Hot for Teacher

Falling in Love, Aged Six

When I was six, I fell in love. Her name was Miss Ashworth. She was petite, tanned, stylish, had long auburn hair, and I saw her every day. Unfortunately, as she was my infant class teacher and a good 30 years older than me, it was not to be, but for an all too brief couple of years it was glorious.

The thing about Miss Ashworth was that she was actually nice to me. Nice to all the kids, but she seemed to take a shine to me in particular and encouraged me like few teachers ever did. She was certainly very different to my previous class teacher Mrs Canham who, like a large number of teachers back then, seemed to actively despise children in general and Tim Russell in particular, and went out of her way to show it. When I look back on my life I can still hardly think of anyone, including ex-wives/girlfriends or previous employers, who has ever loathed me quite as virulently as Mrs Canham did. So until I met Miss Ashworth, the idea that teachers could actually be nice people and show kindness to their pupils was completely unknown to me, and over the next few years of education I would come to realise just how rare the Miss Ashworths of this world were.

I remember her encouraging us to write and put on little plays; nurturing my love of creative writing by gently suggesting improvements to my stories (such as not ending every single story with the protagonist’s trousers falling down, which was a recurring motif in my early work); and instilling in me a love of reading that has never gone away. She was the first to introduce us to Roald Dahl, and the first to read Mister Men books to us - I can remember the entire class doubled up with painful laughter on that first reading of Mr Topsy-Turvy, read with her typical enthusiasm and flair for delivery.

But I’m afraid to impart that, degenerate that I am, my most abiding memory of Miss Ashworth is a rather more sordid one and one that would lead to a rather shameful incident in later life. Miss A would regularly invite pupils up to the front of the class to read aloud, both to give her voice a break and to help give us more confidence in our reading. Some kids dreaded it; the young Tim, the most confident version of himself that would ever exist (ah, where did that kid go? When did he leave us?), loved it, as it gave him the chance to both show off to the others and to impress the object of his affections.

One day, when I was around six, I was the one picked to stand at the front of the class next to Miss Ashworth and read aloud. I can’t remember when exactly it was, nor what book we were reading at the time. I can only remember one thing. On that particular day, Miss A was wearing my favourite outfit of hers - brown suede boots, a tan skirt, and a loose orange blouse. And from my position, standing next to her at the front of the class, I had the perfect view down the front of said blouse to the lacy black bra underneath. I may not be able to remember what I did yesterday, but I can still remember the sight of that bra as if I’d just gazed upon its wondrousness a mere five minutes ago.

Many people speak of those key formative moments of childhood that shape the person they would later become. Seeing Bowie doing Starman on Top of the Pops; watching Star Wars at the cinema for the first time; tasting their first ever sip of beer. I remember all those things and they were great, but they all pale in comparison to that first glimpse of Miss Ashworth’s bra. It felt like discovering a whole new secret world, one that I wanted to explore at great length. Within a couple of years my mum was being summoned to the school (not for the first or last time) to discuss my habit of cutting out pictures of topless women from the newspapers that covered the tables in the art area and hoarding them in my schoolbag. I pointed out that, if they didn’t want kids to see boobies, then maybe they shouldn’t be using old copies of The Sun to cover the tables. My defence fell on deaf ears.

My mum always remembered me coming home on the day of the bra incident and telling her and my dad all about it, and how excited I was. “I don’t think I ever saw you so happy or excited after a day at school” she would say, and she was right, because I never was. Because what else in my 14 miserable years of schooling could ever compare to that? Quadratic equations? Oxbow lakes? Osmosis?

As I mentioned above, there would be an unfortunate postscript to the bra episode many years later. Back in about 2010, an old school friend messaged me to say that her mum was still in touch with Miss Ashworth and, remembering that I was a big fan, offered to connect me with her on Facebook, an offer I gratefully (and rather too enthusiastically) accepted.

I fired off a message, reminding her of who I was and praising her early influence on my education and for being one of the few teachers who ever ‘got’ me. If only I had stopped there. But of course I had to add “...and my mum never forgot the day I came home from school all excited at having seen the black bra you were wearing!”

I never got a reply, and after a few weeks I grasped exactly why. Whilst it’s quite cute and endearing to hear a six-year old talking about seeing a teacher’s bra (or at least it was back in the 1970s which, as we all know, was A Different Time), it’s somewhat less endearing for a woman in her 70s to receive a message from a man in his 40s talking about an item of underwear she wore some 35 years previously. In hindsight, it’s a surprise the police never got involved.

I still cringe as I imagine Miss A opening the message - first the smile of recognition as she remembers the name, then the warmth at hearing what an influence she was on a young schoolboy’s life, and then the look of sheer horror as this pervert starts going on about her bra. Miss A died a couple of years later and it still pains me to think that her last memory of me was not as the cheeky young pupil laughing at The Mister Men, but as a middle-aged man sitting in his office thinking about a bra she wore in 1974. I’d like to say it changed me, but I’d be lying.