Telling Tales out of School

Some of the more conventional devices in the "schooldays are the happiest days" version of events are the use of positive evaluations for the main personnel in the story: "very fine gentleman", "very good student". Such rosy recollections often begin an interview as the interviewee "gives" the interviewer the expected picture and in so doing begins to explore the relationship with the interviewer. This appears clearly in the following extract from an interview with former student Fred Mitchell.

FM: I could tell you a little bit about some of them, Guy Markham was my favourite. He taught me English in first year, and history in second. I think English again in the third. He was a character, he was an ex-... he was British, and he'd served in the Canadian Army in the first World War in cavalry, Fifth Cavalry, and if you could get him going, he'd tell you a little bit about that, but he was a very sincere man. He didn't have, didn't leave his subject like some of them did, as much as some of them did - couldn't get him off what he wanted to talk about, but he made a lot of fun out of English. I can remember him, particularly when we were taking the Highwayman,... but he was a very dignified man, but he'd rush out in the hall and pound on the door as "the highwayman came a riding up to the old inn door," and then rush in and recite the poem. And we were doing Shakespeare, he'd have the fellows up at the front with yardsticks fencing all across the room and telling them what they were doing wrong. This went over very well, and although he wasn't the type that you'd think, he would hold the fellows attention and there was, I think we all got a lot out of it. Different, but very effective was Ben Scott, who actually taught History and English. He was more casual and more prone to tell you what was in the headlines in the morning paper, 'cause he was a big one on current affairs, he didn't mind taking ten or fifteen minutes to talk about something that was in the paper, telling what he thought, the background, and wanting to know what you thought. He would always lead part way, get you started on something and then he would leave. And everybody knew that he was going down to the boiler room to smoke his pipe, and then he'd come back and he'd smell of tobacco, very strongly and the fellows would actually kid him about it, and he wouldn't admit it, to that's where he'd been. Effective teacher and a more of a friend with the boys then Guy Markham although they were both very fine teachers. If a fellow had problems, he might go and talk to Benny Scott about them. One of the best teachers I had there, the best at actually putting over his subject was Sanderson. He taught math.

Interestingly in only a minority of our interviews did the speaker move slowly towards a more dissident and critical view. It seemed that they were slowly feeling their way towards these views; growing to trust themselves (and their interviewers). Mitchell again provides an example of this process at work; after discussing several more teachers in a similar vein to his comments reproduced above, Mitchell turned to memories of another teacher:

He was a bully, and I don't think he was right, his personality was warped, I'll put it that way. He started every class by slamming a metre stick on the front work table because he was in the physics lab, and that was the way he'd run his class from start to finish, with a loud yelling voice. And he took no, there was no jokes, no kidding, no laughing in his class. He taught very well, 'cause you were, you were scared of him literally, because he would smack fellows on the side of the head and so on like that. I've seen him knock fellows right off their stool. But, he didn't give many detentions, he handled it all himself in his classroom, I didn't, nobody liked him. I guess he taught us, I guess we learned our subject, but it wasn't because he put it across to us in any way of a gentleman. He was a boor and a bully.

Moving from the 1930s to the 1960s, the changing nature of school mythology is matched by a crumbling of collective memory: a singular narrative no longer seems so pervasive. Take the question of drug use in the school: interviewees (both students and teachers) presented divergent memories on this issue. Several claimed that they had no memory of any drug use at the school at that time. Others were quite insistent on the opposite:

There was a drug culture at Beal. Lots of smoking marijuana in the halls (Shaw).

Acid was big then, I know a lot of the kids did acid (Shaw).

I remember during the drug scare, we had, that was in the mid '60s, late '60s, very bad, particularly marijuana and there were a few people hitting the main liner stuff, and we had visits from the Mounted Police (Ariss).

The externally-sponsored "drug city" myth, then, could draw support from the lack of an institutionally-produced collective memory.