Wicked!

by Jilly Cooper

  LUBEMIR Albanian asylum-seeker and safe-breaker, which makes him an extremely useful partner-in-crime to Cosmo Rannaldini.

  MR MATES Larks science master, almost as old as Archimedes.

  KITTEN MEADOWS Larks pupil and sassy, hell-cat girlfriend of Johnnie Fowler.

  JOE MEAKIN Under-master in Alex Bruce’s house at Bagley Hall.

  ROWAN MERTON School secretary at Larks.

  MRS MILLS A jolly member of Ofsted.

  MISS MISERDEN Old biddy endlessly complaining about Larks misbehaviour.

  TEDDY MURRAY Randal Stancombe’s foreman.

  NADINE Paris Alvaston’s social worker.

  MARTIN ‘MONSTER’ NORMAN Larks pupil. Overweight bully and coward.

  ‘STORMIN’ NORMAN Larks parent governor and Monster’s mother, given to storming into Larks and punching anyone who crosses her ewe lamb.

  MISS PAINSWICK Hengist Brett-Taylor’s besotted and ferociously efficient secretary.

  CINDY PAYNE Deceptively cosy New Labour county councillor in charge of education.

  KYLIE ROSE PECK Sweet-natured Larks pupil and member of the Wolf Pack. So eternally up the duff, she’ll soon qualify for a free tower block.

  CHANTAL PECK Kylie Rose’s mother and also a parent governor at Larks.

  CAMERON PECK Kylie Rose’s baby son.

  GANYMEDE Another baby son of Kylie Rose.

  COLIN ‘COL’ PETERS Editor of the Larkminster Gazette. A big, nasty toad in a small pond.

  PHIL PIERCE Head of science at Larks, loved by the children and a great supporter of Janna Curtis.

  MIKE PITTS Larks’s deputy head, furious the head’s job has been given to Janna Curtis.

  COSMO RANNALDINI Dame Hermione’s son and Bagley Hall warlord, with a pop group called the Cosmonaughties and the same lethal sex appeal as his father, the great conductor Roberto Rannaldini.

  DESMOND REYNOLDS Smooth Larkminster estate agent known as ‘Des Res’.

  ROCKY Larks pupil and ungentle giant until the Ritalin kicks in.

  BIFFO RUDGE Head of maths at Bagley Hall, ex-rowing Blue, who frequently rides his bike into the River Fleet while coaching the school eight.

  ROBBIE RUSHTON Larks’s incurably lazy, left-wing head of geography.

  CARA SHARPE Larks’s fearsome head of English and drama.

  ‘SATAN’ SIMMONS Larks bully and best friend of Monster Norman.

  SMART Stalwart Bagley Hall rugger player.

  PEARL SMITH Another Larks hell-cat, member of the Wolf Pack.

  MISS SPICER An unfazed member of Ofsted.

  SAM SPINK Bossy-boots union representative at Larks.

  SOLLY THE UNDERTAKER Governor at Larks.

  RANDAL STANCOMBE Handsome Randal, definitely Mr Dicey rather than Mr Darcy, a wildly successful property developer. One of his private estates of desirable residences, Cavendish Plaza, sits uncomfortably close to Larks.

  JADE STANCOMBE Randal’s daughter, sharp-clawed glamourpuss and Bagley Babe.

  MISS SWEET Beleaguered under-matron at Boudicca, reluctantly put in charge of Bagley’s sex education.

  CRISPIN THOMAS Incurably greedy deputy director of S and C Services.

  TRAFFORD An unspeakably scrofulous but highly successful artist.

  GRANT TYLER An electronics giant.

  MISS UGLOW Larks RE teacher.

  PETE WAINWRIGHT Genial under-manager at Larkminster Rovers, the local second division football club.

  BERTIE WALLACE Raffish co-owner of Gafellyn Castle in Wales.

  RUTH WALTON A ravishing adventuress, voted on to Bagley Hall’s board of governors to ensure full houses at meetings.

  MILLY WALTON The third Bagley Babe, charming and emollient but overshadowed by her gorgeous mother.

  THE HON. JACK WATERLANE Bagley Hall thicko, captain of the Chinless Wanderers.

  LORD WATERLANE Jack’s father, who shares his son’s fondness for rough trade.

  STEWART ‘STEW’ WILBY Powerful and visionary headmaster of Redfords, Janna Curtis’s former school in the West Riding. Also Janna’s former lover.

  SPOTTY WILKINS Bagley Hall pupil.

  DAFYDD WILLIAMS Sometime builder and piss artist.

  ‘GRAFFI’ WILLIAMS Dafydd’s son, and captivating, conniving fifth member of the Wolf Pack. Nicknamed ‘Graffi’ for his skill at spraying luminous paint on buildings.

  BRIGADIER CHRISTIAN WOODFORD A delightful octogenarian, hugely interested in matters military and his beautiful neighbour, Lily Hamilton.

  MISS WORMLEY English mistress at Bagley Hall – poor thing.

  THE ANIMALS

  CADBURY Dora Belvedon’s chocolate Labrador.

  LOOFAH Dora Belvedon’s delinquent pony.

  PARTNER Janna Curtis’s ginger and white mongrel.

  NORTHCLIFFE Patience Cartwright’s golden retriever.

  ELAINE Hengist Brett-Taylor’s white greyhound.

  GENERAL Lily Hamilton’s white and black Persian cat.

  VERLAINE AND RIMBAUD Artie Deverell’s Jack Russells.

  BOGOTÁ Xavier Campbell-Black’s black Labrador.

  HINDSIGHT Theo Graham’s marmalade cat.

  FAST One of Rupert Campbell-Black’s horses. Aptly named.

  PENSCOMBE PETERKIN Another of Rupert Campbell-Black’s star horses.

  BELUGA An extremely kind horse who teaches Paris Alvaston to ride.

  PLOVER Patience Cartwright’s grey mare, doted on by Beluga.

  1

  Larkminster, county town of Larkshire, has long been considered the most precious jewel in the Cotswolds’ crown. Throughout the year, its streets are paved with tourists, admiring the glorious pale gold twelfth-century cathedral, the Queen Anne courthouse and the ancient castle, whose battlements descend into the River Fleet as it idles its way round the town.

  Larkminster, famous for its splendid beeches and limes and designated England’s Town of Trees at the Millennium, was anticipating further fame because its newly elected Conservative MP, Jupiter Belvedon, was hotly tipped to take over the Tory party and oust Tony Blair at the next election.

  In his Larkminster constituency, the machiavellian Jupiter was frustrated by a hung Labour and Lib-Dem county council who always voted tactically to keep out the Tories. But in January 2001, to the county council’s horror, central government decided to take the running of Larkshire’s schools away from the local education authority, who they felt was mismanaging its finances and not adhering sufficiently to the national curriculum. They then handed this task to a private company called S and C Services, the ‘S’ and the ‘C’ standing for ‘Support’ and ‘Challenge’.

  Larkminster itself boasted a famous public school, Bagley Hall, some five miles outside the town; a choir school attached to the cathedral; two excellent state schools: Searston Abbey and St James’s, known as St Jimmy’s; and a perfectly frightful sink school, Larkminster Comprehensive, which was situated on the edge of the town’s black spot, the notorious Shakespeare Estate.

  Like many outwardly serene and elegant West Country towns, Larkminster was greatly exercised by the increase in violent crime, for which it believed the Shakespeare Estate and Larkminster Comprehensive, or ‘Larks’ as it was known, were entirely responsible.

  Randal Stancombe, a Rich List property developer and a hugely influential local player with a manicured finger in every pie, was particularly concerned. Cavendish Plaza, one of his private estates of desirable residences newly built above the flood plain of the River Fleet, was constantly troubled by Larks delinquents mugging, nicking car radios and knocking fairies off Rolls-Royces on their way to school. Randal Stancombe was putting increasing pressure on the police and the county council to clean up the area.

  Larkminster Comp had for some years been a candidate for closure. It was at the bottom of the league tables and could only muster five hundred children rattling around in a building large enough for twelve hundred. Taxpayers’ money should not be squandered heating empty schools.

  Reading the graffiti
on the wall, and not liking the prospect of bullying interference from a private company like S and C Services, the then headmaster, Ted Mitchell, had immediately resigned in February 2001. Larks Comp should have been shut down then, but the county council and S and C Services, nervous of the local uproar, the petitions, the poster campaigns, the marches on County Hall and even Westminster and the inevitable loss of seats that occur whenever a school is threatened with closure, dodged the issue.

  They should have handed the job to Larks’s deputy head, Mike Pitts, a seedy alcoholic who would have killed off the place in a few months. Instead they decided to give Larks a last chance and in April advertised in The Times Educational Supplement for a new head. This was why on a hot sunny day in early May, Janna Curtis, head of English at Redfords Comprehensive in West Yorkshire, caught the Intercity from Leeds to Larkminster.

  On any journey, Janna overloaded herself with work which she truly intended to do. Aware that Year Eleven would be taking their first English exam in less than three weeks, she should have reread her GCSE revision notes. She should also have checked the English department’s activities for the rest of term. Even more important, she should have tackled the pile of information about Larks Comp and the area that she had downloaded from the internet.

  But after registering that Larks was underachieving disastrously and those ‘right-wing bastards’ Randal Stancombe and S and C Services were putting the boot in, she was sidetracked by a Daily Mail abandoned by a passenger getting off at Birmingham. Despite her horror at its right-wing views, she soon became engrossed in a story about Posh and Becks, followed by Lynda Lee-Potter’s much too enthusiastic comments about ‘another right-wing bastard’: Rupert Campbell-Black.

  The train was stiflingly hot. Even if she’d had the money, Janna would never have done anything so revoltingly elitist as travel first class, but she wished air conditioning extended into standard class as well, so she didn’t go scarlet before her interview. She was gagging for a large vodka and tonic to steady her nerves, but, on no breakfast, she’d become garrulous. Not that she was going to get the job; they’d think her much too young and inexperienced and she wasn’t even sure she wanted it.

  Gazing at a cloud of pink and white apple blossom clashing with bilious yellow fields of rape as the train trundled through Worcestershire, Janna reflected that the past three years at Redfords had been the most thrilling of her life. The cheers must have been heard in Westminster the day she and the other staff were told their school had finally struggled out of special measures (the euphemism for a dangerously failing school).

  The fight to save Redfords had been unrelenting, but who minded working until midnight, week in, week out, when you were in love with the headmaster, Stew Wilby, who had made you head of English before you were thirty and who frequently put down his magic wand to shag you on the office carpet?

  In the end Stew couldn’t bring himself to leave his wife, Beth, and had retreated into a marriage far more intact than he had made out. People were beginning to gossip and the warmth of the reference Stew had sent to the governing board at Larks – which he had showed her yesterday: ‘I shall be devastated to lose an outstanding teacher, but I cannot stand in Janna Curtis’s way’ – gave Janna the feeling that he might be relieved to see the back of her.

  ‘Staying with Beth, staying with Beth,’ mocked the wheels as the train rattled over the border into the wooded valleys of Larkshire. In her positive moments, all Janna wanted was to escape as far as possible from Stew into a challenge that would give her no time to mourn. Larkminster Comp seemed the answer.

  She was met at the station by Phil Pierce, Larks’s head of science. Bony-faced, bespectacled, mousy-haired, he wore a creased sand-coloured suit, obviously dragged out of a back drawer in honour of the heat wave and jazzed up by a blue silk tie covered in leaping red frogs.

  Phil didn’t drive Janna to Larks via the Shakespeare Estate to bump over litter-strewn roads and breathe in the stench of bins dustmen were too scared to empty. Instead he took her on the longer scenic route where she could enjoy the River Fleet sparkling, the white cherry blossom in the Town of Trees dancing against ominously rain-filled navy-blue clouds and the lichen blazing like little suns on the ancient buildings.

  ‘How beautiful,’ sighed Janna, then bristled with disapproval as she noticed, hanging overhead like birds of prey, a number of huge cranes bearing the name of Randal Stancombe.

  ‘That capitalist monster’s doing a lot of work,’ she stormed, ‘and I didn’t realize that fascist bast— I mean fiend was MP here,’ as she caught sight of posters of pale, patrician Jupiter Belvedon in the window of the Conservative Club. ‘I bet he’s in league with S and C Services,’ she added furiously. ‘Private companies only take over education to make a fat profit.’

  ‘Representatives of S and C Services will certainly be at your interview later,’ said Phil Pierce gently, ‘so perhaps . . .’

  ‘I’d better button my lip,’ sighed Janna, ‘and my clothes,’ she added, doing up the buttons of the crocus-yellow dress she had bought from Jigsaw after school yesterday.

  Looking at the terrace houses painted in neat pastels, their front gardens bright with wallflowers and forget-me-nots, Janna wondered if Larkminster might be too smug, rich and middle class.

  As if reading her thoughts, Phil Pierce said: ‘This may seem a prosperous county, but there’s a very high level of socioeconomic deprivation. Eighty per cent of our children are on free school dinners. Many have special educational needs.’

  ‘I hope you receive sufficient funding.’

  ‘Does anyone?’ sighed Phil. ‘This is Larks.’

  Janna was agreeably charmed by the tawny, romantically rambling Victorian building perched on the side of a hill, its turrets and battlements swathed in pink clematis and amethyst wisteria, its parkland crowded with rare trees and with cow parsley and wild garlic advancing in waves on wildly daisied lawns.

  Phil kicked off by giving her a quick tour of the school, which was conveniently empty of challenging children because it was polling day at the local elections.

  All one needed for outside, reflected Janna, were a pair of secateurs and a mowing machine. The windows could also be mended and unboarded, the graffiti painted over and the chains, taps and locks replaced in the lavatories. The corridors and classroom walls were also badly lacking in posters, paintings and written work by the children. Redfords, her school in Yorkshire, was like walking into a rainbow.

  She was disappointed that there were no children around, so no one could watch her taking a lesson. This had always secured her jobs in the past. Instead she was given post to deal with, to show off her management skills, and made a good impression by immediately tackling anything involving media and parents. She was also handed two budgets and quickly identified why one was good, the other bad.

  She was aware of being beadily scrutinized by the school secretary, Rowan Merton, who was conventionally pretty: lovely skin, grey eyes, dark brown bob; but who simultaneously radiated smugness and disapproval, like the cat who’d got the cream and found it off.

  Still too nervous to eat, Janna refused the quick bite of lunch offered her by Phil Pierce. She was then whisked away to an off-site interview because the governors were equally nervous of the Larks deputy head, Mike Pitts, who, livid he hadn’t been offered the job, was likely to grow nasty when sobering up after lunch.

  Only as Janna was leaving the Larks building did the heavens open, so she didn’t appreciate in how many places rain normally poured in through the roof.

  2

  Janna was interviewed round the corner, past a row of boarded-up shops, in a pub called the Ghost and Castle, which was of the same tawny, turreted architecture as the school. The landlord was clearly a joker. A skeleton propped up the public bar, which was adorned with etchings of ghosts draped in sheets terrorizing maidens or old men in nightcaps. Rooms off were entitled Spook-Easy and Spirits Bar. The plat du jour chalked up on a blackboard w
as Ghoulash at £4.50.

  Janna giggled and wondered how many Larks pupils were regulars here. At least they could mug up for GCSE in the Macbeth room, whose blood-red walls were decorated with lurid oils of Banquo’s ghost, Duncan’s murder and a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth. Here Larks’s governors, a semi-circle of the Great and the Good, mostly councillors and educationalists, awaited her.

  Think before you speak and remember eye contact at all times, Janna told herself as, beaming at everyone, she swivelled round like a searchlight.

  The chairman of the governors, Russell Lambert, had tiny eyes, sticking-out ears, a long nose like King Babar and loved the sound of his pompous, very put-on voice. A big elephant in a small watering hole, thought Janna.

  Like most good teachers, she of necessity picked up names quickly. As Russell Lambert introduced her, she clocked first Brett Scott, a board member of Larkminster Rovers, who had an appropriately roving eye and looked game for a great night on the tiles, and secondly Crispin Thomas, deputy educational director of S and C Services, who did not.

  Crispin, a petulant, pig-faced blond, had a snuffling voice, and from his tan and the spare tyre billowing over the waistband of his off-white suit, had recently returned from a self-indulgent holiday.

  Under a painting of the Weird Sisters and infinitely more terrifying, like a crow who’d been made over by Trinny and Susannah, quivered a woman with black, straight hair and a twitching scarlet mouth. Appropriately named Cara Sharpe, she was a teacher governor, supposed to present the concerns of the staff to the governing body.

  And I bet she sneaks to both sides, thought Janna.

  ‘Cara is our immensely effective head of English and drama,’ said Russell sycophantically.

  So she won’t welcome any interference on the English front from me, Janna surmised, squaring her little shoulders. At the end of the row, the vice-chairman, Sir Hugo Betts, who resembled a camel on Prozac, fought sleep.

  Russell Lambert made no bones about the state of the school: ‘Larks is at rock bottom.’