Hark, when the night is falling,
Hear, hear the pipes are calling,
Loudly and proudly calling,
Down through the glen
Scotland the Brave
Back when every classroom had a picture of the young queen, my grade five teacher was Mr. Thompson. He was sternly intent on teaching us our provincial geography, such as plateaus, rivers and roads dynamited through mountains: I think of him whenever I cross into a certain former South American crown colony: British Columbia.
On his holiday he used “slide projector film” so he could show educational photos, such as his wife on Hadrians Wall. The next year I wrote a paper where I sketched the Mile House barracks at the Wall.
Back when import cars were rare, and men in overalls at service stations were befuddled by cars with an engine in the rear, Mr. Thompson had a little English car—he bellowed from the big front steps when I bent to touch the racing stripe. Looking back I realize that, just like I am now, he was fond of the UK.
I was in a primary grade on the night Sir Winston Churchill died. For our special school assembly next day, Mr. Thompson supplied a recording of Churchill’s war speech, “…Are you prepared?…”
During grade five our stern teacher recommended a children’s book he was reading, An Episode of Sparrows, about poor children playing in the bomb ruins of postwar London. The fierce little heroine our age, Lovejoy, was the most poverty stricken of all the kids. Perhaps the girls kept passing it around amongst each other; anyways, I didn’t manage to read the novel: Decades passed. At last, during yet another holiday in England, I sent away for the novel to be delivered to the London Review of Books, across from the British Museum. I carried it home to Canada. This week I read it. Wow. People cry at parts, according to Goodreads.
My postwar elementary school, Harold Bishop, was the smallest in our district in the municipality of Surrey. We had a gymnasium, no lunch room, no locker room, and one crowded classroom for each grade. The year after Mr. Thompson we had Mr. Macintyre—who never mentioned Sparrows—a young man who matched the hipster images for that time: a goatee, a folk guitar and a Volkswagen van. When he met my parents he said he could tell I had many older siblings because of my vocabulary.
The postwar suburb, where nearly all my classmate lived, was right beside the school to the northeast. Far away, southeast, was my home in the bush, surrounded by “grass, not a lawn” as Mr. Thompson put it. Since the Roman-style road-grid had been surveyed by British sappers before WWI, I knew precisely how far I walked, east and south, home from school. A mile and a quarter. Over two kilometres, we would say today. For a wee boy, it took an hour.
One day after school we changed our clothes in the classroom, putting on our blue shorts and white shirts, and roared off in the VW van to play soccer against River Dale. I forget the score; I was known for ranging farther up and down the field than anyone else: all that walking had made me stronger than the suburb kids. Our route back meant we passed… right by my house! “Hey,” said the kids, “we could let Sean off here!” …
I told Mr. Macintyre, and then he explained, “No, Sean left his pants at school.” Darn, if only I had known in advance we’d go past my home. I still remember that day: because of my deep disappointment, and not because I would have considered how all the other boys had more than one pair of pants. At least, I think that’s why.
Luckily I was popular, so nobody ever bullied me over my poverty, not like I’ve read about in books. The only thing I recall was a couple kids walking a hundred feet ahead of me, and a boy yelling back, “I know you don’t have a lunch kit!” He was being fostered, and soon moved away.
Our older siblings knew that Mr. Thompson used to be even angrier before we had him: He would throw chalk. My year was the first one where he moved his desk to the front, instead of looking at the backs of student heads as they worked. Looking back, I wonder: Had he been keeping an eye out to help the back-of-room slackers? One year, after I was no longer in Mr. Thompson’s class, I was looking at his classroom table of library books and I observed that one, Sea Hunt, inside the fly leaf, had his name. Not property of the library.
He smiled warmly, very warmly, to say that yes, I could borrow it. Looking back, I wonder if Mr. Thompson perceived me as being a sparrow?
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
November 2024,
Now in a glen,
in Canada’s largest sprawling city, named for a place in Scotland, near the Bow river.
Our convention centre is called Glenbow.
Canada is bilingual, but instead of calling an institution the arbalest nursing home, it is the Crossbow nursing home.
… …
Geography: Where the sappers (army engineers) settled, by New Westminster, was called Sapperton. I presume they turned down a free boat “home” to be discharged and settle in the new world, something I later did in my own life. New Westminster, “Queenstown,” was briefly the capital of B.C. and the armoury still has a large canon (with sloping floor for recoil) to protect the Fraser River from foreign ships. I wonder if the sappers were reservists at that armoury?
Earlier teachers:
Note: They lived to the west, in Vancouver, where the jobs were, so they had empty lanes for their commutes each day.
My grade four teacher, Ms Macleod, was also the librarian and had a book about a boy too poor to afford bagpipes for a competition but then he gets a set of pipes from a fairy. My mother teased her, through me, about buying the book because it had the yellow Macleod clan tartan on the cover.
Visiting relatives in rural Scotland (northern Britain) she dressed for the farm, complete with gumboots (galoshes) and a kerchief over her head. Some tourists from Japan were delighted when she posed for pictures. She didn’t tell them she wasn’t a highland lassie. “If they only knew.”
She and our other teachers had us sing The Twelve Days of Christmas properly, “four collie birds.” Since then I have noticed our Yankee cousins use a “mondegreen” of “four calling birds.” Collie means black, as in a barge of coal being a collier.
My grade three teacher, Ms Young, was from the small town of Vernon in the Okanogan. She was very surprised to have a student from Germany who spoke English without any accent.
My grade two teacher, Ms McKay, later caused my all-grown-up sister to have a tear in her eye, while remembering how good she was.
My grade one teacher, Ms Latham, sent my picture of Winston Churchill to the fall fair because, she told me, I was the only one to draw him with round shoulders. (not square) I remember using lots of white paint on his moon face. Hers was the only year where we recited the Lord’s Prayer every morning. For “our father” I always imagined my dad.
Lastly, my half-time school principal, Mr. Jantzen, was very qualified. He had once been the head of the teachers federation (union) and had been in the enormous presidential suite of the Hotel Vancouver. (visiting his former hero Haile Selassie, who had fought Italian tanks with a spear) This when the world was learning that former colonies did not instantly, heroically, embrace democracy. I remember a satire novel from that decade where the Romans departed, leaving the British natives with big shiny polished catapult rounds they could not use.
