corridors and it would have baffled me less.
The week before my thirteenth birthday I had feverishly re-read all the books that had been the intense love affairs of my late childhood. Children have private magical and dramatic worlds, the world that Hans Christian Andersen never grew out of, and my understanding was that on the morning of June 16, 1960, I would wake up in my bed and find I had transformed (metamorphosed?) into an adult. And being adult would mean that childish love affairs would no longer make sense. This concept "adult" didn't terrify me exactly, but I was already exhausted at its grey prospect. To be adult was to move from grass to concrete, from a dappled carelessness and ardent daily drama to a formality symbolised by the dark suits and brimmed hats that my father wore to work every day.
At thirteen, I was innocent in a manner that now seems impossible. In his essay on school days, George Orwell explains how a young boy growing up in pre-World War I England had no curiosity about sex because he had not experienced desire. Orwell, a British Edwardian boy and I, a post-World War II Australian girl, might have co-existed. I was not sexualised, so I was not curious. Orwell at least knew how babies got into women but had no idea about how they got out. I had no idea about either process. A "Mother and Daughter Night" at our local church (low-church Anglican), an unending evening of black, white and pink illustrations of no beauty or significance, had given me nothing but irritable wonder about why my mother had talked about it with such reverence.
My view of the world came from books, "the pictures", my family and several unmarried older women who always had time to show me their new hens and kittens and tell me tales of their war expeditions in Egypt or Africa. They wore long skirts with blouses held together by brooches instead of ugly buttons. They had whiskers on their faces, the hair on their heads was straight and white and they had a scent that was as soft and inquiring as their voices. I loved them and was far more curious about their adventurous lives than any sexual life of my own or anyone else's.
MRS L WASN'T A REGULAR TEACHER FOR ANY OF MY CLASSES, but we crossed paths. She taught French and English – and hockey. In those days there was a shortage of teachers, "a desperate shortage", the pink-eyed headmaster sorrowfully explained to me, polishing his glasses and issuing my punishment for causing a mathematics teacher to resign.
I was to come to school, but instead of going to classes I was to labour in the unestablished school gardens. This ghostly throwback to our convict past was doubly useful as a source of shame for the offender and a practical benefit for the school.
Did I imagine the tears in the headmaster's eyes when he told me how he had walked (did he really say "pounded the pavement"?) from one suburb to another, night after night, trying to find teachers for his school and how one wicked girl – me – could destroy it all? Now he had no junior maths teacher and it was entirely my fault. My responsibility. Did I know that I'd made her cry? Did I know that he'd had to send her home, there and then?
I was dumb with remorse. It was cataclysmic to hold such responsibility, especially when I had had no intention of being "wicked" or of doing anyone any harm. It had all started with innocent laughter and high spirits. I liked dark-haired, rosy-cheeked Miss Webster, although there was something about her – that meek droop of the shoulders in their raspberry handknit perhaps, or a certain lamblike aspect to her milky green eyes – that chafed me. She was so Sunday School, so Shall We Gather At The River. I went to Sunday school to make my mother happy, but it was becoming increasingly hard to keep going because not only did I find it difficult to believe in God but I found the entire thing embarrassing.
Still, my mocking of Miss Webster was a thing not of malice but hilarity. It was the hilarity of a spirited twelve-year-old, a terrible show-off in thrall to language and knowledge who was just beginning to test herself in the world. But this exchange had, somehow, billowed way beyond my control. I, by then stricken-to-the-heart, had last seen Miss Webster running down the corridor, her black hair streaming about her head. Now I was in the garden and she was somewhere being cared for.
Even the other 60 students in the class were shocked. At the time, their delighted shock had impelled my tongue and honed my performance, but now, digging the red clay and tearing out couch grass, I was crystal clear about the cost of those intoxicating minutes. My humiliation was exquisite because digging was specialised punishment given to the lowliest, roughest boys. Never to any girl. Many times, as I had walked past those boys labouring beneath the staffroom windows, I had felt that lurch beneath the breastbone and averted my eyes out of pity. Now I knew that if any of those boys were sent out to dig with me I would not have been able to bear it. I wasn't one of them. I was clever. I flew through the work. I made my friends laugh. But I was digging like them and, although I acted with swagger, I was containing a sheaf of tears that would be unstoppable once they started. To stop those tears, with each push of the spade into that sticky clay, I said to myself: "This is not true."
But it was. And for all the laughter and urging in class, no one came near me after that. I was only twelve but it was a bitterly learned lesson about herds that I absorbed and remembered. I also learned something far more private and useful about shame and humiliation. I thought I would never get over the humiliation of that day, but I did. It did not define me forever.
Mrs L taught my fifteen-year-old brother English. She fascinated him. He was especially bewitched by her voice. He said she sounded "like a picture". I thought so too, or perhaps that she sounded like an occasional voice on the wireless. It wasn't a voice I had ever heard in real life. Sometimes, to amuse my brother or my friends, I would mimic her.
That icicled voice with the pinging consonants (which I didn't even know were consonants, although I had heard of vowels) was easy to mimic. She always sounded as if she knew what she was saying and had meant to say exactly that and nothing else. It was a voice that carried, and I often heard it pinging above the swamp of noise in the corridor near the female staffroom. The voices of my family, of just about everyone I knew, sounded weirdly blurred and indecisive compared to Mrs L's voice. When she spoke, everyone stopped what they were doing and listened. Even the austere pines whispering together on the boundary fence trembled to attention when Mrs L's voice flew across the sports field.
There were two other crucial points about Mrs L. One was that she always wore sunglasses, even inside. Her delicate face was defined by the equally delicate, faintly tilted dark glasses through which it was impossible to see her eyes. All sorts of breathless rumours flew because of these glasses: she was losing her eyesight; she was so vain she worried about wrinkles; she was scarred from a tragic accident. I never discovered the real reason and, although for years I dreamed of catching her unawares, never once saw her without them.
The other crucial, and the most brilliant, thing about Mrs L was her husband. Mr L was also a teacher, although it was rumoured that his qualifications were not as finished as they might have been, even for a state-run school on the verge of anarchy. However, given the "desperate shortage", as an educated man he was highly employable. Thousands of students, all these years after, are grateful that Mr L was employable because he was a born teacher – or born charmer. The two are often interchangeable. Languid, dark, with brown eyes crackling with wit and melodrama, he was the ideal romantic counterpart for Mrs L. To add to his individual glamour, he had an accent. It was an unusual accent that, try as I might, I could approximate but never perfect. Mr L, who taught me French and geography through my early secondary education, was every bit as glorious as his wife but they were quite, quite different. He emitted warmth and laughter, a Cary Grant luminosity, while she remained remote, a Hitchcock fantasy.
One thing was clear. In the deep space that was outer suburban Melbourne in 1960, Mr and Mrs L were pulsars.
THEY WERE NOT ENTIRELY ALONE IN THEIR SPLENDOUR. There was a Hungarian refugee from the 1956 Revolution who spoke nine languages and a former Methodist pastor, Mr Davies, who, in form three, nonplussed me by making mathematics simple. And then there was everyone's favourite, Mr Irvine, an attractively manic art teacher who not only insisted on the school putting on musical comedies but cast the male sporting heroes in the lead roles.
And fizzing, gleaming through every surface of the school there was Barlow – the history teacher who was never anything else but "sir" and whom the students always spoke of among themselves as, simply, "Barlow". High-coloured, eyes a constant dance of malice, grey hair waving back across his scalp with a life of its own, Barlow had an explosive grandeur (or maybe it was the energy of bipolar affective disorder?) and this, in collusion with the common touch, made him irresistible. He knew every student by name and even the hard-core science and maths students warmed to history before his vivid flame. The boys were transparent and touching as they swaggered for his favours, although the girls were less easy. There was something about Barlow. The girls had an inkling that his allure might also contain destruction.
Barlow made me envious of the boys. Not only because history was the subject I most loved but because of Barlow's way with boys. He taught the boys, he joked with the girls.
If the innocence of a thirteen-year-old in 1960 is now unimaginable, so is pre-second-wave-feminism high school. The classrooms were strictly divided; half the room for girls, the other half for boys. These girls could have been any Elizabethan girl bending over her daily circumscribed learning. They were certainly as biddable as any Elizabathan girl as they smoothed their pages, arranged their pens and rulers, did the correct headings and copied from the board in diligent rounded hands each indistinguishable from the other. If, rarely, they wanted to ask a question, they put up their hands and waited. They wanted to learn but they wanted to please even more. Their hijab was their niceness.
Not the boys. They sniggered, made loud jokes that made my face flush with anxiety because I never understood them and drew funny faces all over their books as wisecracks streamed from their mouths. And frail, sandy-haired, incandescent show-off Bruce MacKinley had words and laughter for everything.
In fourth year, as I dragged myself each day to school, I looked forward to a performance from MacKinley, Barlow's court jester. I imagined Barlow looked forward to history lessons with him as much as I did. This was a world where the closest to real status a girl got at school was to be the girlfriend of a high-status boy. Not me. I liked and admired Bruce MacKinley, but it was his quicksilver voice and tumbling laughter that I coveted. Be his girlfriend? No. I wanted to be him.