Apricot Press

Shorthand

By Anne Mac Darby-Beck

Mrs. Dunne was beautiful and bad-tempered, her face creased with a permanent scowl.  If she had taught us in the Convent, she would have terrified us.  But we were college students; she couldn’t touch us.  Maybe that was the cause of her frustration.  Still, she was the only teacher we did any homework for.  She taught us shorthand.

            After the Convent, college was a breeze.  We were giddy with the drug of freedom.  We skipped classes for no good reason, just because we could.  We went for walks, sat smoking and drinking cups of tea in the canteen, went downtown window shopping.  During that year I attended maths class the sum total of four times.

            As our final exams loomed, we began to get worried.  Methods of cheating were discussed.  But cheating wasn’t possible for the shorthand exam.  Mrs. Dunne would read a long piece which we would take down in shorthand and translate back into longhand.  We would only be allowed a few small mistakes.

            I came out of the exam feeling pretty confident.  We sat down together on the steps at the front door of the College to conduct the post-mortem.  We went over each line of the piece, nodding or cursing.

            ‘…and the next line went…,’ said the Class Expert .

Everyone nodded in agreement, except me.

            ‘But .., but …,’ I stammered, ‘didn’t it go…’

They shook their heads.  My mouth fell open.  I’d gotten a whole line wrong.  Instant failure.  I couldn’t understand it.  In my head I could hear Mrs. Dunne’s voice as she read the piece.  But no, the others were in agreement.  They couldn’t all be wrong.

            Two days later Mrs. Dunne came into our room looking crosser than ever.  I wondered if anyone else had failed the exam as well as me.  She placed her books on the table and sat down, knitting her hands together.  We held our collective breaths, my heart pounding in my ears.  Finally, she spoke.

            ‘I regret to say,’ she said, ‘that only one person passed the exam.’

We gasped and looked at each other for confirmation of what we had just heard.  I felt a little relieved.  If everyone bar one had failed, then I wouldn’t be alone in feeling deflated.

            ‘And that was you.’

She was looking at me.  So was everyone else, their mouths open.  I stared back at her, stunned.  Surely she was making some mistake.  But Mrs. Dunne didn’t make mistakes.  I heard little of what she said next about the results being so bad the college had decided to allow the class to take the exam again.

‘You are all to be here at 9.00am sharp in the morning,’ Mrs. Dunne paused, ‘except, of course, for the only person who passed.’

I was almost embarrassed.

            For the first time in my life, I’d beaten everyone to first place and proved, to myself at least, that majorities aren’t always right.