RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30740, 3 May 1965, Page 26

RANDOM REMINDER

TEACHER’S LOT

Salute this morning the country school teacher, head of the school, infant mistress, agricultural instructor, choir master, nurse, careers adviser, secretary, sports master, passenger transport operator, drama producer, district authority on facts and figures, librarian, honorary secretary of every club in the district, out of the stream of interlectual life, yet never quite a local inhabitant, a referee and umpire winter and summer —and not only for sport—an object of jealousy (those long holidays, that cheap house, the pay they get) derision (like to see him milk a cow) and gossip at the afternoon tea tables and the bar. Yet they carry out these duties without a murmur— and others that are thrust on them. Such as when the teacher

at a school not far from Christchurch was telephoned the other morning by a farmer parent who said his children would not be coming to school until the bull feasting on the football field was removed. He knew the bull well and it was an ugly customer. The teacher, still in pyjamas and dressing gown, dashed across to the school and herded the early arrivals inside before picking up a garden fork from the tool shed and seeking out the intruder. The search was short, for the bull trotted playfully round the corner of the school. It froze when it saw the apparition and began to back off as the teacher advanced and the children gave a shrill cheer. But the pas de deux took on a different character. The noise halted the bull. It began

to advance and it wa* the turn of the teacher tb retreat. Back he went until halted by a 10ft high hedge. He recalled seeing a bullfight in Spain 10 years before and cursed himself for not paying more attention. But attack, be reasoned, was better than hopeless defeat. He levelled the fork, drew from the depths of his being a demonical yell, and expression, and charged. The bull began to lower its head, wavered, finally lost courage and turned just in time to miss the prongs of the fork. It dashed twice round the grounds in some panic before finding the gate and trotted off up the road no more menace than

a packhorse. This teacher has been in the district for only three yean, but everyone, he says, talks to him now, openly.