It was like being transported to the past to find an old, tattered Palgrave’s Golden Treasury on Mum’s bookshelf. Its spine is missing and it has written notes and annotations throughout and the names of the people who used it – there lies the treasure! Ivan Dey seems to have been the first owner. Mum says he was a friend of her brothers, which explains the names of my uncle and aunt written inside the front cover:

20 Sept. 1932 A. A. McClean Form VI B S.B.H.S. (Southland Boys’ High School)

Gladys McClean Form 10 B S.G.H.S. (Southland Girls’ High School)

Another uncle, J.E. McClean took a break from listening about poetry in class to practise his signature.

The old edition looks small next to my 1964 one, a gift from my younger brother, with my name inside and the date, Dec. 1978, which was the year I began teaching. There are no notes or annotations, cartoons or comments in my book – only book marks.

Inside the back cover there are attempts at some poetry of their own, explanations of grammatical points, classical places and poetic technique, a drawing of an elephant, some arithmetic, and a list of essay topics of which options 4. and 5. seem to be favoured, being underlined rather than struck out.

The content of the poems reveals their time. Many are of empire and battle, literally and metaphorically, studied by children who grew up to serve in the World Wars, ever loyal to Britain. I wonder if the poems inspired them, but if they saw them differently after the event – if they survived. My uncle, A. A. McClean, didn’t, dying at Cassino in Italy in 1944 as a Second Lieutenant in the NZ Infantry, just after his 28th birthday. When he was in Form VI B in 1932, my mother would have been three years old.

There are several insights into ‘old school’ learning. Not just techniques, but critical thinking is in the marginalia, plus knowledge of classical mythology and history, and I imagined the thrill the student felt in correcting Keats’ error: Balboa was the first European to see the Pacific, not Cortez. The overblown language of the Romantic poets conjures up images of the English landed gentry, home from the Grand Tour, wandering in Capability Brown grounds, a book of poems in hand (perhaps falling into the haha as a result), and climbing to a folly on a hilly mound where, sitting under the classical carvings and statues, they alternately sighed and were uplifted by the exclamation mark-studded sentiments.

I wonder about the teachers who were the source of those notes. Some of my teachers had that depth of knowledge. The curtains in our Headmistress’s study were patterned with the Greek alphabet, so perhaps she would be able to translate the inscription at the beginning of the 1928 edition as this teacher appears to have done judging by the diligently copied translation.

Classics is now a popular subject in schools, so perhaps some of that knowledge survives. My Seventh Form English teacher said she would send her children to Sunday School so they would recognise the Biblical references in literature (she was an atheist herself – as was Shelley, by the way). Now there is a wealth of poetry from NZ and the wider world to teach, though I often returned to some ‘classics’ or did a timeline – past to present – but most of this collection I would not have considered approachable for my students. That said, my youngest nephew can’t abide the mere mention of poetry – like his great-uncle of the signature in the margin, old school or new.