TIM BELFORD

Remembering KP Holmes

Every year at about this time I think of KP Holmes.

His actual name was Kenneth Paul Holmes although I never heard anyone refer to him as anything other than KP

He was my grade six teacher. Actually, he was my grade five and six teacher.

What can I say, it was a small school.

He was an ungainly looking sort -- Ichabod Crane with a shock of ill-cut red hair.

He was also cursed with the pale white skin common to many red heads. Skin that turned to parchment as the weather dropped below zero.

As a consequence, on his desk, sat a large tub of lanolin all winter.

He would rub liberal amounts of the gooey stuff onto his hands on a regular basis throughout the day until his skin took on a strange, oily sheen.

Meeting KP on the first day of grade five coincided with my first use of a fountain pen.

Until that point we had been forced to use wooden-handled straight pens with replaceable metal nibs and a pot of ink.

It was thought by educators at the time that once a child could master penmanship using this nineteenth century equivalent of a goose quill, he or she was ready for a real pen.

Anyway, KP pointed out that we could use black ink or any shade of blue we liked, with the exception of robin's egg blue.

That was reserved for him and him alone.

He was a good teacher.

Oh, he had his faults. He was a little to quick with a piece of chalk which he threw with unfailing accuracy at the heads of the inattentive.

And he was occasionally known to dump a trouble maker, along with the entire contents of his desk, onto the floor.

But he also loved his work. And thankfully he was a stickler for the English language.

It wasn't just what you wrote but how you wrote it.

Spelling counted. So did grammar. We parsed endless sentences until we knew our nouns from our verbs and our subjects from our objects.

But what I remember most about KP was the ice rink.

Every year he would enlist a half dozen or so of the grade five and six boys to show up after supper in the pitch black of a January evening.

And together we would stomp flat the snow covering the asphalt playground behind the school.

Then, armed with a hose secured from the local volunteer fire department, we would flood the playground.

It would take five or six of us, holding on for dear life, to focus the spray in the right direction while KP regulated the flow of water.

We took turns turning up for the nightly flooding but KP was out there every single evening dressed in long underwear, a shirt, two sweaters, two pairs of pants and a parka looking more or less like a red haired Michelin Man.

But, oh what a rink.

It was there I learned to skate and play hockey. It was there I learned it was all right to hold a girl's hand -- as long as you were skating.

And it was there I also learned, although it didn't dawn on me until years later, that there was a lot more to teaching than a text book.

And for that and so much more, I remember KP Holmes.