They, whoever ‘they’ are, say that we all had a favourite schoolteacher who gave us a passion and enthused us in some subject or other. As I was no good at literally anything, I had a very small pool of favourite teachers from whom to choose. Since I understood none of the sciences or the practical subjects, and Maths was well beyond me, all that was left was English. And not just any old English because I had no interest in English Literature. No, all that was left was English Language.
My favourite teacher was an English teacher who was Portuguese. She was called Mrs Defonseca (teachers didn’t have first names when I was at school) and she got me to fall in love with words. Rather than fill my head with Shakespeare and the like, she taught me freethinking and expression. She also tried to teach me the difference between Verbs and Adjectives and Nouns too, but even today I struggle in that department. I am sure I could probably tell the difference between the types of words, but when I started writing, it was by ‘feel’, unencumbered by the nuisance of having to learn the technical stuff. So, if you read my stuff – and thank you if you do – then please excuse the grammar. I’m doing the best that I can.
Mrs D was keen on letting a child’s imagination run wild. This was handy for me since my imagination was already right out there and she was kicking at an open door, a door which I marched straight through. And so I chose English at the expense of all other subjects which made sense since I couldn’t grasp any of the others.
A couple of years later and it was exam time and I knew I was looking down the barrel. There had been no progress at the main subjects and I was unsure whether my new found love of English would be of any use. (In life, it turned out it probably wouldn’t.) Mrs D had warned us that when it came to exams, there would be a series of questions from which you could choose a couple to write about. There would be subjects like, ‘Do you think there is too much violence on TV? Give arguments for and against’ and there would be subjects like, ‘Describe an orange.’ “Always,” she said, “Go for the more descriptive one.” And so it came to pass that one of the questions in my exam was. ‘Describe an orange’. Whether it had been a lucky guess by Mrs D was immaterial because I had forgotten the orange suggestion as soon as she said it, but today there was only one thing to write about. The words came really easy too. I filled pages and pages about the orange and handed in my exam paper at the very last moment. And in English I gained the highest possible mark, not that you would know that today!
The rest of the exams turned out to be the failures I expected, so at least I was not disappointed!
All these years on and I am, at last, trying to follow my dream that started after I wrote about an orange. I have not always followed the project with the seriousness it probably required – girls, football, mental illness all got in the way – but I am on the case now, giving it one last go before it’s too late and I’m too old.
Mrs Defonseca has a lot to answer for, but I thank her all these years on.
