‘I’m still not over the shock of seeing my PE teacher in his swimmers’

It’s a memory that will never fade: the image of my PE teacher trying to have a normal conversation with me as he stood in his swimmers at the local pool. Until then I believed all teachers lived at school, writes Frances Whiting.

Teachers don’t exist outside of the classroom, do they?

Remember when you were a child, and you unexpectedly came across one of your teachers not in a school situation?

It was so shocking wasn’t it? So discombobulating?

I mean, there you’d be, with your mum in the frozen goods section at your local supermarket begging for a Sunnyboy, and suddenly there was Miss Peters, OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM. WITH A MAN. Or a child that apparently was hers. Or a friend. In any case, it made no sense because right up until that moment, you pretty much thought she lived at school.

I say this as a grown woman who is still not quite over the shock of seeing Mr Peterson, our P.E. teacher, in his swimmers at the local pool.

Nothing prepares you for seeing your school teacher at the local swimming pool.

I remember he tried to have some sort of normal conversation with me, while I furiously looked at the ground, watching my banana Paddle Pop slowly dripping on to the cement.

Anyway, I ask this because believing that your teachers live at school is not an uncommon childhood belief, and yesterday my friend Ainslie told me about another.

Ainslie went through her entire childhood believing that her friend Sylvie’s father, Mike Bowers, was the tooth fairy. This was because Sylvie had whispered theatrically – and six-year-old girls know no other way to whisper – to her at school one morning, “I know who the tooth fairy is” … and Ainslie whispered back theatrically, “Who?” And her friend whispered back, “It’s. My. Father. I. Saw. Him.”

Well, that was it, from that moment on, Ainslie watched Mike Bowers like a hawk, on the lookout for any tooth fairy-like giveaways.

“Like what?” I asked. “Oh, you know, teeth falling out of his pockets,” she answered … “that sort of thing.”

The thing is, this isn’t as ridiculous as it now sounds because kids believe – and are told – all sorts of crazy things.

I’m not talking about the usual myths of childhood, not the garden varieties like: If you eat the seeds of a fruit, a gigantic fruit tree will grow inside you, and the branches will come out of your ears. No, I’m talking about very specific beliefs that children hold, most often very particular to their own family.

Hello - is there anyone in there?

Beliefs like the one my friend Simon held for far too many years, well into adulthood, that a man sat in a little box behind the ATM machine and gave out the money.

Simon believed this because this is what his older brothers told him.

Simon only found out it was untrue when, as a young man on a date, the ATM swallowed his would-be girlfriend’s card, he said: “Don’t worry I’ll just nip around the back and ask the man inside the machine to give it back.”

But I think my favourite belief belongs to my friend Julia, who took the parental adage, “When you grow up, you can be anything you want to be” at their word, and spent her early tweens “literally wondering why I still wasn’t a parrot”.

What about you? Are there any myths/fanciful stories/outright lies you believed as a child that you know not to be true? I’d love to hear them.

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