Maurice Gartshore's story about The Grapes of Wrath

As a young teacher struggling to find myself, I rifled the shelves of the bookstore for a text which would grip both me and my pupils. When I read The Grapes of Wrath, I loved it, and finding almost a complete set (a minor miracle!) I crossed my fingers and set to. There's nothing worse as a teacher than to have something you love die before you in silence but I needn't have worried: from the first descriptions of the dying crops through the emotional wringer of the characters' lives, they loved it. And you know, with that involvement I began to think that I might just be a bit of a teacher after all.

As I read there would be an unusual silence, to be ripped apart by a cacophony of tongues eager to chip in their sixpence when it came to discussion. Every aspect of the human experience was there in Steinbeck's themes: Man's inhumanity to Man; the power of The Family; the dignity that rage against injustice brings.

As they'd leave the room, they'd still be talking and I knew that something important had happened. I'd given them something, and something of which I felt proud. I was excited for the first time at the possibility that Sarah there, or Shona, whose fathers were lawyers or oilmen, were realising for the first time that their cosy lives could not shelter them from being a part of a bigger family - the family of Man, in all its wonderful madness. I became proud to be a teacher for I realised how important the job was.
I look back fondly to those moments in Aboyne and hope that for one or two at least, seeing The Grapes of Wrath on a shelf will remind them of the power of the book to shape lives.