After Peter Seale's operation, the one from which he wouldn't recover, his sons sat beside his hospital bed, watching over a father whose mind seemed adrift.

It wasn't until the boys were debating whether a nurse's use of the phrase "lay down" was grammatically correct that Peter came to life.

"My father suddenly sat up, shook his head and said, 'No, it wasn't,' " says son Nigel.

Trust an English teacher, a grammarian, a lover of literature, to take the lay versus lie rule that seriously.

Peter Seale's fans gathered in Oak Bay's Windsor Park on Sunday to tell tales of a man variously portrayed as an ardent sportsman, a cultivated, dapper dandy with a roguish streak, a Quaker and, most of all, one of those all-too-rare teachers to whom former students invariably refer as "the best I ever had."

It was a reminder, as the kids get ready to troop back to school, of how one good teacher can change a child's life.

Peter Seale was born in 1923 to a well-to-do family in Dublin. His father owned a high-end haberdashery, which Peter was expected to take over. Instead, he decided to became a tobacco farmer in Rhodesia, where he took his equally well-bred wife, Patricia, and one-year-old Nigel in 1951. They lived in a tent, then a shack with a tin roof. "This was a guy who came from a mansion, with staff," Nigel says. Patricia, who didn't like the way blacks were treated in Rhodesia, wasn't happy. Find a new country, she told Peter.

So he looked at a map of the world — or at least its pink bits — and sought out a place where they A) welcomed Irish immigrants, B) played rugby and C) played cricket. The Seales moved to Victoria in 1953.

Peter was one of the original Castaway cricketers, president of the Vancouver Island rugby union, an actor in the Langham Court Theatre. "The best-dressed man at any event was Peter Seale," says Nigel. The neighbours might be dressed for mowing the lawn, but Peter would sport a silk cravat.

He taught first at St. Michaels University School, then at Gordon Head, Frank Hobbs, Brentwood College and — for decades — Central Junior High.

I missed his obituary this month, learned of his death through a spate of unsolicited e-mails from former students. "A kind man with fierce intelligence," wrote Wendy Brooks, who attended Central. "He made you feel you could be the best," said another Central alumnus.

Victoria's Julie Flatt remembered Seale's way of dealing with miscreants: "He would beckon the misbehaving student up to his desk, pull open the top drawer and pull out a small box. 'This is what remains of the last person who disrupted my class," he would whisper as he revealed the contents; a chicken bone and a wad of gum. Worked like a charm!"

"He was by far the most important teacher I had in my life, and I can't believe he won't be around next time I need him to tell me I'm right about some problem to do with grammar," wrote author Susan Musgrave from Haida Gwaii.

Musgrave's memoir You're In Canada Now describes how her first writings — "horse stories with tragic endings" — were influenced by her Grade 4 teacher: "I set my tale in Ireland and all my characters spoke with a brogue — because my teacher, Peter Seale, was Irish, and handsome, and I was secretly in love with him. I wrote epics for him, because I just knew he had nothing better to do in his life than go home after school and read my tragedies while his wife peeled potatoes. I admired him, too, because he was a rebel: he didn't 'follow the curriculum' as some parents complained, and he let me spend the whole day writing my compositions because, he said, 'that's what you're good at.' "

I met Peter when I spoke to one of Christine Kirchner's writing classes at Camosun College a couple of years ago. Had my ego pleasantly inflated by this big, keenly engaged old guy at the back — right up until I realized who he was. After that I felt like a fraud, trying to tell Seale, who had forgotten more than I will ever know, how to write. What stood out was that there he was, in his 80s, still eager to learn.

Makes you wish that kind of eagerness could be found in every classroom. The Peter Seales of the world, teachers who can find the gold within their students, are themselves to be treasured.

jknox@tc.canwest.com