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The Music Teacher Who Longed for the Bell

Writer's picture: JackJack

The Music Teacher painted by Jack Greenwood
The Music Teacher

I had the idea to paint some school teachers from memory then write up little things I remember about that teacher. This is the first one. Please subscribe to my blog and share if you like as it really helps me get my art out into the world. Thanks for looking.


We took our music lessons in a temporary terrapin classroom which was slung at the bottom of our grey school yard which lay on the edge of a very large sprawling landscaped cemetery. A couple of gravestones which couldn’t be moved when the school was built poked out of the concrete next to a small sports area marked out with yellow paint on the ground.

Miss Wilkins was our reluctant music teacher. She had long thick black wiry hair greying in the light from the classroom window. Large black glasses magnified her disdain. She wore the same drab cardigan over a rotation of faded floral dresses. Purple eye shadow was thickly smeared across her top eyelids and had thin red downturned lips. She smelled like ice in the bottom of a whiskey glass and damp ashtrays barely muted by old flowery perfume.

She looked at her pupils with the same kind of exasperation that one might regard a flat tyre. She taught music with the finesse of a funeral march, snuffing out any appassionato which could have easily been coaxed out of my musical little soul.

The one time she showed the faintest hint of enthusiasm was when the school budget had afforded the purchase of a dozen mini keyboards (one between two) which only produced sound when one blew salivary air through a connected concertinaed tube. We took it in turns to practise scales and the room sounded like a battery of dying rubber chickens.

Miss Wilkins always filled out her section of my report book exactly the same at the end of each term with just one word, ‘Satisfactory’, a standard she fell short of as a teacher.

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