Last class Friday afternoon. Grade 12 English. It was October 26, 1962, the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was 16 and terrified that the world was going to end in a nuclear war.
Mr Evans was standing at the side windows of the classroom looking up at the overcast sky. As we took our seats, he turned and walked to his desk, not uttering a word. This was so uncharacteristic that we were stilled into an uneasy silence.
He had been our English teacher since Grade 9 and, over 3 years, he had guided us through and challenged us with Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer and Milton, TS Eliot, Keats, Wordsworth and Robert Frost. He read aloud to us from the texts we studied with great dramatic flair and flamboyance and encouraged us to do likewise. He coaxed us into tasting how delicious words and language could be rolling off the tongue. He had so seduced us into falling in love with Shakespeare that, in Grade 10, after we had finished reading Henry IV, Part I, we begged to study Part II. The deal he struck with us was that we had to promise to read the required Dickens of that year on our own over the Christmas holidays. And we did – all 23 of us.
That late October Friday afternoon he turned from the window, walked to his desk, lifted the lid of a portable record player, slid an LP album from its sleeve and placed it on the turntable. All without saying a word. He lifted the needle arm and placed the needle on the now spinning album. And, then, we heard it – that deep, resonant voice with its Welsh lilt. For 35 minutes we sat in silence as Dylan Thomas read his poems, some we had studied and more that we had not. I walked home from school that day soothed and calmed for the first time in a couple of weeks.
That day, Mr Evans bequeathed to us a legacy that has lasted a lifetime: the solace of words and language, a solace I continue to find in our present uncertain times. Thank you, Mr Evans. (364 words)
Ann Robertson