Miss Chapman, Miss Chapman

You remember Miss Chapman. Oh she may have had other names, but you had her. She taught everybody since the earth’s crust cooled. I had her for Three. Long. Years. I suppose for that matter she had me too, for three long years. I believe I’m fair in saying she had the better part of those three years.

In 1954, 1955, and 1956 being a teacher meant something. If a kid didn’t learn, there was no question whose fault it was. To imagine it was anything other than sheer laziness or stupidity on the kid’s part was unthinkable. The teacher was the law. This particular teacher was a little bit of a thing who had the disposition of a Mongol war lord, the tenacity of the British navy, and the management policies of a Prussian field marshal. Parents loved her. Kids survived her, to greater and lesser degrees. 

 Miss Chapman was mean. There is no other way to describe her. Down to the bone mean. Even for a Catholic School in the 50’s, mean. She had a thin, pinched face with a tight little smile that never went any further than her thin little lips. Her hair was a nondescript brown, usually pulled back into a bun. Her little wire rimmed glasses would catch the light as she loomed over us, gleefully putting a big red x through incorrect answers and a tiny, precision check when we (finally) got something right.

She was not universally mean of course. She did have one or two favourites, but even they were not her ardent cheerleaders. Her reputation preceded her, and we all knew (or expected) to have a difficult year ahead of us.  It was probably not too far from the truth to say that Miss Chapman firmly believed that she and she alone stood between anarchy and education. 

I didn’t suffer academically, despite the fact that Pat frequently graded me one of the lower order of beings. In fact, not only was I a relatively able student, I was also very obedient. What more could the Miss Chapmans of the world ask. But I never did achieve the status of “Favourite”.

But I learned a lot from her. There were, of course, the Times Tables, but more importantly I learned that even when you have to keep your mouth shut, you can still talk to yourself. This lesson was underlined one day in the principal’s office. Sweet validation!

Miss Chapman had been asked to deliver her class register to the office, and even she had to admit I was the second or third most responsible kid in the class. I was sent along, with the explanation of why a certain portion was as yet not complete. The principal took the register from me, listened to Miss Chapman’s excuse from my lips, thanked me, and as he turned to his desk I heard him say, not so under his breath, “The Old Bat!” It was almost vindication!

Miss Chapman chose to energetically keep me in my place because she was an experienced teacher. She had, in fact, experienced Pat as a student five years earlier and that was how she formed her opinion of me.  She and Pat had crossed swords on several occasions, and there was no way she was going to endure another one of that brood. Pat, for her part, couldn’t see who died and made Miss Chapman boss. To be fair I must add that, of the ones she thoroughly disliked during those three years of my incarceration, I was perhaps the least despised. That’s something.

She was present in our conversations at home at breakfast and supper for many years. She almost joined the family. I imagine she spent many evenings dining out in several other homes as well. 

So, the battle lines were drawn. Our Mother was a strict believer in the if-you’re-in-trouble-at-school-you-can-multiply-that-by-2-when-you-get-home tenet. Even before I was ever enrolled in grade one the ground shook one day when Pat was in Miss Chapman’s class. Pat wore glasses at the time, and they had met with an unfortunate incident at home, leaving Pat to explain to Miss Chapman how she happened to have the nerve to show up at school, sans glasses, not ready to learn.

Now either she didn’t believe that broken glasses are as useful as cows at brunch, or she saw it as an opportunity to send Pat back home and give her a few precious challenge-free moments in her day. Perhaps her patience was just thin that day.

Mother’s was. It may have been the hazard of making a child, her child, wear broken glasses over her precious eyes. It may have been the waste of perfectly good education time taken up in a fool’s errand. It may have been the implication that her dear little Pat was a liar. Ah-ha! We’ll just clear up that little misunderstanding right now. Mother took on the uncharacteristic role of avenging angel and we all marched back to the school. The homeward bound Pat may have been having a bit of a vacation from Miss Chapman too, but the trip back to the school had me worried. Still a pre-schooler, with shorter legs than Mother or Pat, I beetled along to Agincourt with them.

Pat and I waited in the hallway while Mother “interviewed” Miss Chapman. I knew there was trouble but I wasn’t sure whose it was. Trouble has a way of splashing when it falls, and one can quite innocently get caught in the splash zone. I fretted. Pat was unusually subdued. 

The broken, actually smashed, glasses were produced to the court as Exhibit A. The judge and jury, Mother, found Pat, the accused, innocent of all charges. I’m not sure the defendant had anything to say. Pat was to be reinstated in the class. I had five years to dread being in Miss Chapman’s class.

 Miss Chapman was my grade five teacher, and that was the year, not coincidentally, that I got the most strappings. It probably didn’t help that near the beginning of the school term, when she was ensuring order in the hall ways that I brightly chirped to her that even though all the rest of the kids thought she was mean, I thought she was nice. Low impulse control to be sure. My doom was sealed.

 It began with her re-naming me. I was now Patsy. Not Pat. Not Patricia. Not even Trish, Trisha, or even Patty. I don’t remember there being any other Pats in class that year, so it was an entirely arbitrary decision made for reasons undisclosed to anyone.

In those days, Catholic schools literally believed in knocking the devil out of you, and strapping (with a foot long, quarter inch thick piece of rubber, official companion to every grade school teacher in the system) was the preferred method of directing rebellious charges into the path of righteousness. Offences seemed to be divided into one hand or two hand misdemeanours. One whack per hand was standard issue but particularly egregious errors could warrant two or more.

I got strapped for talking in class (of course). I got strapped for wriggling out of my snow-pants and boots during morning prayers. I got strapped for answering out loud and not putting up my hand. I got strapped for getting out of my desk and going to the pencil sharpener without asking. Those are the ones that I remember.

“Getting the strap”, was common, certainly in Miss Chapman’s class. The word alone brought the troops into order quite quickly. Seeing the instrument of learning extracted from the top drawer of her desk brought immediate peace to the land. It looked like a two-by-four only with flex to it. I suppose it was made of rubber and in actual fact was only about ten inches long and about four inches wide. 

Living in fear, plus a cautious nature, kept me strap-free throughout my entire school tenure, except for one small incident. It was truly hard to distinguish one of Miss Chapman’s “good” days from a “bad” one. Some of us, mostly girls, assumed the worst every day. I was well practiced at not waving flags in front of the bulls. However, one day the class had been warned, “The next one out of their seat gets the strap!” It should work so well in the Middle East. It seemed a long time after that, in the stillness that ensued, I forgot the embargo on gazelle moves, and raised my butt a bit off the seat of my desk to smooth my skirt beneath me. That was enough. Ole’ Sharp Eye ordered me to the back of the room. One crack on each hand. Stung and mortified I endured the rest of the day slunk in my desk and terrified of having to explain my sins at home. No permanent disfigurement, so I decided to lie. Lie like a rug, to save myself the lecture and recriminations, when I knew, I knew, I had been punished more than enough. 

I didn’t tell. I kept that secret, that lie, for years. When the daily log was reviewed, “Who wrote lines today.... ?, Who got the strap today... ?, etc. my name was suspiciously absent from the list. Of course Alan McNabb and Bobbie West were regulars so I threw their names into the conversation pit. It wasn’t until I was grown and had been married for several years that I confessed the tale to my parents. Their reaction was very low key. I guess I could have told them sooner.  

Getting strapped, then was not a surprise. But what was a surprise was getting sent home one Wednesday morning to get my glasses which I had broken the previous evening. Plastic frames then did not have the resilience of today’s plastic. Of course, it may have been that I stepped on them and no plastic would have been able to withstand that type of abuse, but nonetheless, it was an accident, and I was duly chastised by Mother for my carelessness and the didn’t I know they weren’t made of money harangue.

So it was that late spring morning that I was ordered home to fetch the mangled spectacles. I was to wear them even if they were broken.  Mother intuited immediately the premise behind the errand. Miss Chapman thought I was lying and demanded proof that the missing glasses were, in fact, unwearable.

Had I ever lied before to Miss Chapman to give her cause to believe that this was yet another prevarication? Probably. I know I always affirmed my innocence when she advanced, strap in hand – not that it did any good, mind you. When she whirled around in front of the classroom, demanding to know who was whispering, I was not the first one to admit that I was the culprit. No point really – she knew.

I suspect it was the time spent in her class that imbued me with a philosophy that I still have today. Don’t complain when you get a speeding ticket, even if you weren’t speeding because look at all the times you were speeding and didn’t get caught. It’s just payback. At some level, we’re all guilty of something.

Nobody was going to call a child of Mother’s a liar, especially when (in this instance, at least) she wasn’t! Off we all marched back to the school, Mother, Michelle who was on a kindergarten morning off, broken glasses and me.

I doubt that Miss Chapman really had ever dealt with very many enraged mothers during her career. Most kids were too terrified to take homes news of their own misdemeanours since at that time parental reinforcement generally followed teacher correction. In other words, one whack at school got you two at home.

Face to face, toe to toe, much like Roman Gladiators, or their modern day counterpart, hockey players, Mother and Miss Chapman squared off. Voices were raised. Broken glasses were produced and brandished about.  “How”, Mother demanded, “did Miss Chapman expect me to wear something broken, broken glass, that could perhaps damage my eyes forever!?”

Miss Chapman’s tight little smile never left her face. Of course she hadn’t realized that the glasses were “broken” broken. And no, she didn’t expect me to wear them with no glass at all in the bent and cracked frames. And yes, of course, I could return to class immediately.

With that, Mother wheeled about, pointed Michelle in the direction of the door and strode out. Her whole demeanour screamed “Don’t make me come back here!” Miss Chapman and I returned to class in silence. A detente of sorts had been reached it seemed as there were no more strappings and no more parental interventions. 

By a strange twist of fate I found myself, twenty-five years later at Sunday Mass in an unfamiliar parish, seated next to Miss Chapman. Oh, I recognized her alright. Well that was uncomfortable. Do I say something? Ignore her? She didn’t appear to recognize me and I made a great effort to exhibit reverence and deportment during the service. I sang all the words to all the hymns, being careful to be heard to be singing, but not so boisterously loud that I drew undue attention. I mentally reviewed my attire to be sure it was appropriate, and that my fingernails were clean, my skirt covered my knees, there was no cleavage. I must have passed. No pointer stick smashed down on the pew beside me. 

I’m truly ashamed that I latched onto what appeared to me to be a perfectly legitimate excuse to avoid her after the service. She’s gone now, poor old girl. I ran into an old school friend a few years back who told me Miss Chapman had died and Marybeth had attended her funeral at the cathedral. Well, Marybeth had been a Favourite and so was entitled to attend.