Quite a mouthful
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 20, 2013

The scariest teeth I’ve known belonged to a Grade 7 teacher called Mr Campbell. They dominated his face in the same way as Mister Ed’s – horsey and over-sized. In fearsome combination with his gravelly baritone, (which exploded like a sonic boom when angry), choirmaster Campbell and his big choppers are all I remember about singing lessons.

To my four-foot nothing, his six-foot something appeared gargantuan. He strode around the music room on his leg-stilts with his head cocked to one side, straining to indentify which one of us was out of tune. My thin soprano would peter out to a squeak as soon as Mr Campbell leaned over and put his ear to my mouth. Unimpressed, he would restore himself to his full height and grimace before moving on to find the owner of the flat notes.

Memories of his gritted teeth came flooding back last week as the kids and I were shedding our beach sand under the open air shower at North Cott .

There they sat: the top row of a set of dentures, sunning themselves on the retaining wall. My two-year-old daughter pounced on them thinking they were an exotic shell to put in her bucket. Five year old son was more cautious: “Mum, did that thing really come from the sea?” Twelve year old son’s disgust turned to horror when his sister shouted: “Can the teef come home with us?” and jammed those dentures sideways into her mouth, using both her hands to try to make them fit.

“Spit them out!” I yelled.

She did, and they landed upside down in the shower, the plastic palate filling up with a little puddle.  

I gingerly collected those disembodied cuspids, washed them off and set them back in their sunny spot on the retaining wall to await their owner. But after ten minutes, it was clear no-one was missing their front teeth enough to consider them lost.

That encounter with the contents of someone else’s mouth got me thinking about my husband’s grandfather, (unforgettably named Fred Smith). He was the dentist in Collie for forty years. His pet hate was going to parties and having guests whip out their wet dentures to show him where they were chafing. He got his own back pinning patients to the dentist’s chair with his famously giant belly and they got to hear the gurglings of what he’d had for lunch.

Fred Smith flung all the rotten teeth he extracted out the back door of his surgery into his vegie patch. Aunty Lin, Fred’s youngest daughter, delighted in digging them up and playing knucklebones with her gruesome treasures.

It’s rare to see shocking teeth these days. Modern dentistry has given us whiteners and veneers, braces, crowns and caps – all kinds of costumes to disguise the ugliness within our mouths. But historians are fascinated with bad teeth. Josephine Bonaparte’s smile was said to resemble a ‘mouthful of cloves.’ One scholar reported her teeth ‘looked like an oyster lease at low tide.’  

Queen Elizabeth I was renowned for her blackened teeth – being addicted to sweets and fearful of the primitive dentistry of the day. For centuries, portraits of the nobility only showed a tight smile: it was left to the lower classes to display their poor breeding with a cheerfully jagged grin. By the 1800’s, the Georgians had realised a ‘fine set of snappers’ was needed for genteel-sounding speech and to show off the ‘ornaments of the mouth.’ A well-kept toothy smile was obvious proof of prosperity.

In our house, 5 year old son is currently milking the gap in his pegs for all it’s worth. A few weekends back on a blustery day, his boogie board flipped up and smacked him in the mouth, dislodging his prized front tooth in a pool of blood on the sand. The tooth fairy left a comforting, over-generous fiver and a note: “You got off lightly little man, your dad had his front teeth knocked out at Uni when a young Troy Buswell unintentionally slammed a door in his face.”  

My mother was a stickler for my six-monthly dental visits when I was a child. Our dentist, Mr Hodby, had scary implements but gentle hands. I spent hours of my childhood staring at his ceiling, my body rigid with fear, hands clenched in my lap. I can still picture the swirly patterns of the fibrous cement panels overhead. Like a proper lady on honeymoon, that ceiling is all I remember.

Thanks to Mum, my teeth are still my best feature. In my late 20’s, as I was set free from Mr Hodby’s chair one day and was walking back to my car, my old music teacher Mr Campbell came striding towards me. He’d shrunk – his legs were no longer stilts. As we passed each other, I wondered “What about those scarily big teeth?” So I flashed him a confident smile in the hope he’d remember me from choir 1979, front row, squeaky soprano. He smiled back at me, politely, not a hint of recognition, revealing a row of neat white teeth, no bigger than mine. Quite a nice smile, actually. And away he went.