04 Village Teacher

by Jack Sheffield

The Ashes of Archibald Pike

  Miss Barrington-Huntley, chair of the Education Committee, will be our official guest for the opening of the school extension on Saturday, 8 November. Miss Evans has offered to prepare a time capsule to be inserted in the new wall. The school choir will be singing at the Remembrance Day service at St Mary’s Church on Sunday, 9 November.

  Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:

  Thursday, 6 November 1980

  ‘LET’S HAVE A time capsule!’ exclaimed Anne.

  It was four o’clock on Thursday, 6 November, and we were enjoying a welcome cup of tea in the staff-room prior to our impromptu staff meeting to discuss the official opening of the school extension.

  Jo looked up from the article ‘Domestic science for infants’ in her Child Education magazine. ‘Did you say time capsule?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne. ‘The builder said it’s all the rage and he’s left a space in the cavity wall behind where the official plaque is to be mounted.’

  Vera sipped her tea thoughtfully. ‘What a good idea,’ she said. ‘It could be a record of the life of Ragley School.’

  ‘That’s right, Vera,’ agreed Sally. ‘We could get the children involved.’

  ‘With writing and drawings,’ added Jo, warming to the idea.

  ‘And a school photograph,’ said Vera.

  ‘Then let Miss You-Know-Who put it in the cavity space at the opening ceremony,’ said Anne, ‘and my John can screw the plaque on the wall.’

  Everyone seemed to be talking at once. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I asked, ‘where are we going to get a time capsule?’

  There was silence.

  Suddenly Vera jumped up. ‘I know just the person,’ she said, and hurried out to the telephone in the office.

  Three miles away in the Easington Progressive Working Men’s Club, Big Dave Robinson and his cousin Little Malcolm each put a fifty-pence piece into the red plastic bucket on the trestle table in the seedy, smoke-filled entrance hall. The label on the side of the bucket read IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD PIKE.

  The club was a ramshackle building that had once been a bottling factory on the outskirts of Easington, and Big Dave and Little Malcolm went there once a fortnight to drink John Smith’s bitter instead of their usual Tetley’s. However, the main attraction for Big Dave was that it was a ‘men only’ club so Little Malcolm’s girlfriend, Dorothy Humpleby, couldn’t come with them. The only women allowed in were the ones who worked there.

  Behind the table sat the chain-smoking man-and-wife team who comprised the club’s entire social committee; namely, Caesar and Lilly Trickey. They were both in their sixties and had been members for as long as they could remember.

  ‘Thanks, lads,’ said Lilly. ‘ ’E were salt o’ the earth were Archie. Been a T’anic member for nigh on forty years.’ The club had been opened on the day the Titanic sank on 15 April 1912 and, in consequence, had been nicknamed the T’anic ever since.

  ‘So tell us, Lilly, what ’appened to old Archie?’ asked Big Dave. It was pointless asking Caesar a question because Lilly always answered for him.

  ‘Well, ah’ll tell y’summat f ’nowt,’ said Lilly: ‘ ’e ’ad a wonderful death.’

  ‘ ’Ow come?’ asked Big Dave.

  ‘ ’E came in last Friday … an’ ’Arry, with ’is tin leg, were taking t’money on t’raffle.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Big Dave.

  ‘ ’E sat down with ’is pint o’ John Smith’s an’ ’is ticket an’ ’ad a funny turn.’

  ‘A funny turn?’ echoed Caesar.

  ‘Shurrup!’ said Lilly. ‘Ah’m telling t’tale.’

  ‘Sorry, luv,’ mumbled Caesar apologetically.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lilly. ‘ ’Arry came over, with ’is tin leg, an’ said that Archie ’ad been tekken badly,’ she took a puff on her cigarette, ‘… in fact, very badly.’

  ‘Oh ’eck,’ said Little Malcolm.

  ‘An’ when ah went t’look ah saw ’e ’ad a pint in one ’and an’ a winning ticket in t’other.’

  ‘A winning raffle ticket!’ exclaimed Big Dave.

  ‘Yes … an’ ’e were dead as a doornail,’ said Lilly.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ said Big Dave.

  ‘Y’reight there, Dave,’ agreed Little Malcolm.

  ‘It were a shock, ah can tell you,’ said Lilly.

  ‘Fancy that … a dead body … So what did y’do?’ asked Big Dave.

  ‘All we could do, Dave.’ Lilly took a last puff of her cigarette and lit another from its glowing tip. ‘We drew t’raffle again an’ Betty behind t’bar were thrilled. She won six free snooker lessons.’

  Vera parked her spotless Austin A40 in Easington, outside a distinctive Victorian red-brick house. The elegant hand-painted sign over the porch read ‘S. B. Flagstaff, Funeral Director’. The door sported a new coat of jet-black gloss and the brass door knocker, handle and letterbox gleamed after its weekly polish.

  Vera rang the bell and walked in. A faint smell of Brasso, wood glue and linseed oil hung in the still air of a reception area that resembled a Dickensian drawing room. Appropriately, looking like a character from Nicholas Nickleby, a plump, grey-haired man in his sixties wearing a black three-piece suit walked into the room. Septimus Bernard Flagstaff, known as Bernie to his friends, was president of the Ragley and Morton Stag Beetle Society and famous for his collection of pressed flowers.

  He took his large brass timepiece from the pocket of his waistcoat and nodded in satisfaction. ‘You’re a punctual lady, Miss Evans. Ah’ve always said punctuality comes afore godliness.’ He raised his voice. ‘Isn’t that right, Douglas?’

  Our caretaker’s son, Duggie Smith, appeared from the back room in a haze of cigar smoke. He looked flustered as he secreted a half-smoked Castella behind his left ear. Fortunately his Boomtown Rats hairstyle hid the evidence.

  ‘Y’reight there, Mr Flagstaff,’ agreed Duggie: ‘punctuality comes afore, er … what y’said.’

  Septimus nodded in satisfaction. ‘Can you get one of t’spare urns, please, Douglas?’ He turned to Vera. ‘This time-capsule idea you mentioned on t’telephone sounds very interesting, Miss Evans. Ah presume it’s one o’ your charitable notions, no doubt.’ It appeared Septimus was a secret admirer. ‘You’re a very fine lady, Miss Evans, if ah may be so bold.’

  ‘She certainly is, Mr Flagstaff,’ said Duggie from the back room. He selected one of the urns from the dark oak cupboard and placed the large screw-top metal cylindrical canister on the counter. It looked like an outsize vacuum flask.

  ‘Here y’are, then, Miss Evans,’ said Septimus.

  ‘Thank you very much indeed, Septimus,’ said Vera. ‘This will be perfect.’

  ‘We are ’ere t’serve, Miss Evans,’ he said with a bow as he opened the door for Vera.

  On Friday morning when I drove into the school car park, a familiar Austin A40 pulled up next to me. Vera climbed out of the passenger seat and a very tense-looking Joseph drove off quickly.

  ‘Hello, Vera,’ I said. ‘Joseph is in a hurry.’

  ‘He’s got Archibald’s funeral this morning and it’s been a bit hectic for him. The poor man had no family, you see … No wonder he’s stressed.’

  ‘Archibald?’

  ‘Archibald Pike, Mr Sheffield,’ said Vera, ‘the church bellringer.’

  We walked into school and, in the staff-room, Anne was waiting for us. ‘Hello, Vera. What’s happening about the time capsule?’

  ‘It’s at the vicarage, Anne,’ said Vera, taking four cardboard tubes from her bag, ‘and these fit in nicely. I made them last night. There’s one for each class to fill. Give them back to me later today and I’ll pack up the capsule neatly this evening and bring it in tomorrow.’ Vera had clearly worked it all out. We all took our tubes as if we were at the start of a relay race.

  ‘Well done, Vera,’ I said, relieved it was one job less for me to do.

  ‘You’re an angel,’ said Anne.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Sally. />
  ‘Thanks, Vera,’ said Jo, peering through hers as if it were a telescope.

  By lunchtime we handed our cardboard tubes to Vera. All were filled with photographs, writing and drawings. However, a few of the sentences written by Anne’s children about friends and family had to be rejected for more appropriate ones, including:

  My mummy is a lollipop lady. She makes traffic jams.

  My mummy is lovely and wears black underwear.

  My mummy has a tall voice. My daddy is the second boss of our house.

  Meanwhile, Vera had other things on her mind. She held up the front page of her Daily Telegraph. ‘He’s very handsome, don’t you think?’ said Vera. ‘I’m sure Margaret will like him.’

  Under the headline ‘Landslide win for Reagan’ was a photograph of the ex-movie star Ronald Reagan, who had become President of the USA and was heading for the White House. The Republicans had swept cowboy Ronnie and his running mate, George Bush, into power and control of the Senate.

  Sally looked up from her magazine. ‘Do you realize,’ she said, ‘that a man who boasts never to have read a book in his life is now the most powerful man on earth?’

  ‘I heard he’d read the Bible,’ said Jo, putting down her Rules of Netball on the coffee-table.

  ‘Oh well, that’s all right, then,’ said Vera.

  I peered over Vera’s shoulder. ‘It says here that his mind is clear of intellectual clutter and at sixty-nine he’s the oldest man ever to be inaugurated as US President,’ I added.

  ‘Hmmm … I still think Margaret will like his rugged good looks,’ said Vera.

  Sally couldn’t think of a polite answer and returned to her November 1980 issue of Cosmopolitan to consider the merits of two of her favourite men. Did she prefer Richard Gere, the ‘classically sexy man’, or Sting, ‘the cool hero in today’s laid-back liberated times’? It was a tough choice and one thing was for sure: cowboy Ronnie didn’t get a look-in.

  During afternoon school, I called into Jo’s classroom to borrow her copy of Stig of the Dump to read to my class. Large grey waterproof plastic cloths covered each table top, and children, wearing outsize back-to-front shirts to protect their clothes, were painting with poster colours and large brushes on A3 paper.

  ‘Looks interesting,’ I said. Unlike Sally and Anne, teaching art was not one of Jo’s strong subjects.

  ‘We’re doing Picasso,’ whispered Jo, ‘so if the children’s paintings don’t turn out right, nobody will know!’

  However, this indisputable logic was quickly forgotten when a heated argument broke out on a nearby table. ‘Give us a paintbrush, Vicky,’ shouted Terry Earnshaw to Victoria Alice Dudley-Palmer, Class 2’s paintbrush monitor.

  Victoria Alice looked in dismay at her ungrammatical friend. ‘No, Terry, please give me a paintbrush,’ she said with great emphasis.

  Terry looked puzzled. ‘But you’ve already got one.’

  I hurried to my classroom secretly relieved I had the ten- and eleven-year-olds to teach.

  When the bell rang for the end of school, all was ready for the big day. The small extension to the school entrance hall had been completed and a large audience of parents, children and villagers was expected on Saturday afternoon at the grand opening. Miss Barrington-Huntley had confirmed she would be our official guest, and Sue Phillips, our PTA chairman, had rushed into Coney Street in York before her late shift at York Hospital to buy a new dress from Leak & Thorpe. Vera had telephoned the local reporter at the Easington Herald & Pioneer to confirm the event would be photographed and recorded for posterity.

  Joseph looked harassed when he came to collect Vera, so she sat him down in the staff-room and gave him a cup of her herbal tea.

  ‘How did the funeral go, Joseph?’ I asked when I walked in.

  ‘I’ve arranged for his ashes to be scattered at the foot of the bell tower on Sunday after the Remembrance Day service. Sadly, because he had no family, it will be just his fellow bellringers.’

  ‘So who was Archibald Pike?’ I asked.

  Vera gave me that look I knew so well and I settled down in a chair to hear about the bellringer of Ragley and Morton.

  Archibald and his fellow campanologists had taken their job very seriously. Every Wednesday was practice night and for two hours Archibald had put them through their paces. St Mary’s Church had what bellringers would call a ‘ring’ of six bells, with a tenor in E that weighed the best part of a ton. Cast long ago by Taylor’s of Loughborough and hung above the west end of the church, they had marked many great occasions including the end of the World Wars in 1918 and 1945. Also, it was a tradition in the village that the sonorous tenor bell would toll alone to mark the passing of a villager, with one toll for every year of the deceased’s life. In Archibald’s case there were eighty-eight.

  Once each month, Archibald would climb the seventy-six stone steps to the ringing chamber in the tower, where the air was dusty and a colony of pipistrelle bats had made their home. He would clamber up through the trapdoor and lean against the bells, splashed white with owl droppings. Then he would look down at the villages of Ragley and Morton, laid out below him in perfect miniature, and, in his private space, he would watch the world go by.

  Archibald’s routine was always the same. The bell ropes, each one with a fluffy end tricked out in red, white and blue stripes, were tied off neatly with a half-hitch. He would start with the treble bell until it rolled over, past the vertical, and swung round. Then the next five ropes would snake down and fly up to the ceiling through the pulley holes. He would yell ‘One, two, three, four, five, six,’ keeping the rhythm even. Only once, in 1963, when his braces snapped and his trousers fell round his ankles, was Archibald’s perfectly synchronized sequence ever disturbed.

  When Joseph and Vera finally drove off, I sat down at my desk in the office and reflected on the interesting life of a man I had never known.

  An hour later I needed a hot drink and a change of scenery so I drove out of school and pulled up outside Nora’s Coffee Shop in the High Street. When I walked in, Kate Bush was singing ‘Babooshka’ on the old red and chrome juke-box. Dorothy Humpleby, the twenty-four-year-old, peroxide blonde, five-foot-eleven-inch coffee-shop assistant and would-be model, was leaning on the counter and filing her nails. She was dressed in a skin-tight white polo-neck sweater, plush velvet hotpants, a wide white belt and her favourite bright-red, high-heeled, Wonder Woman boots, complete with white vertical stripes made from insulation tape.

  ‘Ah love Kate Bush,’ said Dorothy, swaying to the music, ‘an’ she wears this black bodysuit when she’s singing it,’ she added, a dreamy look in her eyes. ‘It’s reight good.’

  On the other side of the counter, her boyfriend, the five-foot-four-inch bin man Little Malcolm Robinson, looked up at Dorothy like a lovesick puppy. As he stared over the plate of slightly stale, and aptly named, rock buns, he wondered why he had an ache in his stomach. It was obviously indigestion but he had read in the Reveille that he might be in love.

  ‘What’s it t’be, Malcolm?’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Two mugs o’ tea, please, Dorothy,’ said Little Malcolm, ‘an’ ah’ve got summat f ’you,’ he added in a whisper. He passed a small box over the counter.

  ‘Come on, laughing boy, ’urry up wi’ them teas,’ shouted Big Dave from a nearby table, and gave Little Malcolm his big-girl’s-blouse look.

  Malcolm reeled under the gaze but recovered quickly and pressed on. ‘Woman in t’chemist said it were f ’gorgeous, sexy young women … an’ ah thought o’ you, Dorothy.’

  ‘Oooh, Malcolm, ah love it when y’romantic.’

  As Malcolm began to heap three spoonfuls of sugar into each mug, the owner, Nora Pratt, looked up from the frothy coffee machine. Forty-three-year-old Nora was the president of the Ragley Amateur Dramatic Society and her complete inability to pronounce the letter ‘R’ had not prevented her from always getting the star part in the annual pantomime.

  ‘Look, Nora,’ said Dorothy. ‘M
alcolm’s bought me some Charlie perfume spray by Revlon.’

  ‘It’s a weally lovely fwagwence,’ said Nora knowingly. The short, stocky Nora considered herself to be an authority on most things.

  Little Malcolm picked up his two mugs of tea. ‘ ’Ello, Mr Sheffield,’ he said. ‘Ah’ve jus’seen Duggie. ’E says ’is boss fancies Miss Evans.’

  ‘Does he?’ I said.

  ‘ ’E’s a strange man is Duggie’s boss, Mr Sheffield,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Oh, why’s that, Dorothy?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s psychic ’cause ’e’s seventh child of a seventh child, so Mrs Ackroyd says, an’ she knows about these things. She told me ’e were born with super-unnatural powers,’ said Dorothy. ‘He comes in wi’ Duggie sometimes an’ once ’e gave me a sort of look an’ ’e told me ah were gonna meet a tall dark stranger.’

  Nora and I both glanced at Little Malcolm sitting at a nearby table.

  ‘An’ ’e were reight – excep’ for t’tall bit, o’ course – and, er, well, ah s’ppose ah’ve known Malcolm all m’life,’ she added. ‘But ’e’s definitely psychic an’ ’e sez everyone ’as a sort of box inside ’em an’ ’e jus’ sort of opens it up an’ reads what’s there.’

  ‘Ah don’t want ’im weading my box,’ said Nora defiantly.

  Everyone looked at Nora but, wisely, said nothing.

  ‘So what’s it t’be, Mr Sheffield?’ asked Dorothy.

  ‘A coffee, please, Dorothy.’

  ‘Fwothy coffee coming up, Mr Sheffield,’ said Nora, ‘an’ ’ow about a wock bun, fwesh in yesterday?’

  On Saturday morning I peered through the leaded panes of my bedroom window and looked down at my neglected vegetable patch. The last of the onion crop, forgotten now and gone to seed, waved their fluffy heads in the chill autumn breeze. My garden needed some tender loving care and I sighed. I knew how it felt. I was missing Beth. Her suggestion that I look for another headship flickered through my mind … but not for long.

  On my journey into school I called in to Victor Pratt’s garage at the end of Ragley High Street. As usual, Victor, elder brother of Nora Pratt, was not in good humour as he served me from the single pump.