There was a great deal of teenage speculation involving the person of Ms Whyte. There in the same class where our rowdy attempts at agency involved much posing, gales of laughter often at the expense of the weak, boisterous jostling and the astounding bra removal trick which was obviously designed for maximum torment of all involved —this refined, poised and softly authoritative woman arrived to teach English.
Word in the soulless corridors of Greenside High School — not an institution built with neuroaesthetics or the everlasting grandeur of the fading British Empire in mind — was that she was a ballerina whose untimely injury cut short a professional career on stage. I never found out if that was true, but it explained the implicit grace and glamour of her erect bearing.
It was a rough time for kids back in the day — our educators were not wont to spare the rod as a means to marshal discipline. Boys would wear their pain on their ties. A cross thread for every jack. The beatings were relentless. Into this martial atmosphere — us against them — unless you had a talent for rugby, came Nicky Whyte bearing gifts.
Sparkling fresh words, achingly beautiful sentences and long threads of cut-glass ideas. She sprinkled them over her classes like fairy dust, letting the magic land where it may — not straining for too much meaning, but respecting the idea that these young minds in front of her were suitable receptacles for all the marvels she could share and that the words themselves would do their work and alight where they were most needed.
The holidays are littered with countless, pointless mortal tragedies.
It was powerful stuff for impressionable minds. I can still rattle off large tracts of sonnets and cantos that she planted there and then watered and tended gently with her sophisticated teaching that presumed we could pick up what she was putting down.
The greatest good she gave me was the journal. In her neat precise hand on some essay she was marking — she suggested that it might be a good idea to write every day in a personal journal. In that small marginal prompt she set me up for a lifetime of pleasure and unmitigated joy. Even if I had never become this privileged person who gets to write column inches for a living — the gift she gave me was more than I can ever repay. How else would I know what I really think and feel if I did not have this miracle medium — and the trick of putting myself aside so that the words can flow and surprise me into self and knowledge of that self?
I sat in the school hall last Saturday — the same unchanged venue for so many of my tortured heartaches and torrid teenage affairs — and thanked this wonderful woman for her profound service to me. The key to myself.
Ms Whyte went on to become the principal of Greenside High — even The New York Times wrote about her works and ways. Her successor at the post, a glorious gentleman in a glorious suit, spoke with such care about her brilliant life.
Some mindless driver killed her, her lovely husband and her mother in an instant on the road to Prince Albert for her only son’s wedding.
The holidays are littered with countless pointless mortal tragedies. You can’t make sense of them. You can’t even begin to poke at the bear — life, death, time, space — what does it all really mean? How to make sense of such dire and stupid circumstances? How to begin to take a measure of a life terminated in an instant without making that instant everything about that life? Everything changes. But this is brutal.
Here I am back in the school hall, the same boards extolling the head prefects and the academically brilliant — the heavy velvet curtains on the stage and the dread of the matric results hanging in the air. This place where you are sent to collect keys to your fate. I have been here before. All those years ago I sat in this hall as they announced that my dear friend Alex Simmonds had died in a car accident over the weekend. Another girl’s father picked them up from the movies, and boom. My first senseless tragedy. The first cut.
Now I am an expert. And still I struggle to learn my lessons. How to understand these brief flares of vital energy embodied in such fragile vessels with a lifetime guarantee and built-in obsolescence? How to reconcile that some shine brightly and then fade gently into the deep night, while others are extinguished in a flash.
How to grasp the idea that there is no right time? There is just your time. How to make peace with the fact that there is no ideal way to die. There is just this terminal condition and always the baffled bystanders — standing around the piles of food afterwards, eating to remember we are still on this side, never fully comprehending that terminal is our condition too. All you can do is listen to your teacher, who said just write it down.
