Margaret Williams decided when she was seven years, three months and two days old that, she was going to be a nurse when she grew up. That was the day her father tripped over a stray board and fell backwards against a nail protruding from the fence he was repairing. Her mother took one look at the blood welling through his torn shirt and fled, gagging, for the house. It was Margaret who ran for a clean cloth to press on the wound, and who, on her father's calm instructions, washed out the ragged tear in his shoulder, swabbed it with iodine, and pressed a bandage onto it.

Her father went back to his fence-building once his wound was dressed and recovered quickly from the minor injury. It was, all in all, a small incident. Still, it made a deep impression on Margaret. There had been a thrilling satisfaction in being able to help her father, and in his praise for her stoicism and good sense in dealing with the emergency. It would, she decided, be a wonderful thing to spend her life in helping the sick and injured.

Margaret never wavered from her desire to become a nurse throughout her school years, although she learned not to speak of her ambition to her mother. Mrs. Williams had been a Seymour before her marriage, and very proud of the long-ago Duke of Somerset who ornamented the farthest branches of her family tree. Her heritage meant a great deal to her, and she was determined to maintain the dignity owing to her name.

There was, Mrs. Williams informed Margaret with some disgust, no dignity to be found in a career in nursing. Changing bloody bandages and handling filthy bedpans was not a suitable occupation for a Seymour. She refused absolutely to consider allowing her only daughter to go to nursing school.

Margaret knew that she would need to fight for her choice, but had reassured herself that, when the time came, her father would have the final say and would overrule her mother's veto. It stunned her when he took her mother's side.

"I'm sorry, Margaret." He sat on the edge of Margaret's bed that evening as she wept out her disappointment and fury. "You would be a good nurse. I think your mother is way behind the times in her thinking. But she has some old-fashioned notions, and I've lived with her too long to hope that she'll ever budge on this one. It would send her into fits if you became a nurse."

He patted Margaret's shoulder, a little awkwardly. "Look, she did agree to let you go to teacher's college. Teaching is an important job, too, one where you can do as much good. Why don't you at least consider it?"

The summer of 1950 was a long and bitter one between Margaret and her mother. At the end of it, Margaret took the train to Kingston to start her teacher's training.

Margaret's first school was in a mining town in northern Ontario, and the combined Grades Three and Four class she started with was an unruly one, with a number of hardened trouble-makers in it. By the end of the first week, she was seriously considering quitting and fleeing for home. But pride held her fast. She hung grimly on through the year. Talking with other teachers helped her find the strategies she needed to maintain discipline, and she worked hard to make learning more interesting than making mischief. By the end of the year, she was carrying a few emotional scars, but she had gained firm control over her class. To her surprise, the majority of her students had learned most of the curriculum, too.

Hard as it was, the experience of that first year served her well. It established the foundations of her teaching style, as well as her reputation for being a strict teacher, one to be respected.



The next year, things went much more smoothly.

Her third class, however, held a whole new challenge. Two years older than the rest, Norman Baker slouched in the back corner of the room, his dark hair falling over brown eyes that stared at the world with bleak antagonism. At best, he was sullen and fidgety, with no interest in joining in the class work. At worst, he was fiendishly disruptive, tormenting the children around him with pokes and prods, making smart-aleck comments, and encouraging the other boys, who feared as much as they admired him, to join in harassing the weaker members of the class and taunting the teacher. His marks were abysmal.

All her best efforts went nowhere with Norman. He just gave her his fixed, oddly distant stare and sat grimly unresponsive as she tried to engage his interest in learning.

"Norman? He's been hopeless from the start." His Grade 1 teacher shrugged over her half-eaten sandwich. "He spent two years in my class and never did a thing but stare at me in that blank way he has and dig holes in his eraser with his pencil lead. He's even useless at games, as clumsy and blundering as they come. Forget trying to teach that one anything."

The blunt appraisal wasn't encouraging, but it did stir a flicker of curiosity. Norman had annoyed her more than once by holding his mutilated eraser up to his eye and squinting at her through the hole in it. She had thought it was only another way to tease. Now it struck her as odd that he would have hung onto such a pointless habit for so many years.

She left the staff room, went back to her empty classroom, and picked the eraser up from Norman's desk. There was nothing unusual about it except for the tiny hole drilled through the middle. She lifted it to her eye and looked through it.

The neat row of lettering on the top of the blackboard leapt out at her, sharper and brighter than normal. Surprised, she lowered the eraser, then lifted it again. There was no doubt about it. The pinhole was acting as a lens, like a miniature telescope.

It hit her then, an insight so sharp it startled her. She wheeled and headed in a half-run for the principal's office.

"Vision tests? No, they aren't routinely done on the students. There's no optometrist in town. Why?"

It took some talking, but Norman's parents finally agreed to make an appointment with an eye doctor in the nearest large town - but only if Margaret would accompany him. With full-time jobs and five other children to care for, neither of them had the time or energy for what they considered to be a wild-goose chase. Norman was just dumb, and a klutz. They had resigned themselves to their son's limitations a long time ago.

It surprised Margaret that Norman stepped onto the train with her early the next Saturday morning without a word of complaint. He was well-mannered and cooperative with the optometrist throughout the examination, too. Antagonism was such a habit with Norman, she hardly recognized the quiet, intense child with her today.

"He's very near-sighted, no doubt about it. Probably has been for years." The optometrist shook his head. "Poor kid, he should have had glasses long before now. With that level of myopia, I'm surprised he's managed to get as far as he has in school."

Two weeks later, Margaret looked up from her desk at the beginning of the school day to see Norman standing in front of her, his eyes alight behind the dark rims of the glasses perched on his nose.

"My glasses came!" He grinned ear to ear. "Wow, I can see everything now. I can see for miles! Did you know there's a flag on the top of the post office? The edges are ragged, and when it snaps back and forth, it looks like it's sawing the wind. I never knew that before."

He spun around to the class. Everyone was staring at him. "I got glasses now, see? And I like 'em. So don't nobody call me 'four-eyes' like you do Bennie, or I'll pound you. In fact, don't say that to Bennie any more, either, 'cause I'll pound you for that, too."

As Margaret moved to protest, he added, with a growl. "Most of all, I'll pound anyone that gives Miss Williams any trouble from now on. Got that?" He glowered around the room, gave Margaret a curt nod, and strode to his seat with his head high.

She drew in a deep breath, and made a rapid decision.

"There will be no pounding in this classroom, and no name-calling, either. What there will be, is a field trip to West Lake, to collect leaf and bark samples for our Science display." Over the hubbub of excitement, she met Norman's eyes, and smiled. It would mean some fast re-juggling of the class schedule to work in the field trip. But the world's beauty had been a hazy blur to the boy for so long, she couldn't resist giving him the chance to drink in the full, sharp-edged glory of a sunlit northern autumn.

At the end of the school year, when she handed out the report cards, the look on Norman's face as he stared at the neat column of "Good" and "Very Good" comments on his almost moved her to tears. With a whoop and a bound, the boy was gone out the classroom door, waving his report card like a victory banner.

With him went a great part of Margaret's bitterness at being forced into a teaching career. Her father had been right. There was real good to be done in teaching, even if it had not been her first choice or her own choice. She had been nurturing her resentment too long, and with shame, she realized she had been taking some of it out on her students. It was time to accept her life and commit herself to becoming the best teacher she could be.

In 1955, Margaret Williams became Mrs. George Hardacre. For a number of years, she followed her mining engineer husband from town to town across northern Canada. After their son and daughter reached school age, she returned to teaching. In 1974, George was forced by ill health into early retirement. They moved south to Milborough, Ontario. Margaret took up a position as Grade Two teacher at the elementary school there.

Despite the fact that she was getting older and suffering from some nagging minor health problems, Margaret still found teaching a constant and fascinating challenge. The pride she had inherited from her mother prevented her from slipping into easier ways, even at times when aching feet and slumping energy levels made it a serious temptation. Discipline was still firm in her classes, and she worked hard to make the learning fun.



She still found the energy, too, to give a little extra time and attention to the children who needed it to do their best.



In 1998, Margaret's husband suffered a serious attack of the rheumatoid arthritis that had plagued him for years, and was left severely handicapped. She retired from teaching to care for him full time.

It does occurs to her now and then, with a touch of irony, that she has finally achieved her childhood dream. Her days are very busy with full-time nursing. She is, as she expected, very good at it indeed.