Miss Cynthia Hawke It was near the end of my first full work-day at Mount Hermon School in February of 1969. In the Study Hall, Miss Cynthia Hawke was on duty. If you ever wanted to see a hundred or so senior-school boys and girls perfectly quiet and almost totally still – it would have to be when Miss Hawke was on duty. I had done all my homework. The final half-hour of study for us Class IX students was allocated to Library Reading. I had written it into my Home-Work Diary myself earlier that day in class. I had looked at it just before 7:30pm. Then I looked at the book that I had borrowed from the school library. It was too much to bear! I just had to write to my mother and tell her all the great news I had about my new school! I had to tell her about the friends I had made. I had to tell her that the swimming pool was just outside our Class IX Dorm window and that my bed was right near the center window on the side of Fern Hill that faced the pool. I had to describe some of the teachers and tell her how nice they had been to me. I had to describe the whole school campus to her and how I already loved every bit of it. And so, for the next twenty-five minutes my pen blazed a trail that my mind was hard pressed to keep up with. So lost was I in the letter to Mum that all I heard in that huge Study Hall was the scraping of my new pen on the crisp, new center page that I had torn out of my Composition Exercise Book and my own breathing. When a soft, gentle voice spoke behind me, therefore, I was a little startled and jerked up. “What do you have for this half-hour of study, Robin?”, asked Miss Hawke with a maternal smile on her face. I didn’t need to consult my Home-Work book to be able to reply to her, “Library Reading, Miss”. “And what is that you’re doing, Robin?”, she asked , still smiling. Pride filled my heart as I thought how she would approve when I told her that I was writing a letter to my mother. “I’m writing a letter to my mother, Miss”, I said with an innocent smile. “Give me the letter, please”, she said and, of course, I handed it to her. Imagine the chill that wrapped itself around my heart when, while she was still giving me that tender smile, she ripped the letter to shreds before my very eyes and put the pieces in the pocket of the dress she was wearing! I was in shock. And then I became aware that every face in the entire Study Hall had been watching the entire incident. I had had the honour of being Hawkie’s first ‘victim’ in the 1969 school year. Suddenly, I realized how many strange faces there were in the Study Hall. Big boys and girls were looking at me and smiling. Some of them made sympathizing faces at me; some shook their heads; some nodded as if to say, “May we introduce - Miss Cynthia Hawke.” Miss Hawke, or ‘Hawkie’ as she was affectionately called by the students, was the terror of every senior school boy and girl. She was about 5ft. and 7in. tall in the low heels that she always wore but she always seemed to loom over you. She always dressed impeccably and was always immaculate in every aspect of her personal appearance. In all the years that I was in MH, as a student and then as a teacher, she always maintained a perfect and upright posture. She had sharp features – a strong, sharp chin, a sharp, straight nose and rather thin lips. She had piercing, blue eyes that made me think of the sea around her native Australia and the Great Whites that make it their haunt and sent a chill of apprehension deep into my gut whenever she turned them on me. I don’t think those eyes missed a thing. She also had incredible hearing and it was said that she could hear a whisper all the way across the Study Hall . . . or was that just because she always had close to perfect silence in there . . . or was that just part of a legend that had been growing since she started as a teacher at MH? Can you imagine a more appropriate name for her? She seemed to glide noiselessly when she was the teacher on duty, her piercing eyes catching any movement that was out of sync with what was supposed to be happening. At the first sign of a shuffling in the undergrowth . . . she would swoop down and put a sudden end to the disturbance. There was no trace of malice in what she did. You stepped out of line – she would do her duty and make sure you learned never to do it again. Simple. Everyone understood her. If you lived by the rules of the school she was a friend and a helper. If you didn’t, she was a friend and a helper and a strict disciplinarian! Over the next few years I learned to stay out of Miss Hawke’s way. Every time I saw her approaching me in a corridor or outside, I ran the fronts of my shoes against the backs of my trousers to clean them up a little; I pulled my tie a little tighter against the top button of my shirt and my back straightened as I walked past her. I always wished her the time of day, with the slightest of nods, making sure not to smile too broadly in case that was unacceptable behaviour and got me a house-mark or detention or, even worse, a 20-minute lecture! I had seen her chastise even prefects for walking past teachers and not remembering to wish them. I think I was not the only one more than a little intimidated. Every time ‘Hawkie’ was on duty there were new stories of her exploits: ‘Hawkie sent Rudra down to the dorm to change his socks’ . . . ‘. . . she stuck a ruler between them and told them to stand 12 inches apart when they are fencing’ . . . [Anyone remember this couple?? - ] ‘she gave me three house-marks today yaa . . . THREE!! I’ll be standing up in chapel now!!!’ . . . and so on. It wasn’t till the final month before our ISC [1971] exams in class XI that Miss Hawke actually taught me. From class IX onwards we had always had two English groups. Miss Hawke taught one of the groups and I was in the other one. It had become something of a tradition that Miss Hawke taught the whole class for the last month before the exams. She spent two double-periods very carefully explaining and illustrating the kind of simple and lucid language that she expected from us when we wrote our first essays for her. She focused on the descriptive essay. I remember to this day the way she explained that in describing anything we should touch on what we saw, heard, smelt, tasted and touched, thereby covering all the senses. We learnt to be consistent in our tenses. We learnt brevity. I acquired more practical value about the use of the English language in those two double-periods than in all my years of school till then and all the years of college, graduate school and my education diploma put together. I also learned that it is possible to write good English without knowing every grammatical rule in the book. We got our first corrected essays back from Miss Hawke the day after we wrote them. That was a new experience for me. We usually waited a week before we got our essays back. When I opened my exercise book it became apparent that Miss Hawke had scrutinized every word I had written. That was another new experience for me. Only Martina Ghosh scored higher than me in that first essay - yet another novel experience, as I seemed to always get the same, middle-of-the-class, marks before that. There were cryptic red messages in the margin: ‘p’, ‘sp’, ‘g’ and so on. It was all Greek to me till she explained that a ‘g’ in the margin indicated a grammatical error somewhere in the line. A ‘p’ indicated a punctuation error and ‘sp’ indicated a spelling error. We had to find our own mistakes and correct them! Spelling mistakes had to be corrected and written out three times. Any sentence with punctuation or Grammar errors had to be re-written in full [you quickly appreciated the value of her earlier advice to write short sentences!!]. Several students scored sub-zero [I learned that the record was –31 {minus 31} out of 50 ! !] marks for their essays. The rule was simple – you lost one mark for each error, no matter how insignificant. The corrections took some of the students two entire periods and home-work time to complete!! When she got our next essays, she also scrutinized and corrected our corrections. When the ISC results came out the next year we all appreciated the value of that one month that Miss Hawke spent with us labouring over our essays. The Mount Hermon English grades were always good. After I completed my Bachelor’s degree in English Literature I was invited by Mr. Graeme Murray to come up to Mount Hermon and teach and coach swimming and help out in other ways. Miss Hawke was still head of English in the school and it was to her that I reported and turned to for help when I taught English in class IX, XI & XII in 1978. In all my years as a teacher of English in India and later a school administrator, there was only one standard by which I measured myself and all English teachers. It was the standard that Miss Hawke had set for me in my ISC year [1971], in my HSC years [1972 & 1973] and then, in 1978, in my first year as a teacher at Mount Hermon. I learnt how much time it took to correct an essay the way she corrected an essay – anywhere from 5 minutes [the almost perfect essays {which you have to read twice, to make sure that you didn’t miss errors and that you really had just read a near-perfect composition} – and any possible corrections from the previous essay] to 25 minutes [the essays with many errors and previous corrections, which always far outnumbered the near-perfect ones!]. I multiplied that by the number of students I taught. I averaged about five essays an hour and seven hours per class of thirty. About four classes to correct every week. Do the Math. A man I met once said to me, “ Children spell love ‘T – I – M – E’. We made jokes about ‘Hawkie Stick’ and talked about her behind her back but underlying all that was a deep respect and appreciation for the care that Miss Hawke took over her teaching and [after we left school!] our behaviour. Underlying the caricatures we made of her is a gratitude and love that the human heart reserves for selfless teachers. A whole generation of Mount Hermon students writes better English because of her dedication to her teaching. A whole generation of Hermonites understands the meaning of uncompromising principles. When Miss Hawke was a teacher in Mount Hermon, teachers and students alike had to live up to a higher standard. Her very presence made it discomforting to do any less. The bar was raised by her example. The moral and ethical backbone of the school was fortified by her clarity of vision and conviction on issues of right and wrong. That, more than anything else is what Mount Hermon School gained during her stay there. For that dedication to the high calling of ‘Teacher’ and for your unflinching commitment to a code of conduct exemplified by your Lord and Saviour, Jesus of Nazareth, I acknowledge your contribution to my years at MH and to the school. Miss Cynthia Hawke, Mount Hermon School salutes you.   By : ROBIN SENGUPTA         Graduated : Date : 27/6/2003 5:48