Happiest Days

by Jack Sheffield

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Yes, an’ mams an’ dads were invited in … an’ ah’ll tell y’summat f’nothin’, Mr Sheffield …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No one could put a condom on a cucumber faster than Miss Clemence.’

  There was a moment’s silence while Vera lost the power of speech.

  ‘Oh … really?’ I murmured.

  Mrs Longbottom opened the office door. ‘Anyway, mus’ fly,’ she said. ‘Ah’ve got t’get to t’Co-op in York.’ With that, she hurried off with the confident step of a satisfied customer.

  ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Vera.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I was thinking about Shirley in the kitchen,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Shirley?’ I wondered why our school cook had entered the conversation.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vera thoughtfully, ‘it’s salad for lunch and when I spoke to her earlier she was … well … chopping cucumbers.’

  I winced and glanced up at the office clock. It was 8.15 a.m. and a new school year had begun.

  I walked out to the entrance hall where Anne Grainger, the deputy headteacher, was clutching large sheets of sugar paper and a box of safety scissors. ‘Morning, Jack,’ said Anne, a slim, attractive fifty-something, with a slightly strained smile. ‘Here we go again.’

  Anne taught our youngest children in the reception class and her commitment and loyalty towards Ragley School were always evident. Her classroom was a riot of colour and activity, and the children in her care always enjoyed a stimulating start to their school career.

  ‘Morning, Anne,’ I replied. ‘Another year … let’s hope for a good one.’

  Anne stared thoughtfully out of the window where Billy Hardcastle was making good progress. ‘It will certainly be challenging when all the Morton children arrive,’ she said. ‘Most of them are reception children and young infants.’

  Our neighbouring village school was due to close at Christmas. According to our education authority it was for ‘economic reasons’ and Morton’s twenty-eight children on roll would be transferring to us in January.

  ‘I’m sure we will be well prepared,’ I said, ‘and we can redistribute the children when the new teacher arrives.’

  Anne raised her eyebrows and hurried off to her classroom. She was too experienced to count her chickens. It also occurred to me that, from her guarded demeanour, there was something else on her mind.

  Our other two Ragley teachers were in the school hall preparing for school assembly.

  ‘Morning, Jack,’ said Sally. ‘Pat and I thought we would extend the recorder group to the younger ones this year.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said.

  Sally Pringle taught the eight- and nine-year-olds in Class 3. A ginger-haired, freckle-faced forty-five-year-old with an unconventional dress sense, Sally was our art and music specialist. She was tuning her guitar prior to leading the choir in a rendition of ‘Kumbaya’. In her purple cords, a baggy mint-green blouse and a vivid mustard waistcoat, she looked relaxed in her work.

  Next to Sally stood a tall twenty-nine-year-old with a long blonde ponytail. Pat Brookside was our newest member of staff and taught the six- and seven-year-olds in Class 2. A county-standard netball player, she lived in Easington with her partner, David Beckinsdale, a handsome thirty-one-year-old and a recently qualified general practitioner who stood six feet three inches tall in his stocking feet.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ she said. ‘I wondered if we could have a word at the end of school? I’ve got a few more ideas for after-school activities. Also, David mentioned this morning he would be happy to call in to do an assembly on First Aid – in conjunction with the school nurse, of course.’

  ‘Excellent,’ I said, ‘and please thank David.’

  I glanced up at the hall clock. ‘I think I’ll wander down to the school gate to welcome the new starters.’

  The old oak entrance door creaked on its Victorian hinges as I walked outside. The stone steps under the archway of Yorkshire stone had been worn away by the patter of feet of generations of children. I stepped out into the sunshine, where boys and girls with sunburned faces were running around the tarmac playground, which was surrounded by a waist-high wall with high, iron railings topped with decorative fleurs-de-lis. Two ten-year-old girls in my class, Rosie Appleby and Jemima Poole, were winding a long skipping rope while Hayley Spraggon skipped effortlessly. They were chanting:

  Rosy apple, lemon, pear,

  Bunch of roses she shall wear,

  Gold and silver by her side,

  I know who will be her bride.

  I walked down the cobbled drive towards the school gate and leaned my gangling, six-foot-one-inch frame against one of the twin stone pillars that flanked the wrought-iron gate. Excited children were rushing by. Eight-year-old Patience Crapper arrived with her friend Becky Shawcross. ‘Becky’s got ’iccups, Mr Sheffield,’ announced Patience with a grin.

  ‘Oh dear, Becky,’ I commiserated. ‘Go in and see Mrs Grainger and she’ll give you a drink of water and that will make your hiccups go away.’

  Becky considered this for a moment.

  ‘No thank you, Mr Sheffield,’ she said with a mischievous smile. ‘I like it when my teeth cough.’

  I watched them run happily on to the playground to join in the skipping game and reflected on their life.

  During the summer holiday they had played games in the certain belief they would live for ever. To be an eight-year-old during those long August days was to be immortal … in the certain knowledge that friendship never dies and true friends will always be by your side. It was good to be young and run wild in the fields and woods and explore the local streams and ponds.

  As I watched the children it occurred to me that friendship was really quite simple when it began. Only later did it become complicated.

  Now many of the new starters were arriving with their parents and the playground was filling up. I looked back at the busy scene in front of the school that over the years had become my second home. It was a Victorian building of weathered red brick with a steeply sloping, grey slate roof and high arched windows. For the time being, the bell in the incongruous bell tower was silent, waiting for the moment to announce the beginning of another school year.

  Opposite the school lay the village green, dominated by the white-fronted public house, The Royal Oak. It stood in the centre of a row of cottages with bay windows, pantiled roofs and tall chimneys. I looked down the High Street bordered with grassy mounds where the village shops were preparing for another day. Prudence Golightly’s General Stores & Newsagent had been open since half past seven to catch the custom of the villagers who worked in York and she was doing a roaring trade.

  Next door, outside the butcher’s shop, Old Tommy Piercy was instructing his grandson, Young Tommy, to rearrange the pigs’ trotters in the shop window. Then came the village Pharmacy, where Peggy Scrimshaw was once again berating her husband, Eugene, for wearing his Captain Kirk Star Trek uniform under his white coat. Outside his Hardware Emporium, Timothy Pratt was making final adjustments to the alignment of his new range of Dynasty garden gnomes on a trestle table. Meanwhile, Dorothy Robinson, assistant in Nora’s Coffee Shop and wife of Little Malcolm the local refuse collector, was standing in the doorway and listening to Chris de Burgh’s recent number one, ‘Lady In Red’, playing on the juke-box. It was clear Dorothy had something on her mind as she hummed along and stared thoughtfully up the High Street.

  Next door, Diane Wigglesworth was taking down a photograph of Toyah Willcox from the window of her Hair Salon and replacing it with one of Kate Bush, while Amelia Postlethwaite, the postmistress, was yawning while unlocking the door of the Post Office. She was smiling following a night of unrestrained passion with her new husband, Ted Postlethwaite, our local postman.

  The shopkeepers of Ragley village, like me, appeared content in our gentle backwater of North Yorkshire on this fine autumn morning. However, in the wider world, life tende
d to be a little more dramatic.

  For this was 1986. It was the year that Bill Gates became one of the world’s youngest billionaires when his Microsoft company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange; unemployment in the UK had risen to 3.25 million; IBM announced its first laptop computer; and the Sun newspaper alleged Freddie Starr had eaten a live hamster. Gary Lineker was briefly Britain’s most expensive footballer when he was transferred from Everton to Barcelona for £2.75 million; and the first Merseyside FA Cup Final ended in a 3–1 win for Liverpool. Britain’s oldest twins, May and Marjorie Chavasse, had celebrated their 100th birthday, and Prince Andrew had married Sarah Ferguson. On the near horizon, Alex Ferguson was shortly to be appointed as manager of Manchester United and the London Stock Exchange was preparing itself for the deregulation of financial markets that would become known as the ‘Big Bang’. Also the government had launched its ‘safe-sex’ campaign following concerns regarding AIDS.

  We also said a final farewell to James Cagney, the Duchess of Windsor, Henry Moore, Cary Grant and Harold Macmillan, but in Ragley village the talk was not of cabbages and kings but rather the price of a loaf of bread in the General Stores.

  At nine o’clock I walked back into school and rang the bell while the children assembled in their classrooms. There were a few tears in Anne’s reception class, but they were shed mainly by mothers saying goodbye to their children as their loved ones commenced full-time education.

  In my classroom there was great excitement as monitor jobs were allocated. They carried considerable status and Tom Burgess looked as though he had won the football pools when he was appointed official bell-ringer. Claire Buttershaw and Michelle Gawthorpe were asked to look after the library books on account of the fact that they always had clean hands. Likewise, the neat and tidy Rosie Appleby took on the role of hymn-book monitor. Stuart Ormroyd and Jemima Poole, two outstanding mathematicians and both on the highest blue box of workcards in our School Mathematics Project, were put in charge of the school tuck shop. Rufus Snodgrass became dinner-money monitor; the tallest pupil, Barry Stonehouse, nodded knowingly when asked to be chalkboard cleaner; and Sigourney Longbottom, to my surprise, volunteered to be the paintbrush monitor, a particularly messy job. Finally, the lightning-quick Hayley Spraggon became the monitor for delivering messages from one teacher to another.

  Within minutes, after each child had received a collection of manila-covered exercise books, a reading record card, a wooden ruler, a Berol pen, a pencil with a rubber on the end, a tin of Lakeland crayons and a First Oxford Dictionary, we began our first lesson: namely, a piece of writing about our holidays. Predictable, maybe, but I knew from experience it worked, particularly with those children who had almost forgotten how to write during the long holiday.

  Our local vicar and chair of governors, Joseph Evans, the younger brother of our secretary, Vera, called in during morning assembly. After welcoming all the new children he led us in our school prayer:

  Dear Lord,

  This is our school, let peace dwell here,

  Let the room be full of contentment, let love abide here,

  Love of one another, love of life itself,

  And love of God.

  Amen.

  At 10.30 a.m. Tom Burgess undid the rope from the cleat on the wall at the foot of the bell tower and rang the bell for morning break. When I walked into the entrance hall Joseph, a tall, skeletal figure with a sharp Roman nose, was talking to his sister and Ruby the caretaker.

  ‘An odd thing happened this morning in the High Street,’ he said.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Vera.

  ‘Stan Coe smiled at me,’ said Joseph.

  ‘Flippin’ ’eck!’ exclaimed Ruby and put down her galvanized bucket with a crash.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Vera.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ asked Joseph.

  Vera shook her head. ‘This is Mr Coe we’re talking about, Joseph – the man who has been a thorn in our side for years.’

  ‘Yes, I take your point, but perhaps he’s finally seeing sense,’ said Joseph innocently.

  ‘And pigs might fly, Joseph,’ said Vera firmly. ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’

  ‘Jeremiah thirteen, verse twenty-three,’ murmured Joseph.

  Vera nodded. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Y’reight there, Mrs F,’ added Ruby. ‘Y’know what they say … a leopard never changes its stripes.’

  ‘Quite right, Ruby,’ agreed Vera defiantly, wisely choosing not to correct her mistake.

  It was just before school lunch when Vera finished typing letters to the four teachers who had been shortlisted for the new post commencing next January. She passed a copy to me.

  ‘Thanks, Vera,’ I said. ‘Let’s hope we find the right person.’

  ‘And so it begins,’ she said quietly as she put the first letter in an envelope.

  During lunch Anne was sitting at a table next to Kylie Ogden, who was a week away from her fifth birthday. Kylie hadn’t been provided with any cutlery.

  ‘Ah wanna fok-an’-knife,’ she shouted.

  Anne assumed she had used a serious swear word. ‘Oh Kylie!’ she said, looking horrified.

  ‘No, Mrs Grainger,’ intervened Mrs Critchley, the dinner lady, ‘she jus’ wants these.’ She put down a knife and fork in front of the red-faced child and Anne blushed and returned to her ham salad.

  After lunch we gathered in the staff-room and Vera served tea.

  ‘I heard from Ruby that Joseph said he saw Stan Coe smiling,’ said Anne.

  ‘Yes, curious isn’t it?’ said Vera.

  Sally looked up and grinned. ‘There was a young lady of Niger,’ she quoted, ‘who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They returned from the ride with the lady inside and a smile on the face of the tiger.’

  ‘Very appropriate,’ said Vera.

  ‘Edward Lear I think … although I recall there’s some dispute,’ added Sally for good measure.

  At the end of school the children in my class had put their chairs on their desks, recited our end-of-school prayer and hurried out to collect their coats before going home.

  Vera tapped on the door of my classroom. ‘Mr Sheffield,’ she said, ‘we have a visitor.’ She glanced back to the entrance hall. ‘It’s Mr Coe.’

  ‘Really? I wonder what he wants.’

  Vera leaned forward and whispered, ‘Good luck.’

  In the entrance hall stood a sixteen-stone Yorkshireman who stank of last night’s beer. Stan had clearly been frequenting his favourite pub, The Pig & Ferret in Easington. Although his sister, Deirdre, had railed at his drunkenness over the years, Stan ignored her. Meanwhile, he continued to be consumed by greed and his estate had grown steadily.

  ‘Ah brought this letter t’show yer,’ he said, pulling an envelope from his donkey jacket. ‘It’s from t’local plannin’ office confirmin’ ah can replace some of m’fencin’.’

  ‘And where would that be, Mr Coe?’ I asked evenly.

  ‘Nex’ to t’cricket field where ah’ve got some cattle and where your kids ’ang over t’fence where ah keep m’pigs.’

  I was expecting another complaint about the children standing on his fence, but it didn’t come. He simply stood there looking awkward.

  ‘We received a copy of the letter,’ said Vera brusquely.

  He rubbed his hand over his face. A web of veins formed purple tracks across his ruddy cheeks and gathered round his blackened nose. ‘Ah thought y’might. It’s gone round to all t’neighbours.’

  He shuffled towards the entrance door and paused. ‘An’ ah’ve been thinkin’,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Mebbe ah were not as s’pportive as ah should ’ave been in t’past.’

  There was a stunned silence. This was the last thing I had expected.

  It was then that he smiled.

  ‘So ah’ll sithee,’ he said and turned to leave.

  Vera and I walked into the office and watched hi
m return to his Land Rover in the car park. ‘Well,’ said Vera, ‘what do you make of that?’

  ‘One may smile, and smile, and be a villain,’ I said. ‘Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.’

  As Stan Coe drove away, Vera sighed. ‘I wonder,’ she mused, ‘I just wonder.’

  It was the end of a successful first day, but neither of us was smiling.

  Chapter Two

  The Vanity of Vera

  Interviews took place today for the post of the new full-time teacher to commence January 1987.

  The temporary classroom was delivered.

  Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:

  Wednesday, 17 September 1986

  Through the leaded windows of Morton Manor, pale shafts of early-morning autumnal sunshine lit up the entrance hall as Vera prepared to leave for school. It was Wednesday, 17 September and a busy day was in store. Interviews for the new teaching post were to take place and the temporary classroom was due to be delivered.

  Vera glanced at her wristwatch, checked her appearance in the hall mirror and fingered the Victorian brooch above the top button of her silk blouse. She gave a wry smile. There was only one chance at youth and that was but a distant memory. She had lived through that time and it was over. Those carefree days of her young life had been replaced by those two relentless companions, Age and Experience.

  She smoothed the seat of her pin-striped business suit and picked up her royal-blue leather handbag. Then she paused to cast a loving smile towards Maggie, her favourite cat, and then of course to her husband, Rupert … in that order. As she strode out purposefully to her shiny Austin Metro, a raucous cry caught her attention and she stared up into the branches of the high elms. A parliament of rooks looked back at her with beady eyes. She sighed, troubled by their relentless gaze. It was as if they were casting judgement on the discussion she had had last night with Rupert. For now it would have to remain a secret shared only by her husband.

  After all, retirement was so final.

  In Bilbo Cottage Beth and I were preparing to leave and final instructions had been left for Mrs Roberts. We were lucky to have such a caring lady looking after our son and John had smiled up at her when she walked in. It was his half-day at Temple House Nursery, a large converted manor house midway between Kirkby Steepleton and Ragley village. He loved the sand pit, Plasticine and singing games, but most of all the mid-morning banana and beaker of milk.