Wednesday, November 21, 2018
To the Family of Jean Gittins:
Please accept my condolences. I am so sorry for your loss. "Mrs. Gittins" taught me history and altered my understanding of time. I can't tell you in what year she did this, not with any certainty, as I haven't a historian's mind, and am inclined to create chronologies suited to my particular purposes. But it would have been around 1973 or 1974. She was telling us about the industrial revolution in England, and to make our understanding more vivid she gave us excerpts from the writings of nineteenth century witnesses to the working conditions of children in coal mines. I was about thirteen years old. Suddenly, History did not reside in a textbook. Reading the personal account , in an outdated English, set in front of me on that ordinary school day, I understood with a visceral clarity that the past had once been the present, and my understanding of time shifted and cracked open. I will always be grateful to Mrs. Gittins for that moment of revelation, just as I am grateful for her passionate concern about the future of our planet, which she conveyed by entreating us not to buy and eat strawberries in winter, explaining, with an ardour I can still feel reverberating in my ear, the dire consequences of burning vast quantities of fossil fuel to allow for the obscene luxury of strawberries in winter. Mrs Gittins often accompanies me down the aisles of grocery stores and guides my hand. It was a privilege of the best sort to have her as a teacher.
Warmly,
Martha Baillie
