She was tall and thin, her hair a frizzy mess falling over her face as she perched on the edge of her desk in front of our class. She wore baggy clothes; long burgundy, black or olive green skirts, too-big cardigans and shapeless blouses. Sometimes her make-up was smudged, sometimes her voice was gruff and croaky, and there were times when she would excuse herself for five minutes and return smelling of smoke.
We sat in rows in her classroom in our navy and black uniforms, our stockings itching our legs, our shirts buttoned up to the neck, our stripy ties tucked into our jerseys, counting ourselves lucky to have this teacher who knew our names and looked us in the eyes, who did not hide her frailty from us, who handed back our work with long comments in her surprisingly pretty, neat handwriting. For three years we sat in her classroom on the second floor that looked out over the lawns and the neat gravel pathways of our traditional girls' school. We squeezed our almost-adult bodies into the wooden desks with the lids that flipped open to store our books, surreptitiously sweeping our pencil shavings into the holes that girls in long-ago years had used for ink bottles.
She made jokes, she laughed loudly, she read to us with passion. She checked our homework, sometimes, and did not hide her disappointment when we didn't do it. She told us about her children, how hard it was to be raising her two girls on her own, and warned us about faithless men. She told us about how she had once tried to write a Mills and Boon romance novel, and we laughed at the strict formula, how the first kiss had to happen by page fifty five. She loved Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath, and because she did, we did too. She made stories and poems come alive, and I looked forward to every single lesson.
Sometimes we would get to class and she wasn't there. Sometimes she would be absent for a week, and return thinner, her eyes bloodshot and swollen. Once she was gone for a whole term, and for ten long weeks we had to endure Miss Wilson with her bun, brown skirts and sensible shoes. She was all right, but we missed Mrs Cloete. We were worried. There were whispers and rumours - a nervous breakdown, we heard. But she came back, and we were relieved. The smoke breaks were longer, and she was disheveled and pale, but she was back.
I handed in a poem, a parody of a nursery rhyme, and she gave me the highest mark I had ever got for anything like that. Then it was a short story, and a descriptive essay. I read her paragraph-long comments over and over again. She thought I was good. She liked my writing. We had to hand in a file of any kind of writing we liked, as much or as little as we wanted. I was so excited to show her the poems I had written and the first few chapters of the novel I had begun. She gave me full marks and another long paragraph of encouragement. We studied poems in class; she asked the class questions and I knew the answers. I could see the rhythm and the metaphors and the magic. I had so much to say that I kept quiet sometimes, not wanting to show off. There were others in the class way cleverer than I was, other girls who got A's for everything, even Physics and First Language Afrikaans. I wasn't like them but Mrs Cloete made sure I knew this could be my thing if I wanted it to be.
She had a birthday. We brought presents and had a surprise party, and she cried when she opened her gifts. I shouldn't say this, girls, but you are special, she said. She had never had a class like us before. It was our final year; we ploughed through Hamlet and Thomas Hardy, we dissected Ode on Grecian Urn and laughed over malapropisms and euphemisms. She made sure we knew how to address a business letter and structure an argument. Yours faithfully. Leave a line or you lose a mark. We wrote our exams in the echoing hall and we were done.
I wrote out a poem she had loved, tiny as I could, and put into a tiny frame for her. It was strange to say good bye to our familiar world of lace-up shoes and hymnbooks, of blazer badges and bells and putting our hair up in ponytails every day. I was following my dream, going up to the University on the hill where I was going to be taught by lecturers who were actual authors, where I was going to spend four years preparing to stand in front of a classroom and teach grammar and poetry and Romeo and Juliet to teenagers, just as she had. It was strange to leave her behind. Would she be all right without us? Would any of her classes understand her the way we had?
I remember her telling us about Sylvia Plath, how she killed herself by putting her head in a gas oven. How awful, I thought, for despair to be so deep and dark that the only way out is to die. I remember it because in the end she also ran out of hope. She couldn't carry on. It wasn't enough, that she was a wonderful teacher. It wasn't enough that she had given me and the others so much. I wish, and I know we all do, that I had been able to do something to give her hope.
It seems almost meaningless to have dedicated my book to her memory, but I had to do it. She didn't ever know how much she encouraged me. I would love to send her an email: Mrs Cloete - remember me? I wrote a little story when I was fifteen and you told me to keep going. It took me nearly thirty years but I did it and I am so glad I did. Thank you for taking me seriously. I wish you could teach my daughter about Twelfth Night and Christina Rosetti and how to write a precis. I so wish you had found a way out of the darkness.
