Wicked!

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘Then it can only go up,’ said Janna cheerfully.

  Her audience knew from her impressive CV that she had been a crucial part of the high-flying team that had turned around disastrously failing Redfords. But then she had been led by a charismatic head, Stew Wilby. If she took on Larks, she would be on her own.

  She also seemed terrifyingly young. She had lots of dark freckles and wild, rippling dark red hair, a big mouth (which she seldom kept shut), merry onyx-brown eyes and a snub nose. She was not beautiful – her jaw was too square – but she had a face of great sweetness, humour and friendliness. She was small, about five feet one, and after the drenching of rain, her crocus-yellow dress clung enticingly to a very pretty figure. A teardrop of mascara on her cheekbone gave a look of Pierrot.

  Phil Pierce, who was very taken, asked her how she would deal with an underachieving teacher.

  ‘I’d immediately involve the head of department,’ replied Janna in her soft Yorkshire accent, ‘and tactfully find out what’s wrong. Is it discipline? Are the children trampling all over him? Is it poor teaching? Academically has he got what it takes, or is he presenting material wrongly? And then, gently, because if he’s underachieving he’ll have no confidence, try and work it through. After this,’ she went on, ‘he would either succeed or fail. If the latter, he’s not right for teaching, because the education of children is all that matters.’

  The semi-circle – except for scowling Cara Sharpe, Rowan Merton, who was taking the minutes, and Sir Hugo Betts, who was asleep – smiled approvingly.

  ‘What are your weaknesses?’ snuffled Crispin Thomas from S and C.

  Janna laughed. ‘Short legs and an even shorter fuse. But my strengths are that I adore children and I thrive on hard work. Are the parents involved here?’

  ‘Well, we get the odd troublemaker,’ said Russell heartily, failing to add that a large proportion of Larks parents were too out of it from drugs to register. ‘The children can be challenging.’

  ‘I don’t mind challenging children,’ said Janna. ‘You couldn’t find more sad and demoralized kids than the ones at Redfords, but in a few months—’

  ‘Yes, we read about that in the Guardian,’ interrupted Crispin rudely.

  Janna bit her lip; they didn’t seem interested in her past.

  ‘I want to give every child and teacher the chance to shine and for them to leave my school with their confidence boosted to enable them to survive and enjoy the world.’

  She paused hopefully. A loud snore rent the air followed by an even more thunderous rumble from her own tummy, which woke Sir Hugo with a start.

  ‘What, what, what?’ He groped for his flies.

  Janna caught Phil Pierce’s eye and burst out laughing, so everyone else laughed except Cara and Rowan.

  Janna had expected the board to get in touch in a week or so, but Russell Lambert, at a nod from Crispin Thomas, asked her to wait in an ante-room entitled Your Favourite Haunt. Phil Pierce brought her a cup of tea and some egg sandwiches, at which she was still too nervous to do more than nibble. Phil was such a sweet man; she’d love working with him.

  Breathing in dark purple lilac, she gazed out of the window at buildings darkened to the colour of toffee by the rain and trees as various in their greenness as kids in any school. Beyond lay the deep blue undulation of the Malvern Hills. Surely she could find fulfilment and happiness here?

  She was summoned back by Rowan, looking beadier than ever.

  ‘We’ve decided not to waste your time asking you to come for a second interview,’ announced Russell Lambert.

  Janna’s face fell.

  ‘It was good of you all to see me,’ she muttered. ‘I know I look young . . .’

  ‘We’d like to offer you the job,’ said Russell.

  Janna burst into tears, her mascara mingling with her freckles as she babbled, ‘That’s wicked! Fantastic! Are you sure? I’m going to be a head, such an honour, I promise to justify your faith, that’s really wicked.’

  The half-circle smiled indulgently.

  ‘Can I buy you all a drink to celebrate?’ stammered Janna, reaching for her briefcase. ‘On me, I mean.’

  ‘Should be on us,’ said the director of Larkminster Rovers. ‘What’ll you have, love?’

  ‘Not if she’s going to catch the fast train home,’ said Russell, looking at his watch, ‘and Crispin and I have to talk salaries and technicalities with . . . may I call you Janna?’

  Half an hour later on the Ghost and Castle steps, Janna was still thanking them.

  ‘I’d like to walk to the station,’ she confessed. ‘I want to drink in my new town. Doesn’t matter if I get the later train. I’m so excited, I’ll float home.’

  But as she hadn’t yet signed the contract, Russell, not risking Janna anywhere near the Shakespeare Estate, steered her towards his very clean Rover. Despite the stifling heat of the day, he pulled on thick brown leather driving gloves as though he didn’t want to leave fingerprints on anything. As he settled in the driving seat, she noticed how his spreading thighs filled his grey flannel trousers.

  As they passed the offices of the Larkminster Gazette, a billboard announced Randal Stancombe’s latest plans for the area.

  ‘That greedy fat cat’s got a stranglehold on everything,’ spat Janna.

  ‘Wearing my other hat,’ reproved Russell, ‘as chair of the local planning committee, I can assure you Randal is a very good friend indeed to Larkminster, not least because of the thousands of people he employs.’

  Feeling he’d been squashing, he then suggested Janna might like to ring her parents with news of her job.

  ‘Mum passed away at Christmas.’ Janna paused. ‘She would have been right proud. I wish I could text her in heaven. We came from a very poor family; Mum scrubbed floors to pay for my school uniform, but she loved books and always encouraged us to read. She used to take me to see the Brontës’ house in Haworth. I read English because of her.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Dad was a steelworker. He used to take me to Headingly and Old Trafford. Then he left home; he couldn’t cope with Mum being ill.’ Her voice faltered. She wasn’t going to add that her father had been violent and had drunk the family penniless.

  She wished she could ring Stew but he’d be taking a staff meeting. Yorkshire was so full of painful memories; she’d be glad to get down south and make a fresh start.

  Nothing, however, had prepared her for the anguish of leaving Redfords. Parents and children, who’d thought she’d be with them for ever, seemed equally devastated.

  ‘Why are you living us?’ wrote one eleven-year-old. ‘I don’t want you to live.’

  ‘Are your new children better than us?’ wrote another. ‘Please change your mind.’

  Almost harder to bear was the despair of the older pupils, including some of the roughest, toughest boys, whom she was abandoning in the middle of their GCSE course.

  ‘How will we ever understand Much Ado without you? We’re going to miss you, miss.’

  They all gave her good-luck presents and cards they could ill afford and Janna couldn’t look them in the eye and tell them the truth: ‘I’m leaving because your headmaster broke my heart and now it’s breaking twice.’

  Then Stew had done the sweetest thing: he’d had framed a group photograph of the entire school, which every teacher and child had signed. Janna cried every time she looked at it.

  Some teachers were very sad she was leaving and wished her well. Others, jealous of her closeness to Stew, expressed their incredulity at her getting the job.

  ‘You’d better cut your hair, you’ll never have time to wash that mane every morning. And do buy some sensible clothes.’

  ‘And you’ll have to curb that temper and you won’t be able to swan into meetings twenty minutes late if you’re taking them.’

  Waylaid by a sobbing child, Janna would forget about time.

  There had also been the hell of seeing Stew interview and appoint her succes
sor: a willowy brunette with large, serious, hazel eyes behind her spectacles – the bloody cow – and everyone getting excited about a Christmas production of Oliver! of which Janna would be no part.

  Stew had taken her out for a discreet farewell dinner and, because she was moving to the country, given her a little Staffordshire cow as a leaving present.

  ‘I’m so proud of you, Janny. You’ve probably got eighteen months to try and turn round that school. Don’t lose your rag and antagonize people unnecessarily and go easy on the “boogers”, “bluddies” and “basstards”, they just show off your Yorkshire accent.’ Then, pinching her cheek when she looked sulky: ‘I don’t want anything to wreck your lovely, generous, spontaneous nature.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. “The only failure is not to have tried”,’ Janna quoted one of Redfords’s mantras back at him.

  After a second bottle they had both cried and Stew had quoted: ‘“So, we’ll go no more a-roving”,’ but when he got to the bit about the sword outwearing its sheath and the heart wearing out the breast, Janna remembered how they’d worn out the carpet in his office.

  I’ve given him my Bridget Jones years, she thought bitterly. Sometimes she wondered why she loved him so much: his hair was thinning, his body thickening and, apart from the penetrating dark brown eyes, his square face lacked beauty, but whenever he spoke, everyone listened and his powers of persuasion were infinite.

  ‘Little Jannie, I cannot believe you’re going to be a headmistress.’ His fingers edged over her breast. ‘We can still meet. Can I come home this evening?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Janna. ‘I’m a head, but no longer a mistress.’

  Janna, however, was never cast down for long. At half-term, she had come south and found herself a minute but adorable eighteenth-century house called Jubilee Cottage. Like a child’s drawing, it had a path spilling over with catmint and lavender leading up to a gabled porch with ‘Jubilate’ engraved above the door and mullioned windows on either side. It was the last house in the small village of Wilmington, which had a pub, a shop and a watercress-choked stream dawdling along the edge of the High Street.

  Janna could easily afford the mortgage on her splendid new salary. She couldn’t believe she’d be earning so much.

  Wilmington thankfully was three miles from Larkminster Comp. However much you loved kids, it was a mistake to live over your school. When she grew tired of telling her children they were all stars, she could escape home, wander on her own lawn in bare feet and gaze up at her own stars.

  All the same, missing Stew, it was terribly easy to go through a bottle of wine of an evening.

  ‘I shall buy a new car and get a dog,’ vowed Janna.

  3

  From the middle of August, Janna was in and out of her new school familiarizing herself with everything, palling up with Wally Bristow, the site manager, who like most site managers was the fountain of all wisdom.

  Wally had short, slicked-back brown hair and wise grey eyes in a round, smiling face as dependable and reassuring as a digestive biscuit. Living but three minutes from Larks, he was always on call except on Thursday evening, when he and a team of bell-ringers rehearsed for Sunday’s service in St Mary’s Church next door, or on Saturday afternoons when Larkminster Rovers played at home. He was inordinately proud of a good-looking son, Ben, who’d risen to sergeant in the Royal Engineers.

  Janna’s heart swelled when she saw Wally had repainted the board outside the school in dark blue gloss and written in gold letters: ‘LARKMINSTER COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL. Head Teacher: Janna Curtis’.

  ‘Oh Wally, I’ve got to make every child feel they’re the greatest and discover each one’s special talents.’

  ‘Smokin’, spittin’, swearin’, runnin’ away, fightin’ and urinatin’ in phone boxes,’ intoned Wally. ‘As we can’t fill the places, we get all the dropouts that get sacked or rejected by other schools.’

  Wally showed her Smokers’, a steep, grassy bank down which the children vanished so they could smoke, do drugs, drink and even shag unobserved by the staffroom.

  ‘I don’t want to frighten you, Janna,’ he went on as they lunched on cans of lager and Marks and Spencer’s prawn sandwiches, ‘but the kids are running wild. Most of them only come in to trash the place and play football. The rest are off havin’ babies or appearin’ in court. They’re demoralized by the staff, who are either off sick from “stress”’ – Wally gave a snort of disbelief – ‘old dinosaurs hanging on for retirement, or commies who grumble at everything and threaten strike action if you keep them a minute late.’

  Wally also warned her of tricky teachers: Mike Pitts, the deputy head, who taught maths, did the timetable and who was always burning joss sticks and scented candles to disguise the drink fumes; and Cara Sharpe, who’d glared at Janna at her interview.

  ‘Everyone hates Cara, but humours her. She wanted Mike as head, and her to get deputy head to look good on her CV. She and Mike are thick as thieves. Don’t trust them. Cara’s a bitch to the kids.’

  ‘Not any more she won’t be. Where are the playing fields?’

  ‘Don’t have any: they were sold off by the council. The rest of the land is on too much of a slope and you can’t swing a gerbil in the playground.’

  The playground was indeed awful: a square of tarmac surrounded by broken rusty railings with no basketball nets and two overhanging sycamores, whose leaves, curling and covered in sinister black spots, provided the only shade.

  Everything had deteriorated since Janna’s interview in May. A lower-angled sun revealed damp patches and peeling plaster in every classroom. The once lovely garden and parkland were choked with thistles and nettles. Pale phlox and red-hot pokers were broken or bent double by bindweed which seemed to symbolize the red tape threatening to strangle Janna’s hopes. An in-tray of forms to be filled in nearly hit the ceiling.

  The GCSE results out in late August had dropped to four per cent of the pupils gaining A–C grades in five subjects. Only these gave Larks points in the league tables, and only Cara Sharpe and Phil Pierce, the gentle head of science who’d met Janna at the station, had got most of their children through.

  ‘Phil’s a good bloke,’ said Wally, ‘firm, but very fair. He’s always online to answer pupils’ homework questions. The kids love him.’

  ‘Why’s he still here?’ asked Janna gloomily.

  ‘He’s very loyal. Trouble with kids here, they leave at sixteen so they don’t have to come back and face the music of terrible GCSE results.’

  ‘Where do they go on to?’

  ‘The dole queue or the nick.’

  Janna kicked off by tackling her office, which was full of the presence of Mike Pitts, who’d done her job for the spring and summer terms and who clearly hadn’t wanted people to follow his movements. The door had a security lock and a heavy dark blind pulled down over the big window hiding a view over the playground to houses, the River Fleet and grey-green woods beyond.

  Janna insisted a doubtful Wally remove both lock and blind.

  ‘I want to be accessible to both children and staff.’

  Shaking his head, Wally got out his screwdriver.

  ‘It really ain’t surprising [he sang in a rich baritone],

  That we’re rising, rising, rising,

  Soon we’ll reach Division One.

  Premier, Wembley, here we come.’

  ‘What’s that song?’ demanded Janna.

  ‘Larkminster Rovers’s battle hymn. We got to the second division last season. Now we’ve got to stay there.’

  ‘Larks is going up the league tables too [sang Janna],

  Soon we’ll reach Division One.

  Premier, Wembley, here we come.’

  Wally nearly dropped his screwdriver as her sweet soaring voice rattled the window panes.

  Having scraped scented candle wax off the furniture and scrubbed the room from top to toe, Janna and Wally painted her office white, hung cherry-red curtains and laid rush matting on the floor.


  ‘I need a settee and a couple of armchairs so people can relax when they come in here.’

  ‘The kids’ll trash them, the settee’ll be an incitement to rape or teachers grumbling and those white walls won’t last a minute,’ sighed Wally.

  ‘Then we’ll cover them with pictures.’

  Up went Desiderata and Hold the Dream embroidered by Janna’s Auntie Glad, followed by big photographs of Wharfedale, Fountains Abbey and Stew’s photograph of all the children and teachers at Redfords waving goodbye in front of a square grey school building.

  On a side table Janna put Stew’s Staffordshire cow and a big bunch of Michaelmas daisies and late roses rescued from Larks’s flower beds.

  ‘My goodness, you have been working hard,’ mocked Rowan Merton when she looked in a week before term started.

  As a working wife and mother with photographs of her husband and two little girls all over her office, on the door of which was printed ‘Assistant to the Head’, Rowan prided herself on juggling. She had wound Mike Pitts round her little finger and clearly didn’t fancy extending herself for a woman – particularly one in a denim mini, with a smudged face and her red curls in a ponytail.

  ‘Have you flown in to rescue us?’ she mocked. ‘Like Red Adair in a skirt?’

  ‘No, I’ve come to show you how to save yourselves,’ retorted Janna tartly, then, remembering Stew’s advice about not antagonizing people, added, ‘How are Scarlet and Meagan? They must have loved having you to themselves in the holidays.’

  Rowan relented fractionally and said they had, then launched into a list of staff requests for broken chairs, desks, leaking windows and computers to be mended.

  ‘And Mrs Sharpe wants a blind. The sun casts such a glare, no one can read the whiteboard in the afternoon.’

  Cara Sharpe’s own glare, Janna would have thought, would see off any competition.

  ‘And my anglepoise lamp collapses without the aid of two bulldog clips and the angle being wedged open by the last Education Year Book,’ went on Rowan. ‘If Wally could sort all those things out before term begins?’