Southland
Robert Guyton tells the story of his alter ego Snowy Bramble
But in my first year of teaching, fresh from the cocoon that is the teacher’s college and faced with a class of boisterous eight-year-olds, I needed help. I found it in a small figure named Snowy Bramble. I made Snowy myself, using scraps of soft green and brown leather and a hank of woolly sheepskin. He was modelled on the old man “all dressed in leather” from the nursery rhyme that begins: “One misty, moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather…” and stood just 30cm high in his wrapped-leather boots. His woolly beard grew down to his knees and his tall, pointed hat sported a yellow feather.
Snowy appeared in my classroom unannounced and high above the children’s heads,
perched on a rafter and keeping very still, as, I assured my students, all creatures of his type did. What was he, they asked? A woodland fellow, I replied, as casually as I could, not wanting to provide opportunities for challenge. Snowy moved about the classroom, during intervals and overnight, mysteriously and without being seen in transit. I said he was shy, but an excellent observer and that he had already formed views about several of the children. Who, they asked? Write him a letter and ask him, I replied.
And write they did. Every day, letters to Snowy Bramble filled the shoebox letter box we made for him with questions about his past, his life and his family. Where were you born? Who did you marry? Have you slept under the stars? Can you eat real food? And Snowy replied to each and every letter. Every morning, the children who had written the previous day, opened their wooden desks in the hope that one of Snowy’s tiny letters, written in a spidery hand on a tissue-thin cigarette paper, would be stuck to the inside of the lid.
When there was such a treasure, the tiny letter would be pored over, shared amongst friends and brought to me for clarification, as Snowy often used arcane and curious words. I built Snowy’s credibility by encouraging the groundsman and the dental nurse to describe how he’d visited them, asking about their work and chatting about his experiences in the classroom.
One afternoon, the groundsman came in to the room, saying he’d just seen Snowy playing hopscotch in the quad.
Sure enough, when the children all looked, he was gone from his roost in the rafters! As the year went by, some children began to ask if Snowy could go home with them overnight. He’d love it, they said, and promised to look after him with great care.
That presented me with a problem, as I’d committed to the idea that Snowy was a real, live woodland elf who could walk, eat and experience life as a sentient being and, by and large, the class had bought my story, so handing his leather-and-wool self over to an eight-year-old was going to be tricky, especially as the first to bags him travelled to and from school by bicycle.
I fudged the issue for a couple of weeks, then decided to throw caution, and my credibility, to the wind. I carefully handed Snowy to Ashleigh and away they went, together on her bicycle, all the way to her house, where, according to Ashleigh, a wonderful time was had by all.
Snowy’s reputation and desirability grew enormously and he visited many homes, eating with the family,
apparently, and sharing all sorts of wisdom with his young caregivers, none of whom blew the whistle on the little bundle of green, brown and white scraps. I eventually withdrew Snowy from circulation by announcing that he’d gone on an ocean cruise with his lovely wife, Violet, and that he’d return once he’d visited his wider family who lived in various parts of Central America and Europe.
Some 20 years after that experience, I was talking with the parents of the girl who first took Snowy home. They recounted how excited she had been to have a celebrity in her home, how deferentially she treated him and how sincere she was in telling them all about Snowy and his ways. And they said one other thing that made me laugh and laugh. Looking at my clothes (I was dressed for gardening) and at my lengthening-by-the-day snow-white beard, they said, you’re Snowy Bramble! That’s who you’ve become!
And as I headed back to my own wonderful woodland, I thought to myself, they were right.