What do an 93-year-old man and 5-year-old boy have in common? Their love of early 20th century wooden school desks.
Corbin: School is not quite what I imagined it would be.
Me: Can you give me an example?
Corbin: Well, I thought there would be small individual wooden desks with ink wells.
Me: Have you been watching ‘little House on the Prairie’ on UTube?
Corbin: No. I just thought that’s what it would be.
We have now not just survived, but sailed through the first two weeks of full-day kindergarten. It is easy to get him out the door and he does not want – thank you very much – to be walked to the playground. He saunters off, backpack dangling awkwardly as he makes his way along with many other small turtles who are full of promise, ambition and enthusiasm. I am content as I soak up the moment knowing that the day will come when he won’t want to go to school. “He looks so small,” my husband says. If he were a girl, my husband would have teared up. But, that’s not my guy’s style.
We are celebrating Corbin’s new beginnings along with his brother’s. Hamish is having a hard time adjusting to his big brother’s absence at daycare, but has commenced his own pre-school program and is brining home shapes and delightful hand print works of art. And so, on this glorious pre-fall, end of summer day we are heading to Heritage Acres, where we will rejoice in a celebration of steam. I’m pumped. Truthfully, though, I am excited. My Dad belongs to the Vancouver Island Model Engineers and we will ride the trains, eat some corn that has been boiled through the power of steam, and take a ‘nature walk,’ as my son calls it, through the woods.
In two weeks we will have Hamish’s 3rd birthday party here and so I’ve decided to check out the school-house, where we will eat cake and drink libations for the under six set. After checking out the party room, we walk through to look at some of the exhibits of artifacts hanging throughout the building. The room next to the party room is a class room. Corbin walks in and smiles. He has found his desks with inkwells. It is not the classroom that Corbin has come to know, with its myriad of toys in primary coloured plastic bins, central heating, tables (not desks), and cozy carpet for story time. It is the classroom of my son’s imagination. It is a recreation of the original school-house, which stood in Central Saanich in the early days of the nineteenth century and held kids of more than one grade level.
Norman Gillan is sitting off to the side of the room in a chair surveying the one room school-house that he attended 85
years ago. He is alone, quiet and pensive, almost blending in to cork board and black boards behind him. I turn to him to say hello. He tells me that his little sister who was three and his brother who was four were too young for school, but that they were sent there to keep the class list large enough so that Saanichton School would not be closed. He tells me that this was his school, that he grew up in Saanich and although he now lives just outside Vancouver, he took a road trip over for the day just to visit the place where he learned to read 85 years ago.
The school, was built by Thomas Tubman in 1912-1913 and it operated as a public school until the 1970s. It was originally located on Mt. Newton Cross Road on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The two acres were sold to the trustees of Saanich School District with the deed of the land being signed on May 6th, 1914 by Charles Gillan, Norman’s father, who owned the land. The selling price was $1200. The school continued to accept enrolment until it was closed in 1975. In 1980, a grant from Heritage Trust of $17,000 funded the move from its original home to Heritage Acres, where it could be cared for and experienced by the public on the land belonging to the Saanich Historical Artifacts Society. Thanks to generous donations amounting to $40,000, corporate and service club donations and many hours of volunteer labour, the school-house was restored in 1998. One room has been recreated to show what the classrooms looked like while the other is used for meetings, events and birthday parties.
“I’m 93 years old, but I still like to come back. I drive myself, you know. I just bought a new Toyota Matrix.” Norman told me that he and his sister donated towards the restoration of the school-house. “They told me that we donated the most money and put our names on a plaque.” While I can see that he is proud of this fact, I can also see that it is not the status of being a major donor on this project that pleases him. He returns regularly just to sit in the room and remember.
He was a truck driver throughout his life not a high-powered executive or doctor and yet he still feels connected to the place that gave him the foundation of his education. Of course, I wanted to sit down and ask him so many questions. But, I had two rugrats running around my ankles needing open space to dispel energy and so I simply thanked him for all he had done and told him the story of my son’s disappointment at not having wooden desks with inkwells in his class room. I introduced him to my boys, told him that Corbin just started school last week and watched my son’s face as he digested the idea that this man who sat before him attended this very school with his brothers and sisters and friends 85 years ago. Corbin told him that he liked the wooden desks and Norman said, “yes, me too.”
I lost my grandfather almost two years ago. I still miss him dearly and whenever I meet and engage elderly people I feel a tug at my heartstrings. I immediately want to adopt them. I miss the comfortable silence of their company and I miss the stories. It was hard to leave Norman. I’m a historian and am constantly stopping for all sites of historical interest and reading picture books to my children that recount people, places and events in history. And, on that perfect fall day at Heritage Acres, I fell in love with a school room and an old man. And, I recognized that the school desks of my son’s imagination, bound to a remembrance and representation of the idea of school – wooden desks, cherry red apples and scribblers – is fed by people like Norman who nostalgically tied to their own past contribute to the romance of history by keeping it alive through projects like school room restorations.
Photo Credit
© Christine Roome. All rights reserved.
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