18. History Lessons

I’m not all that interested in lessons and exams. It’s not that I don’t try or that I find the work hard, I just don’t care. I’m bored by most of what we are learning and the teachers definitely don’t do anything to engage us or to make their subjects captivating. It’s all so dull.  All the school subjects feel completely pointless to me.

Except for History.

I love History.

Or maybe I love History lessons.

Mrs Munro is our History teacher, my history teacher, and history is definitely my favourite subject.

Mrs Munro reminds me of my mother. It’s her hairstyle I think. Or maybe her whole style. She usually has a silk scarf tied loosely around her neck, just like my mother does. She perches on the corner of her desk, her long legs dangling in a posture that reminds me of my mother. She wears her shiny, dark brown hair in that 70s short cut, blow-dried style, just like my mother. Unlike most of the middle-aged teachers who live in school, she is elegant and carefully groomed. No dowdy tweed skirts and twin sets for her. No sensible, comfortable flat shoes from Clarks. Mrs Munro wears pencil skirts and sheer tights. She comes to school fully made up, every day. Red nails and dusky pink lips. Her perfume wafts into the room ahead of her, mingled with the smell of face powder and lipstick, her heeled court shoes clicking on the hard floors. Mrs Munro is stylish and poised. She’s not like any other teacher I’ve ever had.

The lovely Mrs Munro. She is warm and kind. She talks to us, not at us. I am enchanted and I have fallen in love with History lessons.

The beautiful Mrs Munro tells us about her life when we are not talking about World War II. She is married and trying for a baby. She talks about it cryptically but we all know. Mrs Munro has a life, a life outside of school. For many of our teachers, Oakdene is their life. They live and work here. They don’t go home at the end of the day, they don’t have families or friends. To us they are two-dimensional beings, they are part of the furniture, sad, grey women, always there, walking down the corridors carrying stacks of books, supervising prep or on duty at breakfast. They are teachers, day and night.

Mrs Munro is different. She is alive and vibrant. She makes warm eye contact when she says “Good morning girls”.

I say “Good morning Mrs Munro” and I mean it. It’s a real exchange, between me and a person I care about, not just a few monotone words I utter, mechanically.

Mrs Munro is not getting pregnant. She’s been trying for quite a while. It has been a backdrop to our history lessons, somehow in the air even though she doesn’t talk about it a lot. And then one day she tells us that she is adopting a child. She is so happy. She has a little boy, and his name is Ben. I am so happy to see her so happy. Ben. I have never heard that name before and I love the sound of it. I love it so much that I have decided to call my son Ben, if I ever have a son. Ben. I like saying it and I say it over and over again in my head. Ben. Ben. Ben. It sounds round, clear, simple and beautiful. I have no idea why it appeals to me so much but I can’t get it out of my head and I can see this little Ben in my mind's eye. My Ben is wholesome, solid and sparkly-eyed eyed with silky hair and a broad smile.

I don’t know if of course but I won’t call my son Ben, even though my love of the name does not wane one bit. I won’t because one day, I will marry a Ben.

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I was desperate for a mother figure and I found one in Mrs Munro. I think she is more beautiful in my memory that she might have been in real life! Nevertheless she was warm and kind and that really was a rarity in my experience of Oakdene and she made a positive difference in my life there.

I think I was being a little unfair about the teachers. There are others I remember with fondness, though none so much as Mrs Munro. Miss Cox, who only ironed the part of her skirts that protruded below her sweaters (she revealed this sheepishly one French lesson). She was young and cool. Mrs Ludiker, the German teacher who was stern but always fair and encouraging. Mrs Mercer-Deadman who taught me Italian and had a wicked sense of humour and looked so mysterious with her dark glasses and angular frame. Mrs Entwhistle, who despite her lack of warmth or friendliness was an excellent English teacher with her relentless demand for good punctuation and grammar. She definitely inspired a love of language and reading in me. A teacher can make such a difference in a child’s life. The quality of the teaching at Oakdene was pretty poor but I was also just not academic at the time, a late bloomer! I imagine that others may have had a different experience.