I posted last week about my Mother teaching at Speedwell in northwest Saskatchewan in 1942/43. One of the stories of her teaching there is about the mouse chewing the school register.Rudy Wiebe in his book "Of this Earth" started a chapter with this story, "Over sixty years ago the Speedwell mice found our school register in Miss Hingston's desk drawer sweet chewing. They gnawed away the bottom of it, I recognized now, into a pattern like the west-central Arctic Ocean coastline of Canada. ..."
The school superintendent would not accept the mouse chewed register to send to the department of education in Regina. My Mother had to recopy the whole register, and then kept the new one in a tin box to keep it safe from the mice. The new one was given to the superintendent when she left. That is why we still have the mouse chewed register.
The front page of the school register shows my Mother's annual salary as $800. There were 30 students in grades 1 to 8, with their attendance shown in the register for each day. Rudy Wiebe was in Grade 2 that year.
Rudy Wiebe has won many awards for his books including two Governor General awards. Because of this there are archives of all his writing and papers. He asked if we would donate the Speedwell school register to the archive. We are contacting him again to see how we arrange to send it. I have taken pictures of the pages of the register for us to keep after we donate the original to the archive.
2 comments:
That is so unique. A genuine mouse chewed school register from "ancient" times. Pictures are a good idea and easier to store than the original.
The best part for me is that the mice didn't chew the words "preserve it". Ha! Who knew mice had a sense of humour?
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