MISS PICK AND THE TERRAPIN OF TERROR

Remember those fearsome female characters in Roald Dahl’s stories, such as the grandmother in George's Marvellous Medicine, the shape-shifting crones in The Witches, and Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, whom many now like to cite as evidence of the author's alleged misogyny? Well, I encountered one such character in my secondary school. Her name was Miss Pick, and let me assure you, I don’t consider myself in any way hateful toward women.

Now, while I do believe one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead (I’m prepared to make an exception here, as I promise a redemptive conclusion soon enough), Miss Pick had, in her time, cultivated a reputation so terrifying that many students, bracing themselves for their first lesson in her infamous "terrapin of terror," genuinely wondered if they’d survive to tell the tale.

I did live to tell the tale and can report that she—much like Colonel Kurtz—had colonized that terrapin as her own island, ruling with uncontested authority. No school inspector dared venture into that outpost, which she commandeered with the formidable presence of a great battleship. For all intents and purposes, she was the mathematics equivalent of Captain Bligh, and we were her hapless captives, forbidden even from using calculators. Counting on our fingers was even considered a mortal sin.

Having harboured a phobia of numbers from an early age, I found that Miss Pick’s hugely intimidating reputation only deepened my dread of the subject. She loomed in my mind like a giant monster. Ironically, Miss Pick herself was physically small—short and low to the ground, with an extraordinary gravitational equilibrium. Yet she had the width and heft of a rugby prop. She was more than a woman; she was Boudica and Queen Victoria reborn as a plump yet musclebound maths teacher. Had she run for Prime Minister, who would have dared oppose her? Certainly not us.

The reality of her lessons, of course, was rarely as awful as the dread leading up to them. But one could never be too complacent. However, I do recall one insane daring moment when a female classmate and I, sent to fetch graph paper and rulers from her storeroom, shared an impulsive snog. Was it fear that prompted this madness? Probably. Something about risking our fate so close to where Miss Pick barked out sums gave us a strange thrill.

Years later, long after enduring the nightmare of her blood-chilling tutorship in the first years at secondary school, I found myself in the school library one afternoon. To my complete surprise, I discovered a shelf full of opera programmes and librettos from the Royal Opera House, English and Welsh National Opera, all signed and donated by none other than Miss Pick.

In that moment, I had to re-evaluate my entire opinion of this battle-axe. Images of her weeping at the death of Mimi in La Bohème or Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly in opera houses around the country began to flash before me. Was this woman simply misunderstood? Had she not found her own Rodolfo or Alfredo? Perhaps opera was where she found solace for her troubled and lonely heart.

I began to see her differently—not as an emotionless dictator, but as an emotionally complex lover of great art. She might have even appreciated the impulsive romance of my George Emerson-like kiss in the storeroom with my female counterpart.

Maybe Miss Pick was simply a Jekyll and Hyde figure, with Hyde prevailing more often than Jekyll in the classroom than outside of it.

Or perhaps she was just a woman, and we were simply silly kids.