The Father Christmas Letters

I suppose a few of my primary school teachers were potentially great, but flawed.

My grade five teacher (let’s call her Miss T) was a quite accomplished, well read, and well travelled woman who taught us how to knit, to play a bit of piano, and lots on nutrition. Unfortunately, she was not very good at teaching Maths, so I spent grade six playing catch up.

My grade four teacher (Mr L) was also quite interesting. He had anger management issues in relation to the dumb kids in the class (luckily I am clever) and used to use the strap and metre long rulers and canes a lot. The rest of us used to enjoy the theatre, relieved that we were not the victims.

He also was quite left wing, openly. He taught us that the IRA and PLO are justified in what they were doing, and that Australia should become a republic (this was 1978). Not sure whatever became of him, but I discovered a few years ago that he was an actual committed communist (Google had a photo of him in the 1981 Melbourne Mayday march).

Mr L also had the hots for Miss T. There was one day where Miss T sent two children from her class to our class with a message: “Mr L, Miss T wants to borrow your strap.”

Mr L then replied with an outrageous lie: “Tell Miss T I do not have a strap.”

Total lie! We saw the strap in action several times a week.

Mr L then pulled the belt off his jeans and handed it over to the kids, adding: “Tell Miss T she can borrow this!”

When you are nine, it is unlikely that you are going to understand the subtext for such a loan. As an adult, I think it is pretty obvious what was going on.

Mr L left at the end of the year – supposedly because he was shifting to another school nearer to his home, although it was rumoured that he and our school principal Mr G (a very conservative church going solid citizen who was active in local government as a right wing Labor councillor) argued viciously over politics.

Miss T, on the other hand, rebounded into the arms of Mr R, the deputy principal. He left his wife and teenage kids and shacked up with Miss T, which was quite a scandal in 1980 amongst those parents who were in the know (like my mother, who heard from my former kindergarten teacher whose daughter was a teacher at my school).

Both Mr L and Miss T were very well read – or at least as far as I can tell, looking back as an adult at what I can perceive from what I saw as a nine or ten year old.

Mr L seriously encouraged us to read, and introduced us to some of his favourite authors. He read Banjo Paterson’s poems to us – the funnier ones that a kid will enjoy rather than the classics like The Man From Snowy River and Clancy Of The Overflow. He also read Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding to us.

Of course, as a nine year old, I did not get the satirical subtext of The Magic Pudding, which I discovered much later, about the irresponsible economic policies followed in Australia in the post Federation era.

Mr L also read The Hobbit to us, serving as my introduction to JRR Tolkien. I still consider that this had a huge lifelong impact on me. An early introduction to The Hobbit led me to read The Lord Of The Rings in early 1980 for the first time (I have lost count of how many times I have read it since then).

Since then, as a Tolkien fan, I have read a lot of his other books, and reread them. For instance, in preparation for the lamentable fan fiction Amazon series The Rings Of Power, I read The Silmarillion for the first time in almost 40 years.

I am not exactly sure when I read The Father Christmas Letters. It was either around 1980, when I was still in primary school, or in 1981 or 1982, in my early high school years.

The Father Christmas Letters was a posthumous publication of Tolkien’s letters to his children at Christmas, between 1920 and 1943 (he had a big family). The letters were written as if they were from Father Christmas, complete with fabricated stamps from the North Pole, and lots of illustrations, recounting the adventures that Father Christmas and his sidekick, the North Polar Bear, had over the course of the previous year.

I quite enjoyed The Father Christmas Letters at that time, when I read the book in a cosy corner of the school library.

Now, well over 40 years later, I was pondering that particular Tolkien book, and decided on the spur of the moment to order a copy through Amazon the other day.

It arrived last night, and I settled down on the front porch with a glass of shiraz to read it. As an adult, the creativity and the love for his children really shine through in his letters, which involved painstaking writing and drawings. There is a great poignancy to it.

The one problem with the new version is that the formatting is different from that of the original edition, which was more like a picture book in size with the drawings in full colour and sized such that you could enjoy the artwork for its own sake. The pictures in this version are not as large or set up as an integral part of the publication as they were in the first book.

It seems to me that the editor has aimed at an adult audience, rather than at the children who would get the most delight out of reading about Father Christmas and gawking at the artworks.

All the same, I did enjoy it, even if the original edition gave me so much more joy as an eleven year old.