Our teacher Mr Postance was a right sight for sore eyes. To see him for the first time you had to rub your eyes to see if you actually was not imagining him. I mean after coming from a "normal" school with "normal" looking teachers
and then coming to Mr Postance for the first time was an incredable experience.
If I say he looked like Max Wall then that would give your imagination something to play with. Long hair red/fair hair, yellow corded drainpipe trousers, brown corded jacket with leather on the elbows and big black boots, well Coco the clown meets Mr Pecksniff down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. He had a habit of putting his tongue into his cheek when you were talking to him, and staring at you with big doleful eyes. And he wasn,t slim by any means of the word. This is the picture I,ve got after forty four years of last setting my eyes on the chap.
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Now when you,ve laughed yourself silly and choked while hiccuping I must tell you what a smashing generous and gentle soul this teacher turned out to be. He was very fair in his dealings with us kids and treated us to the grammophone every now and again bringing with him from home, wherever that was, a rare and precious 78 inch record of his favourite composer or tune
I remember Peter and the Wolf being played and could be heard right along the upper corridor and down the stairs and into the foyer of the toilets once when I needed to go halfway through a particularly long rendition of his five best tunes.
His generousity to us kids had no bounds when he would buy for us a "jammie dodger" if we looked a bit hungry or sad that particular day. Now that was a nice twist to education a lad coming round with a tin of jammie dodgers for us kids to eat with our milk at only 1d each. I was to eat my way through many many many of those biscuits in the four years of my schooling at Prince Rupert Secondary Modern School for Boys, or Margy with a hard g. as we referred to it from the first day on. When through the ensuing years some of my fellow pupils would save up their pennies to buy "loosies" at the corner shop next to the playground, (a loosie being a loose ciggarette taken from a packet of five/ten/twenty wild woodbines) I and most of my pals would be spending our pennies on the moist, strawberry, salty yet sweet delights of the biscuit tin. And may I say in defence of my pals that there was not many lads in my class who did succumb to the dredded weed back in the early sixties. Alas, power in the guise of the vice captaincy of the school did bring me down when I confiscated a lads ciggarettes and told him that I wouldn,t report him in the punishment book but would smoke the ciggies myself. Thinking that this made me feel big and smart and grown up.
All good things come to an end of course and that includes good teachers, and one morning while waiting for our teacher to come into class we were instead visited by the head, Mr Williams; a very tall and grey looking and dressed man with a stern unfriendly and unwelcoming face to us "newbie" and scared looking frail schoolboys; And anounced that our loveable friendly teacher Mr Postance had passed away on the first January (1964) While in the first holiday, Christmas as well, of our first year.
Well we were astounded, gobsmacked and so very sad that this Dickens character of a smashing teacher had given up the Marley,s Ghost and left us poor weakling kids in the hands of the unknown. What had we done to the poor man to warrent an early death like this? were we that bad a rabble that were beyond teaching? Did we derserve to be flung to the mercey of the rest of the company of staff in Margy that some referred to as Teachers?
I can,t for the life of me remember who did take us for the rest of the term but according to my file and my report book it was a certain Eric Whitby who was a younger chap with mustache and grey sports jacket with leather elbow pads. Now we wondered if Mr Postance or Charlie, as he was affectionately known, bequeath those elbow patches to Eric or did Eric come from the same "teacher factory" as Charlie, one never knew. Mr Whitby reached the end of term with no points against him as he was only feeling his way amongst us at that period. So we broke up and had a brilliant summer holiday and started back to school refreshed and yearning to go a step nearer to being old hands in the school
Now going back, we knew that we were not the newbies any more so we could play tricks on the new intake just as we had tricks played on us, like, head down the toilet if we looked cute or soft or stupid. I wouldn,t dare do such a thing myself I,d be too scared the newbie would turn the tables and put my head down the bowl instead, I was such a weedy boy in my grey shorts and black blazer and black front scraped shoes.
Our new teacher was Eric Whitby again and under his leadership my english exam results shot up to a considerable good mark. And the second year whizzed through without much mishap or of any noticeable misfortunes by any of us pupils or teachers. One of my recollections with Eric Whitby was that I asked him to type a forward for a very long composition I,d written after seeing a film at the flix. I was a very impressionable child back in the 60s, I still am today my granmother would argue. Anyway after a week or two I kept asking Mr Whitby had he typed my forward that I had written out for him, and he would reply to the negative each time. Until one day as I was reading a passage in a book, he placed a piece of typed paper on the top of my desk and silently walked off back to his desk and put his head into the Financial Times or Titbits or some other notorious publication. I read the forward I had written and looked up at him in bewilderment. His typed forward was not in straight lines and most of it was spelt wrong. At the end f the lesson I went to him and asked him about it and he just smirked and said that it was what I,d asked him to do and he,d done it. I thought he was mad or something, I couldn,t put that in my composition as a project. We went out and went to our next lesson which was on the same corridor and in the last classroom. We sat down to maths with another Mr Williams and as we sat there for a minute or two, Mr Williams called me out and said he had a message for me. I went to his desk and he handed me a piece of paper on which was written the typed out forward I,d asked Mr Whitby to do for me. Mr Williams told me that someone had left it for me, did I understand? "Yes sir" I beamed, and went back to my seat delighted.
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