Stuart Millard
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Bonus Post: The Time I Didn't Meet a Gnome
🕑 Added 2020-09-20 12:07:20 +0000 UTC
This is about a teacher I had at the age of eight, but as he's not consented to be written about on here, to protect his privacy, I'm going to call him Mr. Diarrhea. Hm, on second thoughts, that's a bit too... diarrhea-y. Let's call him Mr. Monk, because the young me believed his bald spot was a deliberate haircut, meant to mimic those of medieval monks, as seen in my gran's collection of weirdly specific monk-themed egg cups and kitchen bric-a-brac.
Mr. Monk was an inventive teacher, who'd quieten down noisy pupils by singing “S.Y.C.H. – shut your cake hole!” to the tune of Big Ben's bells, and once caused thirty children to shite themselves during story time, when it got to a bit where a ghost closed a door, and he yanked on an unseen thread tied to the handle of our classroom door, causing it to violently slam. One of my other memories of Monk, which looking back, I can't quite believe happened, was a fortnight-long lesson on British nature. Much of 1980's junior school life was spent sat cross legged on the floor while the television got wheeled in for wildlife documentaries about sticklebacks and water boatmen (though still preferable to the blood-drenched animal rights one we were forced to watch). I suppose to lift us out of the textbook and teach by experiencing, Monk built us our very own pond – inside the classroom.
All the desks were shunted to the edges so this enormous thing could take its place in the centre of the room, filled with gallons of water, insects, boatmen, little fish, and a number of baby frogs. The latter residents saw the early closure and dismantling of the pond, and I still remember Monk's exasperated cry, as one particular boy, while striding across to the pencil sharpener, trod on another hopping escapee; his third such act of accidental amphibicide. I've a vivid memory of the lights going on first thing of a dark morning, revealing the flat, dried-out little frog carcasses that had to be scraped off the floor, or from the bottom of chair legs.
It's fair to say that in his teaching methods, Monk was a bit odd. But the good-odd, and not the Fred Talbot kind. His main gimmick was that he had gnomes living in his garden, around which all of his teaching revolved. The gnomes each had names and quirks, and a social hierarchy with its own rules and intricacies; their own little structured world. They had hobbies, adventures and schemes, and unwound at the end of the day with a pint at the 'bup' (in gnome language, human English words would often be reversed). He'd regularly share the soap opera of their lives, with pupils enquiring after them, like an adult would their workmate's children or dog. For art, we'd draw the gnomes, for creative writing, we'd pen stories about them; in what was essentially fan-fic.
Every Monday morning would start with the class reporting our own gnome sightings from the weekend. Tiny hands would go up, and kids would share the gnomes they'd seen in their gardens, skittering into the bushes at the park, or hiding behind the chimney up on a roof. Perhaps that last one was an unconsciously shared piece of local lore. Pre-dating Monk, the town mayor who'd been my next-door neighbour as an even younger boy similarly told me that gnomes lived on the roofs of our houses. It wasn't birds you could hear walking around up there, but them, and I've a clear false (or not?) memory of sitting on my bed and looking up to see – as he'd told me I would if I watched for it – a small pair of legs and booted feet dangling down, idly kicking back and forth, belonging to the gnome sat on the drainpipe.
Eventually, having been pestered to for a while, Monk promised he'd bring one of the gnomes in to meet us. As you can imagine, there was tremendous excitement at finally getting to see one of Mr. Monk's famous gnomes in person. However, they're a shy race, and the wee chap spent his school-day under the teacher's desk inside a bucket half-filled with sand, which to the cynical eye, may appeared to have been otherwise empty. Unfortunately, by the final bell, Monk's gnome refused to stop being invisible and talk to us, because it was so offended by the one horrid child in the class who didn't believe, and had ruined it for everyone. This Neil deGrasse Tyson of children was not popular that day, under a barrage of tuts and other kids saying their name in a whiny voice. It probably won't blow you out of your seat to learn that the jaded young misanthrope was me, the ultimate Poo Poo Boy.
In a kind of CBBC allegory for religion, the persuasive power of crowds and the desire to fit in, despite what you feel to be true, as a result of this incident, I subconsciously forced myself to buy into it all. Post-bucket, I became a full-on believer and evangelist for the cause, even adding to the Monday sightings with my own, having 'seen' a snoring gnome asleep in the window of a neighbour's shed; oddly, a sight I can still recall. Then one day, the year after the class had moved up to another teacher, a kid from a different class sidled up to some of us in the playground like a spiv with a jacket full of watches. He said his older brother had Monk as a teacher a few years earlier, and at the end of term, Monk told his pupils the gnomes had all died in an explosion when his shed blew up. The end of innocence.
Thinking back, I have a lot of questions. Would a teacher get away with that now? Are modern kids too savvy and distrusting? Would a parent hear about it and complain to the local paper, with a quote about “filling my boy's head with lies!” and a photo of them outside the school gates with their arms folded? And was the playground gossip even true? Older brothers of 'some kid' at school were fountains of misinformation, always wanting you to push your hands together and peer inside because it 'looked like a fanny', or casually bragging that Bruce Lee died after he got in a fight with their uncle.
For us, a revelation that the gnomes were previously announced to have been killed, suggesting Monk rebooted the story every year for his incoming class, wrapped the whole thing neatly in a bow. We were just arriving at the age where believing in things was for babies, giving us the get-out of “yeah, well I knew it was made-up. I just said I believed it, but I didn't really...” As an adult, I hugely admire both the creative lengths Mr. Monk went to to foster a sense of imagination in his pupils, and if the exploding shed story was true, the nihilistic way he ended it all, perhaps when confronted with a class filled with doubting little Millards.
