A RETIRED teacher from Ceredigion has spoken about the time he taught at a school attended by a young Barack Obama.

Obama takes the oath to become the 44th president of the United States today.

But while America and the world is looking forward, it will be a time to look back for 74-year-old Bill Messer who was a lecturer at the private Hawaii high school which the young Obama attended.

He remembers an "athletic and extremely popular" 17-year-old who was "oddly quiet," despite his articulacy.

Mr Messer said: "To see him as he is now, is to see something that was not really at all predictable."

The teacher was born in Aberaeron and educated at Ysgol Gyfun Aberaeron.

He emigrated to the South Pacific in 1967 after visiting his wife's relatives on Hawaii and began work at the fee-paying 3,750-student Punahou School on the island of Oahu.

Obama, born in 1961, was a pupil at the school from age 10 to 18 and the paths of the two men crossed in the student's final year, when Welsh-speaking Mr Messer took him for one course for his university-entrance tests.

"He was oddly quiet. To hear him now, of course, you would never believe it, but he was oddly quiet in class.

"His more regular teachers thought he was an excellent student - thoughtful and serious.

"I've spoken to them more recently and none of them had the slightest notion that the was going to turn out the way he has."

Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, was the only black youth in the class.

He lost track of his former pupil for many years until his recent political career.

"It came as a big surprise for us. I'd heard nothing of him for years and years and years, until he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention and, by God, that was something.

"It made everybody sit up and think, "Here is a guy who's coming", and so we all started taking more notice of him and realising that we'd had a gem in our midst, without thoroughly appreciating it."

The new US president still regularly returns to his Honolulu high school, most recently last month when he played basketball with friends and former school teammates.

Mr Messer added: "Everybody gives him his space. He's too precious to ruin. It's necessary to give him the kind of room he needs because he's got one hell of a future ahead of him."