Angels and Demons

This post is a bit of a work in progress but I figure if I start writing more will come out as well. It is for my The Artist's Way book (TAW) which I am doing with a group called On The Wing. The book asks you to think back to discover who some of your monsters and heroes were. Those who encouraged your artistic endeavours and those who didn't, who damaged instead.

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Miss W was the first teacher I had when I changed school at seven. She was in charge of a tiny class which I was part of and the year above which was larger. We were all in the same room together and I spent two years there. When I joined the school, I was the youngest in the whole school. I loved to write. It was agreed I had a fantastic imagination but somehow that didn't feel like an entirely positive thing, or at least not positive enough to outweigh the problems with my writing.

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When TAW talks about the censer I see an old woman with grey hair in a bun and glasses in a 70s styley with slight wings to the side and a glasses chain round her neck. She is looking over the top of them a little. She looks bored and boring, self righteous, fuddy duddy.... She is sat at a desk stacked high with papers and she has a pen, and old fashioned one and a jar of ink. She is scrutinising each and every paper and destroying it slowly under the weight of her own marks...

You see my brain had the story and my pen struggled to keep up. My handwriting was awful. There was no grammar or punctuation. My sentences went on and on and there was just no stopping them. And as for my spelling....

They looked at my work and tested me for dyslexia. I wasn't dyslexic. They put me in the 'special' classes at lunch times to make sure I caught up. Everything I did wasn't good enough because I was behind. At the school I had come from I had spent the year with a lovely teacher. It was all play based but I remember more lessons from that classroom than I do the ones before or immediately after. Somehow all that play and fun became bad because now I was behind and that just wouldn't do.

It took me years to figure out but I eventually did... In my old school which was state run, I had been one of the oldest children. My birthday fell very close to the cut off point for that year and I just missed out on being in the year above. My new school didn't worry about dates and cut off points for the year. I got put up a year by accident and no one realised. Maybe my spelling and grammar and punctuation and sentence structure were not as bad as all that.... Maybe they didn't have to destroy my stories to make my writing perfect, but they did....

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After I spent my two years in that class, I moved to a new one with a new teacher Miss E. Miss E was a spinster nearing retirement but she had an energy to her. There was no lack of discipline in her class and sometimes she was hard and strict but she was always consistent and fair. Both my sister and I liked being in her class. I don't so much remember her lessons as things that happened and some of the rules. If you were stuck you couldn't queue at her desk if there were more than three there. If you were there you had to listen to what she was saying to others in case it helped you.

She was very Christian and one girl had a copy of the Demon Headmaster. It was taken away. One time I picked up an out of date factual book and she saw it and took it from me and ripped it up because it was out of date. I remember wanting to take it out of the bin and make it better...

I remember that she always said I would write a book one day. She said it more than once and she said it to my Mum as well, who repeated it to me. I remember that belief in me. I remember that rules and discipline are not counter to care and love. You can be strict and loving at the same time, if you do it right....

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Later on when we had different teachers for different subjects there was Mrs D. She mis-prounounced my name for years but I never told her, it wasn't important. She was an English teacher and she taught us to dissect questions for reading comprehension. She had us take different parts in Shakespeare and read aloud, which helped us all understand it, Shakespeare has to be spoken....

She knew I had book club money even though it was mostly younger ones that used it lots. There was always something there choosen for me, something she thought I might like. She encouraged.

Mrs D is both a hero and a monster. She is a monster because she had to mark and to her red pen, my writing was never perfect, no matter how much soul I put in it. I don't think marking is always a good thing. If a clever and able child who can write well can't get full marks then who can? What good does that do anyone?

She is a hero because she gave us interesting things to write about and encouraged us to love books and writing. Because when I found myself writing a pagan creation myth that came from nowhere she didn't treat it as anything other than a good piece of writing. In such a Christian school she could very easily have made a lot of trouble with that piece of writing. Instead it was entered as a piece of coursework for my GCSE. This was however a mixed blessing as none of us ever got any of our coursework back....

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And now for an art teacher or two... Both I think monsters.

We had a task to create a picture using white, black and newspaper. I created a fish jumping out of a river. It was a simple enough picture and din't take too long but the fish was exactly as I wanted it. The river was exactly as I wanted it. The clouds were exactly as I wanted them. I had managed to reproduce the picture in my head perfectly. I liked it. He didn't. It didn't tick some nice little box that he had I guess.

I remember one time we had to pick two letters and find a font and use those two letters to mask out areas across a page and colour the gaps inbetween. I liked what I produced. So did the art teacher. I remember him staring at it intently and then saying that he thought I would make a good little artist, probably even better than my sister.

Now I have issues with my sister, she has long time been built up and me knocked down in order to try and make us more equal. What started as a compliment turned into trouble as soon as he said I might be better than her. I wasn't allowed to be better than her. Not really....

In the art room there was a long row of cupboards down one side and on top was a huge number of fantastic items for people to draw. Things that had been collected over years and years from all over the world. They drew us like moths to a flame but we couldn't touch and God forbid we try and draw them. They were too hard and they were for the real artists who did A-level or maybe towards the end of GCSE. I never, ever got anywhere near them. I am sure I could have had a damn good go if someone had given me some nice pastels to play with....

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My last hero is an unlikely one, a gay chemistry teacher. He had a class full of girls who were not necessarily overly interested in the finer intricacies of chemistry. He did all the fun stuff, maybe not teaching exactly what he should but making sure we had some fun in there too... He made purple smoke one day in the fume cupboard. He showed us interesting reactions and had us play with fun substances. He blew things up and burned them. We didn't like the proper chemistry and all those titrations but we liked the other bits.

He leant me a book one day. Out of the blue I think. The Enigma Score by Sheri S. Tepper. I havn't read it in years but Sheri S. Tepper is one of my favourite authors to this day and one day I shall re-read that old book just to see if it is in much the same style as her later books. You see her current stuff is high fantasy with a woman's rights and environmental twist. She doesn't preach but she makes you cry in sympathy at the injustice and that raises you up as she takes it all somewhere ehere beauty wins out... He did me a good favour that day. I often wonder why me and why that book. Did he see something in my soul that he was trying to help fly free? He planted a seed... One I chose to grow.