Consequently he didn't suffer fools, which well and truly included me.
Teenagers being teenagers we often joked about his gait. We'd eat our lunch and scoff as he strode past military-like; upright and steady, his head bobbing north and south with each step. His tie like an unruly serpent, seemingly forever flung over one shoulder.
Such memories are superficial compared with the one-off, one-hour master-class in poetry he unleashed on this unsuspecting sixth-former. The poet of choice was the Victorian Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
As I did at the start of most classes, I yawned, assuming we'd chosen that poet only because we were a Catholic school.
I was dead wrong. I became a Hopkins convert within 10 minutes of the yawn. And to boot, three years later I spied him on a list of writers we were to study during my first year of English literature at university.
It became apparent he was a poet in his right - not just an inevitable inclusion on the curriculum for schools of the Papal persuasion.
Or to put it another way, a poet whose work was accepted in both the biblical and literary canons. St John's had chosen their poets - and in this case teacher - wisely.
Anyway, back to the lesson.
Mr Moriarty started reading. Among others, the poems I remember hearing were God's Grandeur, and a lofty sonnet titled The Windhover.
The latter remains an especially poignant 14 lines for me. And serendipitous. That is, it turned up as the primary poem on my end of year university exam paper. It took me a few minutes to believe my luck.
Having analysed it in the past, I knew it well. This, was an absolute gift:
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin/dapple-drawn Falcon, in his riding/Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding ... .
Anyway, back to the lesson.
Like a drunk uncle at a wedding Mr Moriarty was unusually animated. He gestured excitedly at the lines on the board and pushed us to decipher the stanzas, working in that beautiful realm where just for a moment reason was suspended; the imagination no longer a luxury.
Dust flew from the blackboard as he chalked another line. I was lost in the reverie of great verse. Hopkins' sprung rhythm leapt and popped in front of us. It was wholly infectious. It was dangerously good.
Because despite the spiritual subject matter there was something visceral about the lines. They courted the senses, which in itself was obliquely blasphemous in a Catholic classroom.
It was a dilemma for Hopkins, too. The Jesuit's ascetical obligations as a man of the cloth collided full on with the requisite vanity of a poet. Regrettably, I'm guessing it's why in shame he famously threw much of his work on a bonfire.
It was an inadvertent lesson for us then Catholic teenagers. The pursuit of temperance, and perhaps the folly thereof.
Mr Moriarty, I mean to thank you for that hour. The lines you read did for the ear what sherbet does to the tongue. It was the golden highlight in an otherwise unremarkable secondary education on my part.
You turned me - and I hope others in that classroom - into a fan of all things figurative. It's the reason I read poetry to my kids every night before lights out. One poem each. They're too young for Hopkins, but he's about to hover into their radar.
Thanks to you, my kids are already thinking in metaphor.
As we sped past Awatoto fertiliser works' puffing twin towers a few weeks back my eldest daughter said: "Look dad, a cloud factory".
I attribute that to you and that magical hour in 1989.
Even now when I catch the unmistakable whiff of pipe tobacco it reminds me of Hopkins and your refusal to fasten that serpentine tie in the wind.
Mark Story is currently on assignment in China. Next week he'll take a break from his column but will resume The Morning Story on July 23 - four days out from Hawke's Bay's National Poetry Day events on July 27.
- Mark Story is assistant editor of Hawke's Bay Today
