MASTER AND THE SYPHON

On Monday afternoons I enable Ferretfingers at his Adult Learning Alliance allotment gardening course in a community centre’s communal garden. 

The outside tap we use for watering has not worked since the course recommenced in January, with the caretaker blaming freezing weather.  All well and good for the beds as they get rained and snowed on.  Not so good for stuff in the polytunnel.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to do something about it.  I took the watering cans into the ladies’ loos, only to discover a tiny wash-handbasin with no room to put a can under the tap.  So I removed the yard or so of hosepipe that goes between the hose-reel and the tap and took it into the ladies too.  I filled the basin and, with the tap still running, put one end as far into the water as it would go, took the other down to watering-can level, sucked hard at the end and, when the water came through, popped it into the can.  Having created a syphon I could then fill all the cans and the polytunnel plants were watered.

The tutor and other carers were quite impressed.

In fact “You are a wonder” said the South African carer.

I wondered how I knew how to do something so useful and remembered Master.

I was fortunate enough to attend Cwmifor County Primary School in Carmarthenshire when
Mr Edwards was the head teacher.  It was a two room school with roughly thirty pupils:  the Small Class or Infants for 5 to 7 year olds under Miss; the Big Class for Primary pupils under Master.  Cwmifor opened in 1880 and it had kept the tradition of calling the teachers Master and Miss. 
Our parents always referred to Mr Edwards as Master and so did we, and still do amongst ourselves.

The educational equipment, or resources, were desks, books, paper, pencils, blackboards and chalk, a monthly visit from a library van, a radio for music lessons and the ingenuity and imagination of the teachers.

As I stood filling the watering cans my mind went back to the Big Class and a lesson with two buckets and a length of rubber tube. 

A bucket filled with water was put on a desk and an empty one on a chair.  Master put the tube into the water and all the air was bubbled out.  He then put his thumb over one end and lowered it carefully into the empty bucket.

We all knew water always finds its own level (it rains a lot in west Wales)

But to see water going uphill out of the bucket on the desk and then down into the one on the chair below it … well it seemed like magic to me.

Master explained that as long as the top end of the tube was kept under the water and no air let it, and the other end of the tube below it, the syphon would work. 

That lesson must have taken place at least half a century ago and to be honest I’ve only recently found a use for a knowledge of syphons.

But it proves the old adage that no learning is ever wasted.