The book begins with an amusing account of the antics of a small boy who started school in 1939. In later years, when he became a student teacher at the school he himself had attended, his old sports master, with whom he enjoyed a mutual respect, told him that his name had been regarded by all his other teachers as a teacher swear word. Attending a one-teacher school in the bush when he was eight was such a revelation that he decided to be a teacher...