| Contents |
In 1994 I was asked to speak at Ken Leigh’s funeral by his second son, Graham. Mr Leigh was one of my High School teachers at Northland College. His first son, David, was our friend and died far too early.
More of my teachers deserve to feature here. RIP.
§
I remember a book I’d read by Philip Roth about the death of his father. A wonderful book. There’s a photo on the cover of Philip, his older brother and a young, vigorous, smiling, proud man – his father.
His father didn’t look like that when he died. Time had passed on. But he was still that man.
Earlier this year I went to Italy with my father. It was his third visit and my second. On Dad’s second visit — with my mother — he was my age now, rekindling memories of his first time, when he was trying to stay out of trouble at the Battle of Cassino.
This time, this year, it was for the 50th anniversary of the battle. He rehearsed his memories again for sure, but really, this time, it was for me. Or for him and me.
Which leads me to the last line of Philip Roth’s book, written through tears which you can almost see on the page:
You must not forget anything.
Which makes me wish I had a better memory.
§
I’m going to call Ken Leigh “Mr Leigh”. Because that’s who he was to me at Northland College. I was there from 1959 through to 1963. Before rock and roll, almost.
He was quite a lot younger than I am now — his kids ten years younger than ours are now. Nice kids. A terrific family. Their house was down the path behind the hostel, past an enormous, wonderful fig tree. A house full of books and marking and animal remedies and gumboots and cocker spaniels. Bedlam, actually. They were serial spaniel owners, I seem to remember. They tended to get run over on Maungakahia Road. They called them all Kim for convenience. But maybe I’m wrong.
Mr Leigh — Casper The Friendly Ghost. Our teacher.
If he was down the back now he’d be marking me. Giving me points out of ten.
“Stand up straight, boy! Why are you squinting? Speak clearly. Get rid of those notes!” I never did enjoy the speech contests.
“Get your hair cut!”
Mr Leigh, dressed in his RAF shorts and his long socks, the roomiest shorts I’ve ever seen, at least until recently. You could have housed homeless people in those pants, as they say.
Mr Leigh, dressed up to the nines in his Flight-Lieutenant’s blues for cadet week.
We called him Casper because of the way he use to tip-toe round the hostel, quiet as a ghost, looking for trouble. If you were lucky somebody would spot him and call “Here comes Cas!” and we’d scatter. Then he’d come in a rush, sweeping down the corridor with his arms outstretched to corner the culprits as they fled. He whacked me a time or two, I know that, the best behaved boy in the school, but I can’t remember why. Larrikins like Adams escaped untouched.
One night son David heard his Dad coming down the hostel corridor — late at night, when he absolutely shouldn’t have been there. He just had time to hide in a wardrobe before Mr Leigh, who never turned a blind eye, came through the door.
The strange thing was that when he wasn’t doing his Casper routine you could hear him coming from miles away, clomping down the lino corridors in big leather-soled shoes.
Mr Leigh — getting up a few hours earlier than sensible people to tend to his stock across the road. Dashing out to his farm property at Okaihau.
The hostel boys, who knew a good thing when they saw it, would wait until they saw him leave, and then shoot across to the house and ask for him. That way you had a good chance of scoring some of Mrs Leigh’s home baking.
Mr Leigh, in charge of doling out our pocket money at school. We got 2/6d or some such to spend at the tuck shop — I’ll never forget the smell of the tuck shop (Toppas and raspberry chew bars and ice cream) — but the rest of the money our parents provided was eked out by Mr Leigh. Eked out, that is, if you were prepared to stand in a queue and try and persuade him that yes, you were getting a haircut, or yes, you needed toothpaste or yet another tin of shoe polish. He was so mean, we thought, you’d think that every penny came out of his own pocket. Ken Adams became so infuriated at Mr Leigh’s mean-mindedness that after an argument he refused to submit to the queue for weeks. Ken’s Dad saved heaps.
Mr Leigh, the English teacher. Poems of Spirit and Action, The Grass of Parnassus…
Our kids came home with Poems of Spirit and Action once. It was like meeting an old friend.
I sprang to the saddle and Joris and he,
I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.
I tried to find a copy yesterday without any luck.
Mr Leigh, absolutely committed to Shakespeare. Determined to be a good servant to great literature. Looking down his nose at me just a little when I said how much I’d enjoyed Gone With The Wind over the holidays.
Mr Leigh, lugging round a huge reel to reel tape recorder, which I understand he bought himself, so we could listen to radio productions of our set texts. The one I remember best was Under Milk Wood.
I read somewhere that the trouble today is that kids can’t be kids any more because you can’t escape the adult world. Instead we just have little people and bigger people — all more or less equally confused, you’d have to say. By way of contrast I remember how almost shocked we were as sixth formers — that feeling of being allowed a peek into the adult world — when we realised what the widow in Under Milk Wood meant when she said she wanted her chimney cleaned. Mr Leigh amused by our response, and us feeling a little more adult, and just a little closer to him.
On the same subject I remember Mr Leigh creeping up on us kids learning about life by watching Alan Whatmough’s guinea pigs have sex, and Alan demonstrating the difference between boy guinea pigs and girl guinea pigs.
“What are you boys doing?” he asked very quietly, genuinely curious. We didn’t even know he was there.
Or one night after lights-out. This bright spark called Ollie was lying in bed in the dormitory, making little mountains in the bed-clothes with his fingers, and telling his mates what a man he was. As soon as the giggling stopped Mr Leigh’s voice came from just outside the door. “Don’t fret about it, boy. Just go to sleep.”
Mr Leigh didn’t waste much time on relatively unimportant things like the birds and the bees. Instead he showed us by his example some of the great human values, I believe. Honour, fairness, respect for tradition. Respect for great literature.
Fairness especially, I think. Like the day when the Northland College First Fifteen was playing the Kaikohe Juniors. Mr Leigh was the College coach and of course all the little hostel boys had come along and were standing on the sideline with Casper to cheer their heroes. But his son David was playing for Kaikohe and he wasn’t playing fair. He was jersey-pulling in the lineouts or something. So there was Cas on the sideline getting increasingly annoyed about his son.
“Ref! Ref! look at that man, he’s jersey pulling!”
In the end David had had enough and, to the horror of the hostel boys, yelled at his father to shut his bloody mouth. But our Mr Leigh would never shut his mouth or his eyes to something like that.
Whether we like it or not our parents live on in us. They live in our bones. They’ll live on in our children. They listen in while we talk and think and do things. They’re like our conscience, I believe. We can’t escape them if we try. We’re lucky if we don’t feel the need.
There’s a little bit of Ken Leigh in anyone he taught, like me, let alone his family. All we need to do to keep him with us — as fully as possible — is, as Philip Roth said, to forget nothing.
As you’ve probably noticed, Ken Adams helped with the memories.