If not for Miss Dicks,
school would have been nothing but a waste of time for me.
Not to say I didn’t enjoy the time locked in a classroom,
some teachers positively nice, doing their job, as Mrs Gray
did, with enthusiasm in the face of permanent adversity
but there were others
for whom teaching was surely just a way to spend a few hours
away from home and the drudgery of living
in 1970s Britain.
If not for Miss Dicks,
I would have gone on to senior school
in the leafy Oxfordshire town, with no concept of just how
important education is to the soul. Admittedly,
the stench of fractions
and the learning of Pi
to so many
decimal places left me cold, angles only ever truly learned
in the back alley social club where the beer tasted of tin
and the snooker table’s two back legs were a quarter of an inch
shorter than the front and the white cue ball would curl
like a Paul Power free kick in the Cup Semi Final at Villa Park.
If not for Miss Dicks, kind,
inspiring, beautiful and wonderfully intelligent;
school would have been just about
going from arrival to break, from break to lunch
concerned with the tactics of the school yard.
Football on the concrete embalmed earth, best side to score at
least a dozen past the young Asian lad who bemoaned the lack
of friends understanding cricket in the summer, the tactics
of avoiding the indestructible gaze of the shaker maker,
a man out of time but who lived by the time shown
on his pocket watch, always five minutes fast when time
was against him and the thought of
four hundred screaming, wild, dirty, shirts torn kids
disturbing his well ordered life, full of bitterness and the mean
was time to destroy any hopes and dreams they may have,
that’s how it felt, if not for Miss Dicks.
If not for Miss Dicks,
school was to be a place in which I would remember being ill
most of the time I was there, my second year of the Junior
rank and file, dominated by
Chicken Pox, Measles and Bronchitis, lack of interest in anything but
playtime and going home, lack of interest in anything but
the thought of why David Barren wasn’t being picked
for the school team with Adam Sanford and myself,
green and black strips running
round in circles, like off colour wasps suffering from
some type of new disease, of why all of a sudden, girls like Pauline and Christine,
girls I had known since the first day of infants,
suddenly became interesting to be around,
or why all of a sudden I was scared to death of one particular girl,
of why in just another year,
my first female school boy crush I can hold my heart to
in Marie, became a dream I could not awaken from,
until Miss Dicks took me aside and educated me.
If not for Miss Dicks,
I know I would not be here in the middle of the night,
writing. She didn’t give me poetry, that was all my granddad
and his love of the Mersey Beat generation, she didn’t give me maths,
my poor old mum still smacks her head in Cornish discomfort
as she realises that I truly do not care why the subject is important.
She never gave me History, nor sport, my father a god
in those thoughts, no drama, that was a whole school and a county away.
Miss Dicks gave me something so much more important,
She gave a ten year old something vital and for which I will always
praise to the hill, she gave me Time, and multiplied
it by the new found ear not tempered by the aggressive remains of war,
nor the temperature of rising bigotry that found itself
weaving into the fabric of society, and finally she gave me
the most valued of all resources, the early flowering of
hope. If not for Miss Dicks!
Dedicated To Angela Rabone, nee Dicks.
Ian D. Hall 2015.