The Perfect Timetable: A Teacher's Memoir

The Perfect Timetable

A Teacher’s Memoir

Mervyn A Pryer

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Copyright 2018 © Mervyn A Pryer

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List of Photos

1. Arthur Pryer (far left) with his mother, Margaret, and siblings. 1905

2. My parents, Arthur and Lillian Pryer in later life

3. The Chevrolet with a display of Murray cod, caught by Dad

4. My brother, Ronald Norman Pryer, Binnaway

5. My father, Arthur’s, retirement steam locomotive

6. Betty Lillis at 19

7. Mervyn Pryer, Betty Lillis and Bill Jackson at Barraba, 1941

8. Mervyn and Betty Pryer on honeymoon in Sydney, 1942

9. Mervyn and Wendy with the Morris 8/40 at Terry Hie Hie

10. Wendy with Robin, December 1954

11. Mervyn and Betty with Wendy and Robin at Baan Baa. 1956 

12. Wendy’s graduation at ATC in 1966. L to R: Robin, Betty, Wendy and Mervyn

13. Robin with his first guitar at Southgate, 1961

14. Wal and Lola Aldridge, Betty and Mervyn Pryer, 1982

15. Mervyn Pryer at 80

Foreword

It was by law in the 1870’s, incumbent upon the NSW Government to provide education for children between the ages of 6 and 14 years throughout the state of New South Wales. In the 1930’s when my Father, Mervyn Pryer attended one of the two Teacher Training Colleges in NSW, farming was the major occupation of those who lived outside Sydney. The government was the employer for the Education, Railway, Health, Roads and Maritime Services.

Tiny villages along the railway line had a railway station to provide for the transportation of wheat, timber and livestock. This would require a station master to change the signals and organise the fettlers to keep the railway track maintained and safe. Often, the station master would have family and children in need of education, as did the farming community. This was provided by a small school with one teacher, whose responsibility it was to educate the local children between the ages of 6 and 14. So effectively 8 classes in the one room.

Excellent teaching skills and the ability to be highly organised, were essential traits for any individual, undertaking the job of teaching in a small school. Children had to be able to read in the first two years, so they could work quietly on their own, while other grades were taught or the whole system would break down. In 41 years of teaching, my Father said he never had a child who could not be taught to read.

Larger properties had a single school room and a teacher provided by the Department of Education, for the children of the workers and nearby farms. The teacher would be boarded by one of the farmers, it being their responsibility to provide accommodation for the teacher. Larger villages provided a residence for the teacher and his wife and family.

It was a lonely life for these young teachers and an exacting one, as they learnt to master their 8 classes of students. Sometimes there may have only been 9 or 10 children in attendance. That may seem like a breeze, yet each grade had to be taught and acquire the skills of that particular grade. Education is like building blocks, you can only build upon a firm foundation. There was always the search for the perfect timetable.

In 1951 there were 1,395 small schools of one teacher in NSW. There were 53 which closed due to enrolments falling below 9 pupils, and 23 new small schools opened. None were closed in order to transport children to a larger school. The number of small schools in NSW was slowly decreasing, and in 1955, there were 1,329 with 25 closing and 17 opening. In 4 years 66 had closed. All the small schools Mervyn Pryer taught at, have long since disappeared. Today there are none, as children are transported to larger centres to be educated.

The young men and women who taught in these schools were special. There was deep loneliness with little or no distractions to alleviate it, a heavy work load and no collegial support to share the burden. Teaching, as with other professions, is a specialised occupation, and the intricacies and solving of techniques and problems, unfortunately cannot be resolved by sharing with persons, outside the profession. These teachers had to be resourceful, self-aware and self-critical, self-reliant and highly responsible individuals.

Mervyn Pryer was one such small schools’ teacher, who began teaching in 1939, along with his lifelong mates Wal Aldridge and Bill Jackson.

After his retirement, Mervyn hand wrote, in longhand by fountain pen, about his experiences in small country schools and his life. Coping with numbing loneliness, the challenges teaching presents, the joys of a life shared, the personal satisfaction of the achievement industrious work rewards and the never-ending grief of losing a beloved life partner.

He paid tribute to the life of his Father, Arthur Pryer and the high esteem, in which he held him.

When Mervyn died in November, 2014 I inherited the book he had written. As part of my grieving process for my Father, I have typed and edited the manuscript so others are able to share in this special man’s life journey.

Wendy Pryer

Sydney, 2018

For My Grandchildren

Chapter 1

My Father, Arthur Pryer

My father was born on 17th July, 1893, at Lambing Flat, between Armidale and Uralla, to John Patrick Pryer and Margaret Marr. His childhood was spent at Limbri, a village on the railway line, between Tamworth and Armidale, where his father was a fettler. There were four in the family – Jack, Herbert, Myrtle and Dad. I don’t know the order, but my father was neither the eldest nor the youngest.

For reasons I am not aware of, and perhaps Dad never knew, his father just walked out and left the family. In those days, there was no assistance coming from the state for such ‘deserted’ families as there is today. John Patrick Pryer, was transferred to Narrabri and for a while sent money home. This dwindled as he was keeping a woman there. Later, in 1905, his wife divorced him for desertion.

This reminds me of a limerick-

‘There was a young lady of Spee,

Who let herself go on a spree,

Now she writes to the papers

Condemning such capers,

And signs herself "Mother of Three’.

Indeed, so far has the ‘caring’ society evolved that this ‘young lady’ will be supported by the State and given a house, finally get the Old Age Pension and never do a jot of work all her life.

In Grandma Pryer’s case, the family had to fend for itself. Grandma was apparently a woman of strong character, or she could never have managed.

1. Arthur Pryer (far left) with his mother, Margaret, and siblings. 1905

Dad spoke of her taking in washing, so earning some sort of income. This was washing from some of the stations around; grazing cattle and sheep being the main rural activity there in that hilly country. She and the children took the washing down to the creek, and Dad, looking back, remembers regarding it as some sort of picnic! The linen was boiled in a copper over an open fire, soaped and rubbed, rinsed, wrung out by hand and hung out to dry there. Perhaps this was when times were a bit dry and rainwater tanks were low. The children seem to have spent the time helping (or hindering) and swimming. Later there would be starching and ironing with the old flat irons heated on the stove – a night time job for her at home.

Times were hard for them, and, I can recall Dad saying that they would have gone hungry if the boys hadn’t been able to go out and shoot a duck, a rabbit or a kangaroo. Once they seemed to have eaten parrots they shot. Among the old guns there was a kind of flintlock. It didn’t fire immediately the trigger was pulled. He said you nearly had to pull the trigger and then look for something to shoot. They spent a lot of time roaming the bush, and Dad’s love of the bush and shooting game probably originated in this. The boys also shot possum and wallaby for their skins, which brought in some money too. There was a demand for possum skins. You shot them on moonlight nights, sighting the possum against the moon. He always knew where he was in the bush, which way was home, or the car when I went with him as a boy. This sense of direction was just as good in strange bush also. I never had any idea where I was!

Also, the storekeeper was lenient with credit, and others seem to have helped at times. Grandma was very religious, and surely the fortitude she gained from faith sustained her. These were times of strong religious divisions between Catholic and Protestant. (The Catholic being the Irish immigrant descendants). Grandma, being Protestant, could have expected little aid from the Catholic people around, yet, Dad always stressed, it was the Catholic people who were kind to them and gave them things. It’s understandable: their forebears, perhaps parents, had known want in Ireland, and the tradition of charity was in their blood.

Sometime during Dad’s childhood, Grandmother added to their income by boarding the teacher. His name was Champion. The point of the story Dad told is that the teacher ate in another room, but Dad was so enjoying his meal that he kept saying, This is champion (really good). He recalls being hushed by his mother in case the teacher thought they were making fun of him. I suppose the teacher ate the pigeons, duck, rabbits and wallabies the boys shot, too. I know Dad always liked such things.

The reader must remember that I am just recalling little bits and pieces that I have heard Dad speak of. No detailed account is possible.

I mentioned that the Catholic families aided them in bad times. Remember that the Catholics in those days were at the lower end of the socio-economic scale – the battlers, and it was a predominantly Protestant owned country where the landowners were Protestant. They, from the beginning, had obtained land as grants. From the First Settlement, the Establishment had been England – Protestant. Perhaps the self-righteous and superior, uncharitable attitude of the Protestant landowner is illustrated by my father’s recollection of coming across two tramps. These two had camped in one of the landowner’s woolsheds, and the owner had flogged them off his property – he on his horse, cutting pieces out of them with his whip.

Schooling was available, but I think small fees had to be paid in this period. It was, of course, a one teacher school, and the teacher, I’d reckon, had about six months training. The object of school then was to cover as much ground as possible as soon as possible, because school could be left at 14 years or earlier if a certificate of proficiency was given. Dad had some neat homework books he had kept, with long arithmetic calculations in them, words and meanings, and spelling lists. These he sent back to Limbri school when he was middle-aged, there being a centenary of the school advertised in the Tamworth paper, which he read. I recall him telling me he was rather hurt as the teacher had not even bothered to thank him, or return the books. The incident illustrates that schooling had meant something to him, and it seems he was a good scholar. I have a Bible he was awarded for 1st prize at Sunday School.

There aren’t many schooling incidents I recall him speaking of. One is that the teacher had two suits, a brown and a blue one – he was invariably cranky when he wore the brown one! Another is of the teacher patiently explaining how to tell the time on a cardboard model clock, and then asking Uncle Herbert at what time the hands were set. After due calculation, Herby announced, Fifteen to twenty! The teacher threw the clock out the open window in disgust, went over and gazed out the open doorway with a suffering look on his face!

Crazes come and go in education. Art teaching then had as one of its exercises the drawing of balanced designs using two hands, one each side of the axis of symmetry. The hands moved in opposite directions, so that both sides were mirror images of each other. After the crazes, I’ve seen come and go in education, I’m not even inclined to smile at this one. Apparently, Dad was good at this, and during an inspection, always an ordeal for the teacher, for an inspector can always find fault, the teacher called him out to demonstrate on the board. He recalls making a complete muck of it and letting the teacher down.

Reading in school was then taught through a reading book for each grade. There was nothing else to read in the school but these. The class read over and over a story, each one apparently to the class till Dad, and no doubt many others, were utterly tired of the same story. However, woe betide any child, who through curiosity or interest in stories, turned the page to get a preview of the next story. I can recall Mum and Dad talking over the stories. The books being in State wide use in a rigid centralized system, and remarking on the frustrations they felt.

Some of the stories were historical. One told of the Bligh Mutiny. One was cautionary and one a ‘tear jerker’. It told of a child who, against its mother’s warning, crossed the creek near their bush hut and became lost and died. In my teaching career, I came across what I am sure were some of these old readers, stuffed away in an obscure part of the school. The standards expected were high, the top ones, Book 1V, being harder, than Year 6 School Magazines.

The boys lived a wild bush life. They hunted, swam naked in the creek, rode logs down it in flood, knew all the bush animals. Bush life has changed. I, myself, have seen only once a kangaroo-rat, and that only a glimpse as it tumbled out of its ‘nest’ in the grass. These small marsupials, also called rat-kangaroos, were plentiful in Dad’s childhood. It hides in a tuft of grass, staying still, camouflaged and expecting not to be seen. The boys would take advantage of this trait, sneak up behind it, give it a kick out of its ‘nest’, to see it bowled over an over before it could scramble to its feet and madly hop away.

There was a need of course, for the boys to get out and earn money as soon as they could, to help the family. Dad was twelve or thirteen when he began working. He must have reached the required standard of proficiency and so could leave. He had various jobs. One was to assist a man who attended to the roads. As part of this man’s job, holes were drilled in rocks (to split them perhaps) with a long chisel. This chisel was struck with a sledge hammer. The man held the long chisel, turning it a fraction after each blow, thus drilling a circular hole. Dad’s job was to do the striking while the chap held the chisel; and he had many warnings not to miss! They camped out in tents along the road – great adventure for a modern twelve-year old, but I doubt they would like the work with the