Bob was the Teacher’s Pet
By Robert LaFrance
It just so happens that my column falls on the same day that Donald Trump slinks out of town and off to Florida – the ultimate Snowbird. May he go to jail by next Tuesday afternoon, about four.
Enough about that.
Sitting in front of my computer keyboard and watching it snow, I am thinking of the frosty Miss Sara Hilda Williams, my high school English teacher. Some people, students and teachers alike, really hated her but she was my favourite.
How many Blackfly Gazette readers remember Miss Williams? (Even now I do not dare to call her Sara.) I graduated from what was then SVRHS – the letter R stands for Regional – in 1965 and I remember Miss Williams congratulating me and slipping me an envelope bulging with ten-dollar bills to help my further education.
I became her Teacher’s Pet in 1961 when I was twelve. My mother died in May of that year and when I returned to school after the funeral in Lerwick I found myself the envy (or object of hate) of my classmates because I was a TP. She gave me extra help in her English class and even drove me home to Tilley a few times, usually because she kept me in for extra help.
Her first school in Victoria County was at South Tilley. From that beginning in this area, Miss Sara Williams went on to teach at several other small schools, including Block X School in North Tilley (I attended there from grade one to five) and the South Tilley School. A look at some Block X records from 1939 shows that Sara Williams was designated a 'Class II' teacher at a salary of $280 per annum for teaching 33 students ages six to 15. (What could she possibly have done with all that money?)
After teaching at various schools she took a job in September 1953 that was to
last the rest of her career, until she retired in 1966. The newly built Southern Victoria Regional High School in Andover had opened its doors for the first time with G.E. Malcolm MacLeod as its principal and Mrs. Maybelle Titus, who was to become one of Sara Williams's lifelong friends, as vice principal.
In the morning Miss Williams would always ask how I was and if I answered "good" or "fine" she would say: "No, Robert, you are neither GOOD nor FINE. You are WELL!"
Everyone had a story or an anecdote about her. The late Vaughan DeMerchant had three stories that he said were not printable, and they weren't, about things students had said to her in class.
"She used to sing - or try to sing," said my late cousin James LaFrance of North
Tilley. "What I remember most was that my seat was right in front of her desk and when she got mad at someone behind me she'd push her desk back hard and push mine right into my stomach every time."
My sister Joan (LaFrance) Laverdiere, of Welland, Ontario, said: "I liked Sara. The funny things she used to do like throwing the books. You just had to duck in
time. She'd get so mad, but it might be for just a few seconds. I think most of the kids liked her."
Turning the clock forward to the late 1970s after I had built a cabin in Tilley: I had spent years saving money for an early retirement after working in Ontario, BC, and the Northwest Territories and was settled down to my savings bonds and garden.
One summer morning my phone rang just as the sun was peeping over the hill by the Murray and Minnie Paris house. It was 5:35 am and I immediately recognized the voice on the line. It was the voice of Miss Sara Williams, whom I hadn’t heard from for a dozen years. She wanted to talk about figures of speech and sentence structure, namely subject and predicate. In four minutes she had said what she wanted to say and abruptly hung up.
Next morning, and for many mornings afterward, this 75-year old lady and I, a 28-year-old bachelor (same as my son is today) and I discussed the English language and every possible ramification and nuance until I moved to Birch Ridge where I still had the same phone number, but she didn’t call any more. I guess I was a foreigner.
The next thing I heard about her was that she was a resident in the Victoria Glen Manor when it was still in Perth. I resolved to go and visit her there. She didn’t know me. Not a glimmer. I talked to Betty and Jane at the nurses’ desk for that wing and they said she was back teaching English spelling to her students at SVHS. Whenever one of the staff went near her she might start explaining the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs or describing what a gerund was.
Miss Sara Williams lived to be 99.95 years old. I mentioned one day to one of the staff that it was a shame that Miss Williams wouldn’t realize it when she became a century old and that (unnamed) staff member said: “She knows how old she is and said she refused to become that old.” Sure enough, Miss Williams died in early July 2003, five days short of that century. -end-
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