the longer i've left school the more i think i love mr evans. if i win the nobel prize one day i will name him the most influential teacher in my early school years. all our former animosity seems to have vanished now and i feel nothing but great affection for him. the other day i went back to school with zak, terence, cheemun and yeeyeo, and i realised that he was the only person i really wanted to see. i found him coming along the narrow corridor between staffroom 2 and the hod rooms and gave him a great hug, and considering how notoriously badly we got on when i was in school, this is much more significant than it sounds. in fact, this is only the second time in my life. which is very different from mr reeves who is always cheerfully dispensing hugs to everyone who comes to see him. actually, i wonder how many people have ever tried to hug evans in the first place. i mean, mr evans does not inspire hugging. usually he inspires parangs in the back of his head. in fact, evans himself must have thought it too amazing to be true for the next thing i know reeves was coming into class grinning and saying " what's this i hear about you and mr evans?" i didn't quite believe i did it either. immediately afterwards i went running into the canteen and announced in wild mirth - guess what i just did! afterwards i thought, i mustn't have been in my right mind.

mr evans is smart, very, and a terrible snob, and greatly prejudiced against those students who weren't good in lit, and anyone else he thought an intellectual lightweight, to the point of being unkind. i think he keeps spare kegs of his infamous sarcasm under his table and i wonder that his acidic pen didn't leave smoking holes in people's essays. he had an infuriating grading system that created levels on subtle levels of mocking judgment and meaning. what do you make of a teacher who gives B+, B++, and then B+++, before he was willing to proceed to a B/A? (After B/A came A/B, A---, A--...) which means you can walk into class and say, he gave me a B++, and someone else can retort, he gave me a B+++.

mr evans and i got through our two years in flamboyant enmity. evans loathed people without discipline, and i never turned in my essays until hounded to. also, many of them were without introduction or conclusion, consisting only the middle parts. i said they were the only good bits, and intros and conclusions were just fluff. i gave him to understand that, like onno, i thought he was one of those who thought achievement more important than talent, and of course he's a man who believes in hard work and enterprise and hates frivolity. (puritan values, 1b used to mock him) i was downright rude to him, nearly all the time. the more sarcastic he got, the more insolent i got. then of course, i had to devise ways of avoiding him so that he couldn't say "where's your hamlet essay minzeeeee?" which means he'll try to give me a white slip for skipping class (reeves intervened). usha tells me i used to give him a withering look when he calls on me in class. i spent a lot of time denouncing evans in florid speeches. looking back, i was simply an intolerable discipline case. which means he deserved me, the insufferable old prig.

mr evans and i vigorously disliked each other, and everyone in school knew it, but i always valued his praise more than anyone else's. no matter how much the personal antagonism rose between us, he never grudged me his just assessment of my work. although he always was snide about it of course. i remember one essay (A/B): "when i had slashed through the dark woods of your handwriting, i found your judgment to be sound". of course sometimes the joke was on me - once i ran into him outside the staffroom after prelims, and he said, your beaux strat essay is one of the best i've read, so i bounded down to the canteen, gloated to von about how i've smashed them all for lit, and then much to my chagrin when the papers came back he'd given me 17/25, and he gave von some appalling mark like 20. i shall never live that down. but after all is said and done, he knew i was good and acknowledged it. i will always remember one of my tempest essays which came back praised for intellectual honesty and unwillingness to simply mouth criticism. evans didn't like me, and "well done" would have sufficed. i think i cherish that more than all the good remarks i got on my later essays in college.

just two weekends ago i met two rj humanz kids at e2k2. they are econs majors to be (one of them was erlina yeo actually) and when i asked why they said because they had a fantastic econs teacher, and of course it turned out to be jamie reeves. who takes you for lit? geoff purvis and michael evans, they said, and no, they didn't like evans one bit. this is generally the case with most people. reeves is warm, funny, personal. he tells jokes in class, teases his students, makes fun of the administration. he's the perfect sort of person to be a form teacher - the kind who makes the whole class go to donate blood, or signs everyone up for cross-country. 2nd year we managed to get him to tell us the story of his life from a levels (he wanted to take russian because he thought there was a career in espionage) through marriage (how he met mrs reeves at a bar), and if we had another year we would have got through his forty-fourth year too. mr evans on the otherhand never talks about mrs evans or his family. once only i heard him say that his older daughter is a lizzy (bennett), but the other one is a lydia. mrs reeves comes to humanz parties and drama feste, but i can't imagine what mrs evans is like. if there's one around. is there?

he must have already been in his early fifties when i was in his class. i've always remembered him as being an old man. mr reeves looks much younger than he really is, works out several times a week, and as julia said the other day, is still hot, but mr evans always looked like he was 60 and going to disintegrate sooner. we know he was a cambridge man, after which he did a masters in singapore, where he met teachers like d.j. enright and wrote his masters thesis on philip roth. taught in a bunch of singapore schools, went back to england, came back, before ending up at raffles, eventually becoming head of department. he is very smart, thinks himself smarter, looks down on some of his colleagues, and perhaps wishes his students better than they are, only he isn't a man who wishes things. he criticises singapore long and often, in the way an expat who has lived here a long time does, but is unlikely to go back to england, whatever he might think or say. he is a vestigial sort of colonial influence and a small tyrant in the department, not unaware of his own lack of popularity with some of the other teachers, and somewhat aloof, whether because of, or self-protecting against, that fact. he knew he wasn't going to win throngs of adoring students either, that's for sure. mr reeves played football, told jokes, and was amiable and popular with the other teachers as well. evans in comparison was an old doddering cynic who made ironic jokes which only he laughs at and had the most expressively disagreeable pair of eyebrows that conveyed infinite degrees of mocking and scorn. you could hardly expect people to like him. but he isn't a bad man. and you see, he wasn't wrong often. and the longer i've been out of school the more i appreciate him.

that time that i hugged mr evans in school was when mr purvis gave me distinction for this lit 's' essay, so i went to evans's office to show off. actually no, the real reason i went was to thank him, for asking me to take lit 's'. i didn't want to be in lit 's' actually. i tried to get into history 's', wasn't offered, went and appealed, and the vice principal said, i don't see why you are so stubborn abt history 's'. it's not as if you can't do any 's' paper. mr evans has said at the s paper meeting he'll support you for lit 's' instead. the last person i wanted to do me any favours was mr evans. besides, i never expressed any interest in taking lit s, never approached him about it while some were fawning at him for it, so what makes him think he could dispense favours from on high to me and think i would be kowtowingly grateful just cos i needed an s paper? i went off right away and pounded on his office door in a teary angry fit saying why are you offering me lit s do you mean you have any confidence in me how do you know i can do this how come i don't!? he says yes. i was flabbergasted. he took out his record book and showed me my essay grades through the year. i thought about it, then i went and got my bag from the canteen and went to the lit 's' briefing. so when purvis gave me my "D" 3 months later i went and saw evans first thing and handed him my essay and gave him a hug. it wasn't so much gloating, really. it was an olive branch. i hope he knew that too.

mr evans and i don't understand each other. we like literature, that's the only thing we really have in common, the one thing that unfortunately complicated our mutual disapproval. i would have preferred to loathe him simply without distraction, like i did kenneth lee, the world history tutor, but i couldn't. i was the worst sort of student discipline-wise, and he was the most sarcastic and anal kind of teacher, but i knew that he was a darned good lit teacher, and i was good at lit, and that kept grudging respect in it. that was also all that kept us on safe terms, the love of literature and our ability at it, for literature also separated us. the last time i went back to school i said i thought i was not sure whether to go into medieval, post-colonial or narratology. he said, do postcolonial. medieval is just escapism, and narrative is too academic, but post-colonial has something to do with life. you see, that's the way we're really different, i guess. we don't have the same ideas at all about literature, and we won't ever approve of each other, but i do love mr evans afterall.