All The Names...

The reason I recalled this teacher, was not initially because of the incident which followed, but because I recall she had a totally unpredictable system of selecting who cleaned the chalk from off the blackboards. And her demand for cleaning was not just 'wiped off with a duster', but washed, with three lots of water to remove all traces of chalk dust off the blackboard, to ensure her chalk could clearly be read by those students right at the back.  I kid you not. This meant that after you had stayed behind and wiped the board with the duster, washed the blackboard with one, two, then three lots of water (ensuring in between each bucket load, you rinsed the chalk dust out of the cloths completely otherwise it only smeared onto the blackboards surface). You then had to dry the blackboard off with an old piece of towelling. There were to be no streaks, smears or lines left by the water. In fact the piece of towelling should also be clean of any dust, and there should never be any blackboard paint appearing on the towelling. Any evidence of black paint on the towelling meant you then had another task before you could leave. you had to wash out the fabric until all traces of the black was removed from the towelling. This last was practically impossible. Blackboard paint was black, the paint was also unvarnished (otherwise you could not write on it with chalk), so of course if you wet the paint sufficiently, traces would end up on the cloth you used to dry it with. Logical, I realise that now. There would always be traces of black on the towelling so you would always have to wash the cloth before able to go home. Oh, did I mention it was always cold water from a tap in the toilet block that you had to use to fill the bucket? It was this toilet block tap, and the toilet block, that led to one of the more significant incidents between my self and the nuns of the Catholic Church.

On this particular day the 'black demon' (and I am not referring to the strap as mentioned yesterday), strode down the class. Please don't anyone say to me that nuns 'remind them of penguins'. Unless you are referring to a bunch of aggressive black and white sneaky birds, prepared to do anything to other penguins, providing they end up with the best nest. But assuming anyone saying that, is using the visual, that a group of nuns walking give a similar motion to a small colony (or 'waddle' - waddle of penguins is kind of cute though isn't it?) of penguins, I could only hope for the sudden appearance of a starving leopard seal mistaking the rapidly approaching nun for a penguin and thus putting me out of the forthcoming horror. It wasn't going to happen. Firstly, because there was no hole in the classroom floor for a leopard seal to suddenly rise up from and take her, and secondly, that leopard seal would likely receive the full weight of "muddy doo" (see blog 21st February 2013) painfully on it's snout before it could close its jaw around the cowled neck of the nun's habit.
(Continued tomorrow)