Three Little Birds

You may remember a post from about a year ago entitled ‘The English Teacher’. It described my experience with the absolute BEST English teacher ever, Mr. Dominic Stead. He was interesting, he was funny, he was enthusiastic, he was anti-curriculum – the greatest, coolest, loveliest, sweetest, most alternative English teacher I have ever had.

Several months ago we received the news that he had died of liver cancer.

It’s taken me so long to write this because it’s hard to know how to say it. How to give the words the fullest impact, to let you know truly how much he meant to me and everyone else who knew him, and how much sadness we felt on hearing of his death.

There was no announcement. I first heard the news by accident: standing outside science, I overhead Hannah, a girl who’d never been in his class, talking about someone having died. At first, I paid little attention – the way she spoke made it sound like the death had been a long time ago, and maybe I thought I’d heard about it before or didn’t know the person in question. Then somebody asked, “Who? Who’s dead?” This was in the morning. Throughout the day we kept hearing about it as the news circulated around the school, seeming to take impossibly long to reach all the people who had any care at all. Even by the last lesson there was still one boy in my class who didn’t know – and nobody told him because by then, it was common knowledge. It was about lunchtime when I had to give up my hope that Hannah had been misinformed.

The only official information I have is from my English teacher. This is yet another teacher from the ones I have already mentioned, and so far the most constant – she has now been my teacher for more than a year. She told us that Mr. Stead had died a few days ago from liver cancer; that hardly anyone in the school had known of his illness, except maybe his form group; and that he had moved to Brighton to be close to his children. I don’t know how long he had known he had cancer, but I remember how he often missed English lessons to go to doctor’s appointments, and how he said he’d tell us later why he was moving to Brighton – but he never did, and I always wondered about his mysterious reason. Now, maybe, I know why.

Mrs. Topf, my current English teacher, is also wonderful and interesting and friendly and openly expresses her distaste of the curriculum. If I had never met Mr. Stead I would probably call her the best English teacher I ever had: now, she’ll have to settle for second best.

Requiescat in pace.