A Stool From School
In those days just after the end of World War II, I attended Box Hill State School. To put it more correctly, as we used to write on the front cover of my books, my full name was Gordon Keith MacKenzie Moyes, Grade 3, Box Hill State School No. 2838, Box Hill, E11, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, The Southern Hemisphere, The World, The Universe! If nothing else we were very precise about our address.
There are other figures I remember well. For example, the telephone number at my parents’ bakery and cake shop was WX 451. A few years later when more people moved into the area it became WX 1451. Land was selling around Box Hill for 32 pounds 5 shillings a house block.
But what I remember most about my school, of all the grades, were Grades 3 and 4. Miss Higgins was our teacher. She was a very large woman with bright red hair. It always took a great deal of effort for her to walk up the steep hill in Station Street. After school she always seemed to have about six or eight bags. She had 60 children in her class.
I liked Miss Higgins a great deal and for the two years she taught us I was her ink well monitor. When we went into Grade 4 one of the most exciting opportunities that faced us was improving our handwriting so that we could move from pencil to a pen with a steel nib. Gradually, all of the children changed over to pen and ink. The ink monitor had to clean out the ink wells every Friday in a tray with lots of holes in which each of the china ink wells were seated. The ink wells were inevitably filled with pieces of screwed up paper and sometimes broken ends of chalk.
The ink wells were filled from an empty lemonade bottle with a rubber cap on the top with two spouts and a little hole over which the monitor would place his finger. These rubber spouts where really used for filling batteries in cars but they filled our ink wells without flowing over the edges. We very soon learnt that ink wells could be useful when the teacher was not in the room. A piece of paper rolled into a flat pellet dipped in ink and pulled back over a rubber band which stretched between two fingers, made a very good wet missile aimed at another student’s head or at the ceiling of the classroom.
Miss Higgins had an objective for my life: she wanted to improve my speech. For many years I had had a serious speech impediment. My mother had to take me to the Royal Children’s Hospital which, in those days, was in Carlton. I had trouble with what they called labials and dentals and there was a whole range of sounds I could not make. From the time I first began to speak I could not pronounce D, T, B, TH, PH, RR or Z sounds. Our dearest friend, Miss Perry, became something like “Peppi” and Miss Maggie became “Mimmie”.
Those names stayed with both of those ladies for the rest of their lives and they were called by members of their family and friends universally, Mimmie” and “Peppi”.
So Miss Higgins tried to improve my speech by giving me exercises to say at home and by making sure I had as many opportunities as possible to read in the class. How I hated both the exercises and the class reading. While she would be marking a roll or doing the Tuesday morning school banking for the State Bank, or some other activity, she would have a pupil stand beside her to read aloud from some book. She would look up from her banking or writing to correct a word or two and we would continue on while the other students continued with some class work. Bad errors, however, were soon noticed by the class which often treated the reader to raucous laughter. I also hated the exercises “Thora thrust thick thistles through the thinning hedge” and “She sells sea shells by the sea shore”. There was one long and difficult piece whose subject completely eluded me but whose words have stayed in my memory until this day. It was Shakespeare in Grade 4:
“The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth like
The gentle rain from heaven upon this place beneath.
It was twice blest.”
Even now I can remember the agony of trying to say “droppeth”.
If I could not speak or read aloud well, at least I could fill the ink wells! A moment of pride came when, on a written term report, Miss Higgins wrote “a conscientious and reliable monitor” words which I did not fully understand but which I knew meant I was improving.
The subject that saved me in school in the Fourth Grade was “Sloyd”. In those days after the War we had some teachers who believed in this method of teaching boys to use tools in woodwork after some Swedish model. The girls were never trusted with sharp tools and instead were confined to doing needlework.
The boys made a number of small items from wood which taught them elementary craftsmanship. We made a door stop, a holder for pot holders which would hang above the stove and wooden matchbox holder which held a matchbox half opened displaying the remaining matches inside for the gas stove.
While the boys made a choice between these three, I indicated that I wanted to make a four legged stool.
My mother always had trouble reaching the high shelves in our narrow pantry. There was not much room in the little house we shared with my poor demented Grandmother and the pantry was narrow and high and with few shelves in the rest of the house so much of our kitchen and family goods that would not fit into the sideboard or the kitchen dresser were placed upon the pantry shelves. My mother needed a stool to reach the highest shelf.
The next week we were having Sloyd I convinced my mother that I should be allowed to take all of my late father’s tools from the back of the garage to school in a sugar bag. I took every one of them, spanners, a wood plane, a brace and bit, screwdrivers, hammer and three saws including one long one which stuck out of the top of the sugar bag. Carrying it to school was heavy business but I felt like a tradesman.
The school did not supply timber and we had to bring our own pieces of timber to make our matchbox holder, or doorstop or pot holder.
So I went to Bird’s Timberyard up Main Street, past the railway station, the first thing that morning when I was to do Sloyd. Bird’s had the biggest fire even seen in Box Hill and had only recently rebuilt their front offices.
Mr. Andersen was behind the counter in the front office. He was a big man who walked with a stick. He had a great bushy moustache. He was Swedish. He always smoked a pipe which glowed on winter days. He was a kindly, friendly man but there was some suspicion that his pipe may have started the fire. Early that morning I went into the shop and stood before the counter.
“Hello, young Mick, what can I do for you?” Mr. Andersen said. I told him that I was planning a stool for my mother and I wanted a round piece of wood, ten inches round and four legs two foot long. I showed him a plan I had drawn on some blank butcher’s paper. “I am going to make it this afternoon at Sloyd” I told him, “and these are my father’s tools.”
Mr. Andersen looked at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “I’m sorry young Mick, we don’t sell round pieces of wood. You will have to make that yourself. And we don’t sell round legs either. You will need to get some soft timber. Pine wood would be easy enough for you to work. Did you say you were making it for your Mum? I see that you are really filling in your father’s shoes. Shame about your Dad dying. We all liked Norm up here.” Then after a long pause Mr. Andersen said “Tell you what I will do I will see if we have got some scrap timber out the back. Come back here at lunch time and see what I have been able to find.”
That lunchtime I ran all the way up Station Street, around Main Street, past the railway station and down into the front doors of Bird’s Timberyard.
Mr. Andersen was there with his pipe glowing. “Well young Mick, I have had a look out the back. It is a bit hard to find soft timber these days, but I will tell you what I did find someone had left an order here some time ago for a stool and they have not called to pick it up. It might be too big for you. What size did you say you wanted?” That was a surprise question because I had left with him my drawing with the measurements on it. But I replied “I wanted a round top 10 inches across and legs that were two feet long.”
Mr. Andersen felt under the front bench and looked at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “What a coincidence! This one is exactly the right size. All you will need to do is to put some glue on the legs and tap them in.” As he pulled out the timber I could hardly believe what I was seeing. He continued “Now the other fellow has already paid for this so there is no charge for the wood, but I will have to charge you threepence for the glue crystals. Is that O.K.?”
Was that O.K.! I thanked Mr. Andersen, gathered up the five pieces of wood and the paper bag of brown glue crystals that had to be softened with boiling water and raced out of the timber yards hardly believing my good luck.
Mr. Andersen stood behind the counter beaming, his pipe glowing, looking very pleased with himself as if he had just done something very special.
That afternoon at Sloyd, I mixed the glue, knocked in the legs and sandpapered all the edges and had an unbelievably beautiful four legged stool before any of the other boys had even cut out their matchbox holders.
Being Thursday, the last period after Sloyd was “Reading”. My day nearly threatened to end on a bad note. Several times I had been asked to read and I had mispronounced words and the class had laughed and I had slouched back to my seat in tears.
But that day I was feeling good. The four legged stool stood at the back of the classroom. Miss Higgins called me out to read again that bit about mercy that I had messed up the previous week. I stood up with all the confidence of a four legged stool maker and read out:
“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven
Upon this place beneath.
It is twice blest.
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
It is the mightiest in the mightiest.
It becomes the throned monarch, better than
His crown.”
I went on till I finished. Not one mistake. Miss Higgins led in the clapping. She stood up and put her arm around me and said “One day, Gordon Moyes, you will be the best reader in the whole school.”
I could hardly believe my ears “the whole school”. Maybe the best in the class, but the whole school that was beyond my understanding.
My feet flew home that day. I was loaded down with the sugar bag with all of its tools with the long saw sticking out the top. My school bag was over one shoulder and in both hands was the four legged stool. My heart was bursting. It was the greatest day of my life. “The best reader in the whole school.” Those words never left me.
Forty years later at a dinner in the Sydney “Menzies” Hotel where I was presented with an award for being “The Australian Public Speaker of the Year”, I gave thanks to the big, red headed teacher who taught me how to read aloud properly, and to pronounce “droppeth”.
I often thought of the day I made the four legged stool with a little help from my friend Mr. Andersen, and I read the piece before the class and Miss Higgins gave me a vision of what I might yet become, as I walked up Bank Street, along the railway line to the top of the hill and to No.5 Miller Street, Box Hill, a great city which was then only a village, where the adults were kind, and the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
