THE TEMPLE LITERARY READERS BOOK 2

This book was used by Margaret Gowans who entered the Claremont Teachers College in 1945 after spending a year working at a school in Nannup to be monitored to see if she should be accepted into the Teachers College. Margaret was accepted and the course went for two years. There Margaret was trained in teaching with music and art being her main strengths. During this time Margaret was living with her parents and siblings in Belmont.
On her graduation in 1946 Margaret spend several weeks nervously waiting for a posting from the Department of Education. The letter finally arrived and with her family clustered around her she was informed that she was to be teaching at the school in Roleystone. Margaret was to be the new Roleystone teacher of the infants and upper middle grades of the school. No one in the family knew where Roleystone was so they asked the policeman from next door to look it up on the map in his office, and he informed them that it was a place in the hills outside Kelmscott.
Margaret's first trip to Roleystone in 1947 was quite the adventure, she packed her case and saying goodbye to her family she boarded a bus on St. Georges Terrace in the city for the trip out to the hills. During the trip she got chatting to an older lady who was from Roleystone and told her all about the community and the lady who she would be boarding with, and how the house was close to the school. As the bus was winding further up the hill, Margaret fell in love with the scenery. The older lady then told Margaret that her stop was coming up and hoped that she would see her around the community and that Margaret was bound to meet some of her children. She did, as that lady was the mother of her future husband, Vern Bettenay.
Margaret was first billeted with a Mrs. Minnie Newman for four or five months. She was a very feisty, quite elderly lady, quite fearsome in a lot of ways, she was a very good conversationalist. She had offered to take the new teacher as a public service, because the Education Department at that time was putting it to a community that unless someone was willing to board the teachers then they simply wouldnt put a person into a position until they found a home for them. Unfortunately Mrs Newman began to be quite worried about having to provide a meal for Margaret each night , so unbeknownst to Margaret she arranged for her niece to take over the chore of boarding her, so Margaret moved to one of the Bettenay families who were living in Roleystone at the time. Margaret moved in with Sydney and Wilfred Bettenay and their four children who were Vern Bettenay's cousins.
Margaret then joined the local theatre group known as the Choral and Dramatic Group and also the youth club
Margaret started teaching the upper and lower infants grade 1 and grade 2. It was an interesting situation because the school was extremely small; it was what they called, the second Roleystone School, it was situated on Brookton Highway, and the Infants room was actually a very roughly renovated outside veranda, with louvre windows which got very hot in summer and the louvre windows didnt open. There were about twenty nine children in that classroom , double rows of desks, you could hardly move between them, and in the winter time it was freezing cold. There was a beautiful little pot belly stove in the corner which was lit every day for the children's wet clothes to be put beside.
There was an upper and lower infants. The upper ones had come in at the beginning of the year in February, and there was a second intake in June, so that you actually had two grades of infants. This meant lessons had to be designed so everyone could join in at some level.
Also at the school was the headmaster Mr Robert Dalby, who occupied the room next door, and he had all the rest of the senior classes, from grade three onwards. In all there were around 50-60 students at the school with two teachers looking after them.
Margaret met her future husband within a week of arriving when she received a knock on the door and this very presentable young man in a rather beautiful, luxurious car introduced himself as being Vern Bettenay, and he thought Margaret should go down and meet the locals, and would she like to go with him to the local youth club.. The car was full of people as she remembered and she set off with this car full of people down to the Youth Club, to be introduced to the district at the time.
The Youth Club was a gathering of all the young people around the area with organised activities there, speaker and sports, including badminton.