Mrs. Harwood- French and German

 

Mrs. Harwood taught French at Tulketh and started the same year as me, 1975. She had the task of teaching the class 1N which I started out in after the first day entrance exams. Mrs. Harwood was a middle-aged woman with blonde hair and glasses on. She hailed from Liverpool and was a supporter of the successful football team who the previous year had won the FA Cup.

Most of us I would have guessed had a small amount of French knowledge which was provided at primary school in the final years there. I remember one of the first lessons involving writing down the words of the number one to 20 in French and learning about nouns and verbs as well.

I remember we had a bit of a quiz in one of the lessons in which at the end we had to swop exercise books and mark the answers. Harmless fun you might think. I had spelt trois – three as tw.t, which of course is a swear word. I remember a lad called Graham Norton who was given the task of marking my quiz answers laughing out loudly at this which of course promptly brought it to Mrs. Harwood’s attention. Of course, like all classroom misdemeanours’ it spread round the class like wildfire. Mrs Harwood looked at the answers rather pensively and asked me to stay behind after the lesson finished which was the last double period of the day. When I received my book back from Mrs. Harwood I realised my error and a million things went through my mind. canings, expulsion, letters being sent home to my parents. The irony was I got 19 out of 20 with the swear word being the only one of course which was wrong.

At the end of the lesson, I stayed behind, Mrs. Harwood asked me if I could explain to her why I had used such a word. I held my hands up and apologised to her unrefutably and accepted what was to come. She seemed to take an age to decide what to do and then she focused on my Liverpool FC sports bag. She asked me if I was a fan of Liverpool FC, I thought I would say yes to get on the right side of her and with my encyclopaedic knowledge at that time on football give her chapter and verse on the 1974 FA Cup winning side and how it was the first one we watched in glorious colour on television at home. This seem to impress if a little baffle Mrs. Harwood, but it took the sting out of the situation I was in. She told me of the times she stood on the famous Kop terrace at Anfield in the glorious Bill Shankly years in the 1960’s with her father.

Suddenly she looked at her watched and realised it was after four o’clock. She said, “You better get off home”, but you can do a detention the following day as punishment. I remember the following evening along with some other students from different years I did detention in room 31 which was conveniently next to the staffroom. A Spanish teacher called Mr. Watt took the detention. On instruction from Mrs. Harwood, I had to write, I must always check my work out before handing it in to be marked, a hundred times.

Our paths never crossed again until the third year when Mrs. Harwood taught me a subject called European Studies.  I think she left the school at the same time I did in 1980. 

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