‘A teacher’s gift: How a simple word enriched my life and my language’

It’s about time that Mr Clyne’s story was told. Yet I can almost hear the mystification stirring already: Who the hell is Mr Clyne, someone is sure to think. Well, Mr Clyne, to the best of my knowledge, is not famous; in fact, he is almost certainly deceased (unless he is quietly setting a new world record for longevity). And probably largely forgotten.

Mr Clyne was an ordinary school teacher, mine in fact, when I was in third class at Gladesville Public School. I know very little about him; in fact, I can barely remember what he looked like. Through the mists of memory I see a big, slightly overweight man with sandy (or greying) hair but, then again, to 60-pound squirts, everyone must have seemed large and imposing.

But Mr Clyne had a couple of idiosyncrasies that managed to etch themselves indelibly in my recollection of that dreary, war-weary time. First, there was the inkwell ritual.
People forget how primitive was that blunt-edged post-war world we grew up in. Ballpoint pens were non-existent and ink came in a powdered form (guarded jealously by Mr Clyne). We, the pupils, were provided with a pen, into which a replaceable nib was inserted (again, parsimoniously distributed by Mr Clyne), plus a brown bakelite inkwell that fitted into a hole in the front right-hand corner of our heavily scored, cast-iron-framed, 19th century desks.

That’s where Mr Clyne’s ritual slotted in. At some mysterious interval, we were ordered into a line to carry our inkwells up to him where he proceeded to fill them with a concoction made up of ink powder and water. He must have been a dab hand at it, because I never recall there ever being anything but a common, consistent, blue-black hue to the ink he dispensed. For a whole year.

His second ritual was the morning tea event. It was probably illegal (it was certainly dangerous) but every morning, round about 10am or so, one of his pupils (we were barely eight, remember) was sent out of the class, across Victoria Road, which was one of Sydney’s main transport arteries, to the local cake shop. Every day, his order was exactly the same: one fruit slice. To this day, the idea of a fruit slice has such an aura about it, that it is still (67 years later) my revered first choice snack whenever our family visits a cake shop.

Now, I imagine a few readers are already rubbing their eyes, muttering: what’s this all about; what’s the big deal about this Clyne fella, anyway? Be patient. Mr Clyne may have been a World War II veteran, but he never said anything concrete about himself (including his first name), so I don’t know. He may have had the most extraordinary backstory — spirited out of Germany in 1938 just before his parents were sent to concentration camps, and washed up on these shores where he subsequently anglicised his name from Klein. I just don’t know that, either.

But I do know this. I had many years of formal education and many fine, mediocre and poor teachers, including some, like the Leavisites who took over the University of Sydney English department in 1964, who were missionary zealots, to say the least. But not one made a more lasting impression on me than Mr Clyne.

Ironically, I remember very little of what Mr Clyne taught us in that Coronation year. Indeed, he might have wasted most of the first six months rabbiting on about the big event due to take place in Westminster Abbey on June 2. Or about the armistice finally being negotiated to end the war in Korea. But in all the too-ing and fro-ing of 1953, he uttered one simple word that burned into my consciousness and stayed there ever since. Enrich.

At the first lesson of that year, Mr Clyne told his 30 reluctant pupils that (paraphrasing), “this year, we are going to learn how to enrich your words and sentences”. Wow! From the mouth of a third-class primary school teacher in embarrassingly self-conscious Sydney in 1953, came an encapsulation of the entire history of our native tongue!

Eight-year-old children were being told that the language they spoke was not necessarily a given; that it was dynamic, beautiful, filled with infinite possibility, and that we were being ushered into the great, but simple, mystery of how our language could be made more beautiful. As beautiful as William Shakespeare’s English. By ‘enriching’ it.

Don’t just say, Mr Clyne would tell us, that “the cat sat on the mat”. Enrich the story to bring it alive in your own eyes and in the ears of your listeners. “The cat, badly shaken from crossing Victoria Road to get Mr Clyne’s morning fruit slice, was mightily relieved to settle down on his comfy old mat, and damned glad to be warm and still alive.” And so on.

To Mr Clyne, as I interpret him from afar, the language we speak was the greatest gift that could possibly be passed down to the next generation. But it was also the gift that keeps on giving, once we, the recipients, understand that it is our means to breathe life into our own precious stories. Whether one person is listening or reading, or one thousand.

It rather breaks my heart to see what technology has done to our beautiful language. How can you possibly move someone to tears, or to action, or to have a Kit-Kat even, if they receive a text message of 42 characters of gibberish. Are we human beings, replete with all the feelings of human beings, or are we mere desiccated extensions of a piece of tortured plastic?

Unfortunately, I do not hold very coherent religious views. Unfortunately, because one of the people I would have liked to catch up with at the pearly gates would be Mr Clyne. I’d have asked him: “How do you feel now, looking back on that great threshold key you passed to us, then comparing it with what we in our mindlessness, did with it? Would you have been better off if …” and then my question would trail off. Ever so kindly.

Yes, kindly, because I don’t think I could bear to hear even an angel weep.

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