Avia Collinder, Gleaner Writer

Hazel Patterson - Photos by Colin Hamilton/Freelance Photographer

Personality is one of those intangibles which are worth their weight in gold. For 90-year-old Hazel Pearl Patterson, her ability to laugh at herself and to stick to deeply held principles have created a personality which, perhaps, has delivered to her more value than any other skill acquired or course of study pursued.

Hazel Pearl was laughing when recalling for Outlook her hard childhood experiences, which were not the happiest.

The teacher, as a toddler, learnt to creep in a governor's mansion in St Andrew, where her mother worked as housekeeper.

As a child she was trained as the gardener and "given every gift a child could want, but never sent to school".

But, her experiences bred in her the determination to defy the low expectations of those around her and succeed at any task placed before her.

On July 4, 2002, Hazel Pearl Patterson was recognised by the Jamaica Teachers' Association for 60 years of service to education, collecting the Golden Torch Award for the feat. On March 10, 2008, she was also fêted by Dallas All-Age School, St Andrew, for 30 years as principal of the school.

Raised in governor's house

Hazel was raised in the governor's house in pre-independence times, and was the gardener until she was 11 years old, when her mother decided that she must go to school.

Receiving no encouragement from her mother's employers she persevered, trying several schools until she began to teach herself.

"My mother was an Alpha girl, very talented but she got pregnant and had to run away and have me."

Her mother got work in the governors mansion and took the baby to work with her.

"It was not a happy childhood, not altogether, but I liked to work. I never had a child to play with and was never handed a book. I cleaned the library, cleaned the house and worked in the garden. I wanted to read those books in the library."

So her mother, she said, sent her to school behind her employer's back.

"When they came back from holidays and saw that I was attending school, they did not say a thing."

Continuously teaching math

Hazel Patterson went to school in Mavis Bank, St Andrew, where she said, "I did not make fun with the mathematics." She would stay awake late at nights studying, and at age 14 was able to pass her first Jamaica Local Examination, followed by the second level of this examination.

At age 90, the woman who has been commended for many years of service to education is the veteran teacher who has taught at 10 schools, including Dallas All-Age. "Hundreds of teachers have passed through my hands," she today boasts.

Long journey to papine

Patterson laughs, relating how she walked from Dallas in north St Andrew to the University Hospital of the West Indies, in Papine, to have her first child, and of other difficult times in Dallas.

Starting with 37 students at Dallas All-Age and a structure that was really a kitchen, Patterson expanded the school into an envied institution, persuading the Ministry of Education, eventually, to build a new school to hold the expanding flock.

She recalls, "There was only one girl who could write two sentences. But, I liked those challenges. I got 100 per cent support from the Ministry of Education, which set up a library, sent over a nurse and sent me some young teachers. They had just come out of the training college, but it did not matter."

Soon, her students were doing the Jamaica Local as well as the Common Entrance examinations. "I walked to Papine every examination day (to oversee the students' welfare). Those children were mine. They are mine forever."

Still teaches class

The retired principal who ran the Hazel Patterson Preparatory School after retirement, and who still holds evening classes for mathematics students, is today as spry and merry at 90 as some would wish to be in their younger years.

Hazel Pearl is an avid gardener who makes her daily routines, including service to others, a labour of love, refusing to be weighed down by the bitterness of the past.

"I am like this, I love to laugh," Hazel states.

Both her children are teachers, Audrey - almost born on the roads of Dallas and now living in the United States, and Philip, who is at Moneague College in St Ann.

Her four grandchildren, she says, include a lawyer and a medical student.

Hazel smiles. She has come a long way from the governor's backyard.