Afternoon Tea With Miss Sycamore

When I moved up from elementary school to secondary school I discovered my new school had something stupendous going on--a class called "English". While I knew that I was English, nobody--certainly not my parents --had ever explained that in the big girls' school there was such a thing as English class. "What?" I thought. "Do we have to have a class that teaches us how to be English?" Elementary school classes had consisted of the basic "Reeling, Writhing, and the Branches of Arithmetic--Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision, " as Mr. Lewis Carroll put it. The reeling and writhing I quite enjoyed, but the branches of arithmetic turned me into a window gazer.

English in secondary school turned out to be heavenly and taught by a proper "English teacher." In English we read novels and plays and poems! Then we talked about them--and learned something about plot and characters. Often the English teacher would read to us while we sat and laughed or cried as the case required. I also discovered that not all my compadres enjoyed English. "Boring, " they said, and took their turn at the window watching the boys play soccer on the playing field. They sat and waited impatiently for gym class or a game of rounders or netball on the playground. How anyone could hanker after gym instead of reading and talking about a good book was beyond my understanding.

In second grade we had reeled and writhed under the guidance of Miss Pierce. Miss Pierce was fierce. How old she was is difficult to say now, but to us in 1938 she appeared to be a hundred. Plastered to her sour face were steel-rimmed spectacles and her greasy gray hair was screwed into a tight bun at the back of her neck. Long, dismal dresses finished off her look (neither the bobbed and shingled flapper era of the 1920s nor the sophisticated Marcelled wave of the 1930s had influenced her one bit).

Although we were only seven years old Miss Pierce regarded us as bitter enemies. She frowned as she entered the door each morning but I can't remember what crimes we committed--perhaps not sitting absolutely still, or perhaps turning around to talk to a girl behind. Whatever the crime, we could expect a heavy blackboard eraser to come crashing down on our heads, expertly hurled from the front of the room. If ever a person deserved her own name it was the piercingly unkind Miss Pierce. Her successors as we moved up through the grades were unremarkable. Long does she remain in memory.

In those days we wrote with pen and ink. The ballpoint pen would not be thought of until after the war. Our desktops contained an inkwell and a little groove for our pens to rest in. When the ink ran dry, Miss Pierce took from her cupboard a large jug of ink and toured the room filling the little empty wells. Our pens required constant attention because the pen-nibs wore out quickly and had to be replaced. Such pens in the hands of little girls created drops and blots that fell all over our pages, stained our fingers, and landed on the sleeves and cuffs of our white uniform shirts. The term "ink-stained wretches" certainly applied to us. We tried out suggested methods to remove the stains. Milk poured directly onto the blot was supposed to erase the ink, but it only helped loosen the blot and spread the ink further By the end of the week--laundry was an arduous task for our mothers in those days of hand washing--our shirts were in a dismal state.

Once we were safely in secondary school, Miss Sycamore, a mild and friendly woman with a face that looked rather like a friendly sheep, hooked us on English. She had us laughing hysterically when she read aloud the antics of Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn. Such freedom those boys had down beside the Mississippi! Mark Twain was the first American writer I had ever encountered and he was the first to reveal certain appealing things about that huge country so far away across the ocean. I learned that in America the people had the strange idea they were equal to one another, that there were no royals (except for actors playing kings and queens), and that whoever presumed to set himself up above the others and act in condescending ways would be jerked off his pedestal promptly.

So it was with great sadness at the end of our first year with Miss Sycamore we heard that she was leaving our school to become headmistress of a village school somewhere in the rural part of our county. The loss of our favorite teacher was so severe I decided to find out where she lived and visit her. Friend Peggy was a co-conspirator. Somehow we found out her address and got in touch with her. She responded by inviting us to tea on a Saturday afternoon.

How Peggy and I worked this out without our parents knowing is lost to me, but it did seem important to keep our plan secret. I think it was based on the fact that parents rarely understood our way of thinking. During vacations in those days children had a great deal of freedom to roam and we both knew our way about trains --the main mode of transport in those days together with buses. Our pocket money paid for our tickets and we traveled down the line past several stations to the small village where our good friend had settled herself in a charming little cottage.

Afternoon tea with Miss Sycamore was wonderful. Over little sandwiches and delicious small cakes we told her how much we missed her and the stories we read in her class, and she told us that she missed us too but it was important for her to move up in the world and become a headmistress. Somehow we understood. .

On the return journey we felt satisfied and renewed. That afternoon we learned something about moving on from disappointments and facing the future. We got over our loss of Miss Sycamore and when the new school year began we met another English teacher who inspired us further by making the plays of Mr Shakespeare and the novels of Mr. Dickens come alive.