Hard Bastard Terry Ewart - a real life story by Russ Cavanagh
I only ever met Terry Ewart once. He had a reputation as a 'hard bastard' and even the toughest boys feared a summons to his office for what would likely be six-of-the-best from his thick leather tawse.
Despite being a heavy smoker, Ewart wore a dark suit and tie each day to work. His gun-metal moustache and peppered hair complemented piercing brown eyes. Months away from retirement, he was deputy headmaster at the secondary school I attended in the nineteen-seventies.
My story with Ewart started one morning after my registry teacher Fran McIntosh, a late middle-aged woman with the vocal articulation of Geraldine McEwan's film role as Miss Jean Brodie, asked me (or, rather, told me) to take a note over to a distant classroom in some peripheral wing of the school building.
I refused Ms. McIntosh politely, being concerned that my first class of the day was in a room sat at the diametrically opposite end of the school from where she was sending.
Oh, but Miss McIntosh insisted, despite a rich pool of possible alternatives also readying to exit her registration class. I then lost composure and spat out, 'Fascist.' Miss McIntosh, still holding her folded note, said nothing more as I left.
That morning continued from double English to a single period of Arithmetic then, after morning break, double Music. I was bumbling along happily - until I received the message that Terry Ewart wanted to see me in his office at lunch break.
So I left the music department at lunchtime to walk across to Ewart's partly open door. The penny dropped that this might be to do with the Miss McIntosh episode earlier. I was shaking.
'Come in and sit down,' Ewart said, fountain pen in hand, not yet looking up from the blotter lit by a period angle-poise. Heavy curtains were drawn over any sight or sound from outside, to set an office-noir scene.
'Miss McIntosh tells me you called her a fascist, son. Is that right?' Hard bastard Terry Ewart looked up and stared right through me. I was rattling by now.
'Yes sir,' I said, 'Miss McIntosh insisted I deliver a note, even though it was to a teacher miles away in the wrong direction from my first class ... and I didn't want to be late ... but she wouldn't listen, and she got angry.'
I kept my eyes lowered. Surely it wasn't right that I should be belted? But I knew that talking back to teachers was as good as a signed warrant for corporal punishment.
Ewart sat silent. An ornamental clock ticked from a credenza on which also sat several thick volumes and a vase of wilting cut flowers. I wished I was elsewhere, far away.
'Do you know what a fascist is, son?'
'I believe so, sir.'
'You believe so, eh?' Ewart wasn't being sarcastic. He was taking his time deciding in which direction to take this matter.
He stood up from his seat, walked round to the front of his desk, and sat back against its edge only a few feet from me. Then he went on to tell me about the fascist dictator General Francisco Franco and the 1930s Spanish Civil War - a conflict that had started forty years before the day I sat there in Terry's office. Indeed, Franco had only recently died, ending Spain's fascist regime.
Ewart's tawse never left its drawer that day. Instead, I received the best history lesson I ever had from a man who clearly knew about that episode of history very well. The 'hard bastard' took his time to educate me in a way I've never forgotten.
'You were over the top son. Apologize to Miss McIntosh, next time you see her,' he said, once his lesson was over.
'Yes sir,' I replied.
Though some classmates asked afterwards about my visit to Ewart's office, I said nothing. How could I tell them what I'd just experienced?
Some years later I later found out that Ewart had volunteered while still a boy, not much older than I was when he spoke to me, to go fight for the coalition forces against Franco back in the 1930s. He'd made no mention of this bravery during our exchange.
Furthermore, I heard that Terry Ewart had been battling lung cancer - even as he counselled me that day. Previously a confirmed bachelor, Ewart married his long-standing friend and colleague Miss Francesca McIntosh, my registry teacher whom I'd called a fascist, in the weeks before he died.
Copyright © Russell Cavanagh