This painting – John Charles Dollman’s ‘The Unknown’ – always reminds me of having to endure double maths with Ma Smith throughout four years of secondary school. During my first year I never realised I was a poor maths student and regarded myself on a par with most of my peers, but for months we’d been warned that we would be getting Ma Smith as our teacher, a woman whose fearsome reputation preceded her. Known to be one of the strictest and most uncompromising tutors in the whole school, playground whispers had left us in a state of high anxiety in the weeks prior to her taking over our maths education. On that first day we were marched into T1, the prefab where she conducted her witchcraft, and made to sit boy-girl. Cosy cliques were instantly exploded, and a new order established in which males were referred to by their surnames whilst the girls were at least spoken to as if they were human beings. Further insult was added by her stating that she’d watched us all walk into her classroom and based on that assessment alone she knew who would pass and who would fail their Maths O-level some four years down the line! She then proceeded to pick out one character on each cluster of desks to be her pet numpty within that group – and I’m sure you can guess the rest. Every time one of her favoured little boffins failed to answer some pointless fucking Trigonometry teaser she would delight in asking each of her dunces in turn…”Never mind, Rawling will tell us.” No, he wouldn’t. From the outset she’d set me up to fail, and who was I to disappoint her? At least three times a week I would have to endure this behaviour and being stuck in a draughty classroom with windows covered in graph paper – thus denying the prospect of any form of sensory stimulus – I had ample opportunity to ponder what had fucked this women up so much to display such open hostility towards children. If she hated us that much, as I’m sure she did, then why the fuck did she become a teacher? Whenever I see a picture of Myra Hindley I have an instant flashback to Ma Smith, though in her manner she was more like Thatcher…so you can see why it was so easy to hate her, and hate her I did – not with a blazing intensity but with the slow burn of someone who is prepared to wait for the right moment. In the end, fate provided me with sweet revenge in the form of a slippery path and a misplaced high heel, that sent her crashing down in the mud outside T1. She rose from the mire scowling, threatening us with her muderous glaze to dare laugh. To crack up at that point would have been to waste such a sweet taste, so I swallowed it all and it has stayed within me to this day, warming me on cold winter nights.
The ultimate irony of course is that I failed my Maths O-Level three times but ended up working in finance, a job that has required absolutely none of the shit that Ma Smith tried to cram into me head.
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