It took half a dozen or so attempts before her shaky legs eventually carried her to the other side of the street, to the side where a handful of boisterous young men were drinking beer and tossing rude remarks at passing teenaged girls who were mostly grinning in response, as though the lewd remarks that were being flung their way they were fulsome compliments.
It took the young men some time to recognize that the woman who had crossed the street was trying to attract their attention. When they became aware of her they seemed mildly irritated.
These were what are loosely described as ‘road men,’ layabouts whose favourite past time include dressing well, drinking beer in public and spending most of their time in idle pursuits. They assumed, correctly, that she had crossed the street to ask for money and before she could articulate her wish they had assembled a handful of twenty dollar notes and were poking them in her general direction. The whole idea was that she would take them and move on.
The thought that she had been second-guessed by the youngsters discomfited her. She looked at them rather than at the bundle of notes being pointed at her, wearing a half frown, as though she wanted to create the impression that their gesture had been unsolicited, unnecessary, and that it had offended her. The bearer of the handful of twenty dollar notes continued to point them in her direction. She took them quickly, grabbing them and rolling them into an misshapen ball for the purpose of concealment.
After that, what she wanted to do more than anything else in the world was to get away from there, to conceal herself from the shame to which she felt exposed. She hesitated, wanting to thank her benefactors before she walked away.
“Hello Teacher Collisson.” The voice came from over her shoulder and she felt as though her legs had been hit hard by a blunt object. She stumbled around to the direction from which the greeting had come, simultaneously grabbing the hand that appeared before her. The young man was reeking with alcohol but he appeared sober.
“I’m Eric Blackett, Teacher Collison! Don’t you remember me?”
Of course she didn’t remember him. She had spent thirty-odd years tutoring thousands of children at a dozen schools and had retained no clear memory of any of her former students. There had simply been too many other things to fill her miserable existence.
She shook his hand and waited on unsteady legs as he recounted the history of their relationship to his friends. He told them that she had taught him in primary school and that he remembered that she had been a good teacher.
Try as she did she could not recall any of what he was relating to his friends though she felt a measure of gratitude over the fact that he was singing her praises.
The friends were casting sheepish glances at Teacher Collisson. The knowledge that she had been a teacher had rendered them belatedly circumspect and now they were doing their best to conceal their beer bottles.
The longer the encounter went on the more discomfiting Teacher Collisson was finding it. Her one-time pupil had decided that the circumstance dictated that the group extend its generosity beyond the handful of twenty dollar notes that they had already given her. This time around they were more charitable. Their enhanced generosity only deepened her discomfort though it did not diminish her gratitude.
Gloria Collisson was in her ninth year of retirement and she had watched the value her meagre pension diminish daily. She remembered that 20 years earlier her salary as a Senior Mistress used to be enough to cause her to be able to dress reasonably well. Dressing well was important. It was a matter of sending a message to the rest of the world that teaching was prestigious and that as a teacher you could live well.
Nothing, of course, was further from the truth. When she had started teaching she was living with her parents. Both of them were Colonial Civil Servants, proud, middle class ‘fair-skinned’ people who were far from well off but had, over time, cultivated the skill of creating an impression to the contrary. Gloria had never married and had never moved from her parents’ home.
It was not just the diminishing value of what she was earning that frustrated her, but the corresponding loss of status which teaching had suffered, compared with other pursuits. Her sister, Kathy, had long been married to a Btitish engineer who had come to Guyana to help solve a troublesome electricity generation problem. Kathy had left Guyana with her husband and had invited her to live with the couple in London but she had turned the offer down. She had reasoned that she preferred to become an ‘old maid’ here in Guyana, in her parents’ home, than to assume the role of a stern, spinster aunt to her sister’s half-caste children in some dull, cold, unfashionable part of London.
After her parents died, first her mother, following a stroke and her father two and a half years later from what she had diagnosed to be a loss of the will to live, Gloria had descended into a condition of self-neglect so severe that her classroom duties became the only thing that she took seriously. She neglected her health, her diet, and her parents’ home which she had inherited. Having been able to save little over the years she had taken to selling off bits and pieces of the furniture – including her mother’s cherished grand piano – to anyone who was prepared to pay for them.
There had been a brief respite to Gloria’s joyless existence when Kathy and her two, teenaged daughters had returned home on holiday. Kathy was just two years younger than she was but she appeared young at heart, fashionable and altogether satisfied with her life in London. Her daughters were warm and outgoing.
At night Gloria and Kathy would sit in the living room of their parents’ Albertown home to ‘old talk.’ Over pots of tea the reminiscences would come thick and fast. One evening, after Gloria had related to Kathy the story of how she had come to sell the family’s grand piano they had fallen into each other’s arms, wept and bemoaned Gloria’s diminished status. After that, Kathy had offered to help subsidize Gloria’s living expenses, an offer which the older sister had turned down flat. The most she was prepared to accept was Kathy’s offer to finance the renovation of the family home which was now the property of the two sisters.
After Kathy had returned to London Gloria fell into a state of depression. She missed the ‘old talks’ with her sister and the thought that the new school year would start in a few days was not helping. For the time being at least she could afford a private physician. Her sister had left her some money so that at least she had an option to the Georgetown Public Hospital.
The doctor had recommended a holiday…out of Guyana but she couild not afford that and she was not about to ask her sister to finance the trip abroad.
The reality of her circumstances really hit Gloria Collisson only after she had begun to approach the parents of her Common Entrance students to discuss extra tuition. It had taken her several months to decide to offer lessons after the regular school day as a means of subsidizing her salary. Her primary inhibition had been ucertainty as to how to approach the subject of tuition fees with the parents.
It was her mounting medical bills that finally pushed her to take the plunge. Her failing health, she had become aware, was a function of stress associated with worry over her financial circumstances and her impending old age and she had to face the cold reality of the need to swallow her pride and pursue the moonlighting option. It would have killed her parents, she thought, were they not long dead, but that was not an issue that she could afford to dwell on.
Three months after she had begun to provide extra Common Entrance lessons Teacher Collisson received a letter from the Ministry of Education directing that she proceed on pre-retirement leave. She had not seen that coming.
The inevitability of retirement at the end of a career that would not have provided her with either the professional or material satisfaction that she might havbe anticipated began to fill Teacher Collison with an even further sense of worry. She felt as though her whole life had fallen well short of what it ought to have been and she wanted to start again, in some field that had nothing to do with teaching. Some things that had not been clear to her just a few years earlier were becoming clearer now…like the fact that some of her contemporaries who had chosen to pursue what she had thought to be less worthwhile paths than teaching had been rewarded with much material wealth and personal satisfaction. It began to occur to her too that children no longer looked up to teachers; in fact they had grown
openly contemptuous of teachers, aware as they had become that formal education was by no means a guaranteed pathyway out of the poverty in which they had grown up.
Four years had passed since her sister Kathy had returned to Guyana on holiday and other things had happened to further depress Teacher Collisson. A small army of junkies has squatted on the lot next to her home which had grown vacant after her family’s long-time neighbors, the Chins, had died and their children had migrated to Canada. She had had to learn to co-exist with her new neighbors, to endure the attendant downside which included the occasional loss of pieces of personal items like her garden hose, long boots, cases of empty soft drink bottles and an old stove. On account of her neighbors proclivities, Gloria had also cultivated a nore for marijuana. They smoked it constantly and after a while the smell actually became bearable.
Retirement, the winding down of the Common Entrance lessons, Kathy’s divorce from her husband and the realization that her meager gratuity and pension would not suffice to sustain her had filled Teacher Collisson with a mindless terror. The day after she had walked away from her classroom for the last time she became a recluse, venturing out only when it was absolutely necessary, when she had to collect her pension and to guy food and pay her utility bills.
It took a while but it eventually caught up with her. Her parents’ ageing house began to literally fall apart and after a while it became impossible to maintain a sense of normal life. She could no longer afford to eat well and looked forward to visits from one former colleague or another who had fared better than herself and who would bring her the occasional meal.
There were days when she sat in the old rocker and rummaged through the ruins of her life searching desperately for such emotional memorabilia as she could find. Those were few and far between. There was, however, no shortage of regret and frustrastion over the fact that she had anchored her whole life to a profession which, at the end of the day, had left her both unrewarded and unsatisfied. She began to think that all those years ago migration might have been a better option. Ity was all too late for that now.
On the day that she had finally suppressed her mountain of pride and decided that depending on public pity was the only option left open to her she had put on the best dress she could find and stepped out the front door which was close to falling off its hinges, looking for her next meal.
