I had a wonderful teacher at just about the perfect
time for having such a thing. I was about 12, coming from a small primary
school to a huge intermediate, the setting off point in New Zealand then towards
secondary school.
I’d been lucky with teachers before then too, more lucky
than most when I read and hear the things others remember of growing up.
But Mr Tyson was the first male teacher to have a huge
influence on me. And he is the teacher I remember first, always.
He knew how to teach but I don’t remember the classes
really, other than the topics he introduced to make subjects interesting. We went
to Auckland airport; we flew from Hamilton to Auckland when most of that class
had never been near an airport let alone a plane. I can’t remember how exactly
we raised the money needed but I remember the chart on the wall tracking the
progress towards there being enough that we could all go.
He did little things that will stay with me for ever.
We
were boys and girls, and full of energy. Sometimes the energy must have been
heading in the wrong direction, and Mr Tyson would tell us to get up and take
our chairs, and we would line them up back to back on the first sports field we
came to outside our demountable classroom, and sit down. Mr Tyson would call
two names and those people would chase each other around the chairs in a mad whirl
of arms and legs.
He always managed to pick two who would absolutely burst with
the effort of trying to catch each other, and then a couple more just the same.
And before you knew it it would be over, and we’d be back inside, and somehow
the class we’d left half complete made so much more sense than it had when we went
outside.
I never saw another class out there chasing each
other.
He always told us to head outside in the same voice he
used to tell us anything else. Even then I understood that I wanted to be able
to do that, to deal with the good and the bad and the infuriating in the same
way.
I remember thanking Mr Tyson at the end of the year,
but I was incredibly shy in those years and it would have been in as few words
as possible.
I had another year of intermediate and would have
bumped into Mr Tyson from time to time. I don’t really remember though. I had a
very compartmentalised mind then, things came to an end, they were done and
then there was the next.
The road to high school ran at right angles to that
which ran dead straight the kilometre or so I had walked to intermediate. I
would cut across the face of a row of connected shops, bottle shop, fish and
chips, dairy, newsagent, something, something, hairdresser, chemist and jog across
when a gap came in the busy morning traffic.
Often a man on a black moped would be coming past, dark
sunglasses and a light-coloured helmet with no faceguard so that his close-cropped
black beard showed.
It was Mr Tyson. And I never once waved a hello. I don’t
know why.
I don’t have regrets. I’m finally old enough to
understand how little use they are.
But I wish I had waved every day.
A few years later my mum told me that Mr Tyson had had
a stroke, I’m not really sure how she knew.
And then a few months later I was running across the
road as always, and here came a black moped with a man with his jet-black beard
close cropped, his mouth just a little more set, the dark sunglasses
in place. And I didn’t wave.
I’m a different man to that boy, in lots of ways I look
back and think I wish I could still be him. I would wave now though.
I’d shout “You’re a champion, Mr Tyson!” And I would
hope everyone heard, and his mouth might be just a little less set as he headed
up that long road to the intermediate.
