Teacher Songs #8: The Return Of Mrs. Tebb

I've written about Mrs. Tebb before.

She was the primary teacher, you may recall, who insisted I drink my free school milk even when I told her I didn't drink milk because it made me throw up. And Mrs. Kaye never made me drink it last year! "Drink your milk," ordered Mrs. Tebb. 

So I did. And I threw up.

The Beach Boys - Be True To Your School 

Maybe this set the tone of our relationship and explained why Mrs. Tebb didn't like me for the rest of the year. She thought she knew better than a 7 year old, but actually... guess what, Mrs. Tebb... sometimes you don't.

The Lemon Twigs - The Student Becomes The Teacher

Then last week, while discussing knocking down walls in Emergency Questions, Alyson jogged my memory about another incident - one in which I was far more culpable - which cemented the animosity Mrs. Tebb felt towards me. The time I pushed Andrew Lodge through the classroom wall.

I'm pretty sure it was Andrew Lodge, but I might be wrong about that. Either way, my apologies to him. And my apologies for the time that he attended my birthday party and I threw a dart in his eye, almost blinding him. Believe it or not, Andrew Lodge was a good mate of mine in junior school. But these things happened. 

Supertramp - School

Mrs. Tebb didn't have a classroom in the main school. She taught her class in a portacabin out in the school garden. It was a very nice portacabin in a very nice garden (we had school chickens too, provided by my mate Simon, whose dad was a chicken farmer). Far be it from me to suggest that the Head had arranged it that way to keep Mrs. Tebb away from Gen-Pop... or the other teachers... but if he had done that, I could easily understand why.

Jim Bob - The School Is Not The Building (It's The Children)

Anyway, as you entered the portacabin, there was a small cloak room, then a door that led into the main classroom. One morning, I was messing around with Andrew Lodge (or someone else whose name has been lost to antiquity, but Andrew Lodge is taking his place), playfighting, and... y'know, I had a bit of a temper when I was a kid, and maybe things got a bit out of hand... so I pushed Andrew Lodge straight through the cloakroom wall (which to be fair, was obviously made of an amalgam of tissue paper and spit) and into Mrs. Tebb's store-room. 

Looking back, I'm starting to understand why Mrs. Tebb didn't like me. She was never going to teach me love, to quote Rockpile...