Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Read Free Book Online Page A

died.

Are you sure you’re cut out for this?
    February 1954 would not be put off: time for the Diploma of Education year to begin. I liked the safety of the lectures and dreaded when we were to put them into practice. My shyness was now forced out into the open. I had to face large groups of up to forty smirking adolescents and give them lucid, structured and lively lessons (the recommended adjectives).
    I had only two defences: pills and alcohol. Oblivon had just come onto the market, and was only a vowel away from the desired state. The instructions on the packets stressed that only one should be taken initially, so before my first exposure to an English class I took two with difficulty: they were almost the size of toy footballs. On no account, the instructions went on, should alcohol be consumed while on this medication, so after getting them down I went over to a nearby hotel and had a couple of beers.
    Something strange happened on my way back to Northcote High School: a highly bearable lightness of being. I sailed into the classroom, floated up to the platform, introduced myself with a deprecatory laugh, and said we’d now have a look at Alfred Noyes’s The Highwayman .
    At this stage in my literary life I’d cruised past T.S. Eliot and moved into Mayakovsky and Apollinaire, whose Zone , I insisted, was the great modern poem. The Waste Land was passé and the Georgians not worth considering. Each student was to read a portion, and as the couplets began their balladeering progress around the class, I began rocking backwards and forwards with the rhythm. As the metre got faster, so did I. When we reached the climax, with the highwayman riding unsuspectingly to his fate (‘Tlot, tlot, tlot, tlot—had they heard it? The horse’s hooves ringing clear’) and the class laughing at me, the poem or both, gripped by a pharmaco/alcoholic fever, I held up a hand: ‘Class,’ I said, my notes about rhythm and rhyme forgotten, ‘this is a silly poem. A romantic, melodramatic fool of a poem.’ At this, Mr Brophy, the supervising teacher, got to his feet. ‘Okay, class, Mr Oakley doesn’t seem to like this poem, but I do, and tomorrow I’ll tell you why.’ Then the bell rang, and Brophy, grim-faced, waited for them to leave. He could manage only a single sentence: ‘Are you sure you’re quite cut out for this?’
    I wasn’t cut out for this, and a few weeks later I proved it. The school was the prestigious Melbourne High, and the teacher a short, irascible man called Baker. There’d be no nonsense here. Since mine was the final lesson of the morning, I forbore my medications, and in a state of pre-teaching terror got the runs instead. I fled to the student, not the staff lavatory, because it was closer. After I’d finished, the door refused to open. After some futile kicking and punching, I had no choice but to slide out underneath. What did the group of boys in 4B make of their visiting teacher suddenly presenting himself to them feet first, followed by an arm holding a briefcase?

Smirks and titters
    At the beginning of February 1955, when England was winning the fourth test in Adelaide, and Tom Dougherty of the Australian Workers’ Union claimed a secret society known as The Movement was trying to take control of the ALP, my father drove me in his pre-war Plymouth to the central Victorian town of Maryborough, to whose Technical School I had been posted by the Education Department. I had failed in Practical Teaching, and would have to complete my Diploma of Education later on.
    Accommodation had been arranged by my fellow-Campion Kevin Keating, who was teaching at the high school. I had a large room in a red-brick building that had once been a Mechanics’ Institute, and was now Wandsworth, a warren of flats.
    Kevin, who was destined for the Dominicans and who tried, usually in vain, to get me to go with him to daily Mass, offered to teach