A cot in the classroom

After 27 years, Leah McFall catches up with the teacher who had a crib in the corner and a baby strapped to her chest.

If you had to pick a teacher as your best of all time, who would it be? And would you seize the chance to meet them again 10, 20, or even 27 years later? I’d pick Mrs Hall. And I did seize the chance to meet her, after 27 years, because in a featureless classroom at New Plymouth Girls’ High School, her teaching changed my life.

I chose art history only because it wasn’t maths. I was in seventh form – today’s Year 13 – and no longer had to take compulsory subjects. Art history sounded like a bit of a cruise, to be honest. I was in for a shock.

The first thing about Mrs Hall was how young she was – barely older than we were.

This was unusual for a teacher and fascinated us. She was an old girl of our school, too. Why has she come back here, we wondered, when she could be anywhere? Why wasn’t she in Italy, where her heart seemed to be? There was a theory she was somehow being held against her will.

She was strict, largely because there was never enough time. She had merely weeks to introduce a classroom of restless 17-year-old girls to medieval painting, the Renaissance and modern New Zealand art. As it was basically still the 80s, she had only the most threadbare means to do it: photocopies of famous paintings, photocopied again onto transparent sheets and beamed onto a pull-down canvas. She was required to teach us centuries of stories about colour, almost entirely in black and white. But she had the power of her personality.

She adored, and was utterly serious about, the artists. Piero della Francesca and Giotto helped drag the Dark Ages into the enlightened sunshine of the early Renaissance, she told us. See how Giotto’s figures occupied space, where in earlier paintings they were ghostlike, and unsubstantial? Yes, I did see. Saints seemed to slide off the picture before Giotto, whose fat friars had charisma.

Next we galloped past the portraits of Leonardo de Vinci and Raphael in the Renaissance (which really was the first age of the selfie, but in oils). Then, New Zealand painting. Rita Angus, Mrs Hall would say – look how she dragged Central Otago into a new kind of light with her ‘gem-like’ colours. Gem-like, I remember writing down.

I like to think that I aced Mrs Hall’s class and impressed her, but my school reports tell a different story. My essays were off-topic, and according to Mrs Hall: ‘‘Leah talks too much in class, which I and others find distracting and annoying. Please stop!’’

Yet I’d been listening. Art left clues about people. Now I wanted to see the gem-like South Island for myself and thanks to Mrs Hall, I would. In my final exam, I nailed 86 per cent. I chose the University of Otago.

Ileft school in 1990 but Claire Hall would stay on for another 20 years, during which time she had two daughters. At one point she taught with a Port-a-Cot in the classroom and a baby strapped to her chest.

When I tracked her down online, I discovered she was teaching boys at prestigious Scots College, which sails like an elegant, red-brick galleon over suburban Wellington. She was now a house dean, and head of department for Middle School English.

‘‘You’re so grown up!’’ she exclaimed, when I arrived at her classroom this week.

‘‘You look just the same!’’ I said, and it’s true. She was totally familiar and exuding friendly authority because this classroom was, after all, her natural habitat.

There was so much I wanted to ask. Had she known then, at 24, that she’d been born to teach?

Claire smiled. ‘‘When I was a little girl I used to get all my dolls and teddy bears and line them up in rows and make them little exercise books and I used to teach them. My mother always said I would be a teacher and I resisted it, furiously, the whole way. I only took on that job at New Plymouth Girls for six weeks as a favour to the outgoing principal, and my parents, so they could go on a trip. But it’s just one of those jobs, the minute I got into it, that was purely vocational.’’

She was 51, she said – a good age for her job now. ‘‘I taught you as a 24-year-old … and that was an advantage. Now that I’m old, that’s an advantage too because for the boys, I’m like aunty or grandma. So they put their guard down. They don’t have to impress you. They can just be completely honest and trust you.’’

You were so passionate about the artists, I remarked. Had you been to Italy before you taught us?

‘‘It was our plan to,’’ said Claire, ‘‘but first baby Gracie scuttled that. In 2000 we took a term off school and the four of us spent 16 weeks in Europe and it was gobsmacking. It totally changed my art history teaching. There were things I thought I didn’t like and when I saw them in real life was bowled over by.

‘‘Every now and then, I get a postcard from a past student. Last year I went to my pigeon hole and there was a postcard from a girl I taught – Jane – she would be late 30s, maybe 40 now. She was in Italy in the Sistine Chapel and she thought, I’ve got to send Mrs Hall a postcard. ‘I finally made it, Mrs Hall! I finally saw Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel!’

‘‘That’s the gift of being an art history teacher. While a novel can have a lasting impact on somebody, unless they read it again at a later time, it might not stay with them. When you teach someone art history, they can have that experience.’’

Time flies when you reunite, and we didn’t have enough to talk about it all. For example, I’ve always wanted to know what Claire might think of my theory that Rita Angus’s self-portraits seemed to get more and more cross, the less and less sex she was willing to have.

‘‘Stop talking, Leah,’’ Mrs Hall of 1990 might have said, if I’d raised my hand to ask. ‘‘Please stop.’’ All the same, I’ve had nearly 30 years of gem-like colour in my life since that class. Would I have noticed, were it not for Mrs Hall?

‘‘The first duty of the artist,’’ Rita Angus said once, ‘‘is to find beauty in everyday life.’’ This is also the gift of a good teacher.

Thank you for teaching me art history, Mrs Hall. But more than that: thank you for making teaching an art.