by Jilly Cooper
‘If you feel like that,’ said Janna furiously, ‘you shouldn’t be teaching here.’
‘I couldn’t agree more.’ Jason smiled into her eyes. ‘I’ve been trying to see you all day to hand in my notice.’ Over the gasps of amazement he added: ‘But Rowan Merton wouldn’t let me cross your threshold,’ and, shoving an envelope into Janna’s hand, he turned towards the door.
A striking strawberry blonde in a non-existent skirt and a clinging pink vest glued to her worked-out body, whom Janna recognized as Gloria, the deputy head of PE, gave a wail: ‘When are you going, Jase?’
‘If one resigns on the first day of term, one can be over the hills and far way by half-term.’
‘And where are you going?’ hissed an incensed, wrong-footed Cara.
‘To Bagley Hall as head of drama,’ said Jason, filling up his glass on the way out.
‘That’s an independent,’ thundered Sam Spink.
‘I know,’ murmured Jason. ‘Adequate funding, nineteen weeks’ holiday, a decent salary and no Wolf Pack: need I say more? Here’s to me,’ and, draining his glass, he was gone.
Over a thunderous murmur of chat, Janna had to pull herself and the meeting together. Clapping her hands for quiet, assuring everyone she wouldn’t keep them long, she then had to express great regret that Larks had had to bid farewell to ten teachers she had never met. There were broad grins when she described a former ICT master as a ‘tower of strength’, when he’d evidently jumped half the female staff and impregnated two supply teachers, and laughter when she expressed deep regret at the death of some former head, who’d only emigrated with his wife to Tasmania.
‘Mike Pitts wouldn’t have slipped up like that,’ muttered Skunk Illingworth, the science Dinosaur, refilling his pint mug.
‘I will get to know you all soon,’ apologized Janna. She took a deep breath and looked round. Somehow she must rally them. Then Jason returned. Seeing him grinning superciliously and lounging against the wall, Janna’s resolve was stiffened and she kicked off by attacking her staff for their atrocious GCSE results.
‘We must start from this moment to improve. If we can get our children to behave, then we can teach them, and they will behave if they’re interested.’ She smiled at Lydia in the front row.
‘They will also behave if this is a happy school and they have fun here as well as learning. We must give them and the school back its pride so they’ll stop trashing and graffitiing the place.
‘Wally has worked so hard restoring the building over the holidays. Debbie has worked so hard cleaning up in here. Frankly, it was a tip.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wally clutching his head. ‘In turn,’ she went on, ‘I’d like you all to work hard transforming your classrooms. We want examples of good work on the walls and the corridors and colour and excitement everywhere.’ Then, beaming at the furious faces: ‘And will you all start smiling around the place, particularly at the children, making them feel valued and welcome.’
Only Phil Pierce, Lydia and Lance, Mags Gablecross and Miss Cambola, the busty music mistress, smiled back.
As Janna took a fortifying slug of white, she heard a loud cough to her left and, glancing round, saw Sam Spink tapping the glass of her watch.
‘You were saying?’ snapped Janna.
Marching over, Sam said in a stage whisper that could be heard in the gods at Covent Garden: ‘People have been in school since eight-thirty, nearly nine hours, working flat out to get everything shipshape. Many colleagues need to collect kids from childminders, others have long journeys home and want to be alert for their students tomorrow. I’m sure you’re aware that anything over eight hours is unacceptable. Any minute they’ll walk out of their own accord.’
‘OK,’ muttered Janna, turning to her now utterly captive audience, ‘we’ll call it a day. I’m afraid it’s been a very long one. Thank you all for coming. I look forward to working with you,’ then she hissed at Sam Spink, ‘and I’ll personally string you up by your Winnie-the-Pooh character socks if you ever cheek me in public like that again,’ before stalking out.
‘Remember always to smile around the school,’ Cara Sharpe called after her.
‘Never thanked me for taking Year Ten to Anglesey in July,’ repeated Skunk as he petulantly emptied bottles, then glasses into his mug.
Phil and Wally were kind and complimentary, but Janna knew she’d blown it.
‘This place needs shaking up,’ said Phil. ‘Would you like to come home for a bite of supper?’
‘Oh, I’d love to,’ said Janna longingly, ‘but I’ve got so much to do.’
She still hadn’t written her speech for assembly and her in-tray, to quote Larkminster Rovers’s battle hymn, was ‘rising, rising, rising’.
She was also jolted to realize that in the old days, before she’d become part of the high-flying team at Redfords, she’d have probably been out hassling senior management like Sam Spink: was poacher turning keeper?
The full moon, like a newly washed plate, followed her home – perhaps she should buy the staffroom a dishwasher. Jubilee Cottage was cold, smelt musty and didn’t look welcoming because she still hadn’t unpacked her stuff or put up any pictures. Most of them, admittedly, were adorning her office at Larks. Poor little cottage, she must give it some TLC along with five hundred disturbed children and at least twenty-eight bolshie staff.
A large vodka and tonic followed by Pot Noodles wasn’t a good idea either. She’d promptly thrown up the lot. Then she washed her hair. Nagged to present a more respectable image by her fellow teachers at Redfords, she had had her red curls lopped to the shoulders, then defiantly invested in a pink suit decorated with darker pink roses which should jazz up tomorrow’s proceedings.
As heads covered up to ten miles a day policing their schools, she had also bought a pair of dark pink shoes with tiny heels. She laid everything out on a chair. By the time she’d showered and put on a nightie, it was half past twelve.
She fell to her knees. ‘Oh please, dear God, help me to save my school.’
If you banged your head on the pillow and recited something last thing, you were supposed to remember it in the morning.
‘Feral Jackson, Paris Alvaston, Graffi Williams, Pearl Smith, Kylie Rose Peck . . .’ The faces of the Wolf Pack swam before her eyes throughout the night.
Then she overslept and didn’t get to school until eight-fifteen.
At the bottom of the drive, in anticipation of a new term, were already gathering lawyers’ assistants waiting to hand out leaflets encouraging disgruntled parents to sue the school, pushers lurking with offers of drugs or steroids, and expelled pupils hanging around to duff up pupils they’d been chucked out for terrorizing.
On her desk, Janna found a pile of good-luck cards, but nothing from Stew, not even a phone message. She was also outraged to receive a card on which Tory blue flowers – bluebells, flax and forget-me-nots – were intertwined and exquisitely painted by someone called Hanna Belvedon. Inside was a handwritten note from Jupiter Belvedon, presumably the artist’s husband and Larkminster’s Conservative MP, welcoming Janna to Larkshire and hoping she’d ring him if she needed help. As if she’d accept help from a rotten Tory.
Out of the window she could see pupils straggling up the drive, smoking, arguing, fighting. Several posters and the welcome-back sign had already been ripped down. There was a crash as a brick flew through a window in reception.
Two minutes before assembly was due to start, Rowan Merton bustled in quivering with excitement:
‘You might like to open this before kick-off.’
It was a beautifully wrapped and pink-ribboned bottle of champagne. Darling Stew had remembered. Turning towards the window, so Rowan couldn’t look over her shoulder, Janna opened the little white envelope and was almost winded with disappointment as she read: ‘Dear Miss Curtis, This is to wish you great luck, I hope you’ll lunch with me one day soon. Yours ever, Hengist Brett-Taylor’.
‘Who the hell’s Hengist Brett-T
aylor?’
Rowan was so impressed, she forgot for a moment to be hostile.
‘Don’t you know? He’s head of Bagley Hall.’ Then, when Janna looked blank: ‘Our local independent school – frightfully posh. He was on Question Time last Thursday making mincemeat of poor Estelle Morris. Livens up any programme.’
‘Not Ghengist Khan,’ whispered Janna in horror, ‘that fascist pig?’
‘Well, I don’t approve of Hengist’s politics,’ said Rowan shirtily, ‘but he’s drop-dead gorgeous.’
‘He’s an arrogant bastard,’ who, now Janna remembered, had just poached Jason Fenton, another arrogant bastard. They’d suit each other. She was about to drop the bottle of champagne in the bin, when the bell went, so she put it in the fridge. She might well need it later.
Applying another layer of pale pink lipstick, she defiantly drenched herself in Diorissimo, buttoned up her suit to flaunt her small waist, and jumped at the sound of a wolf whistle.
‘You look absolutely gorgeous,’ sighed Phil Pierce, who’d come to collect her, ‘roses, roses all the way. The kids are going to love you.’
Hearing the overwhelming din of children pouring down the corridor into the main hall, Janna started to shake. The task ahead seemed utterly awesome.
5
Dora, the eleven-year-old sister of Larkminster’s Tory MP, Jupiter Belvedon, had heard that the young headmistress starting at Larks, the local sink school, was an absolute cracker. Dora thought this most unlikely. Schoolmistresses in her experience were such old boots that anything without two heads and a squint was described as ‘attractive’.
Dora had therefore risen at seven to ride her skewbald pony Loofah along the River Fleet and into Larkminster to check Janna out. Dora also needed to think. She was very exercised because she was starting boarding at a new school, Bagley Hall, in a week’s time. Dora’s mother, Anthea, kept saying Bagley Hall was like Chewton Glen or the Ritz, but to Dora it was prison – particularly as she’d be separated from Loofah and Cadbury, her chocolate Labrador, who bounded ahead of them putting up duck. Dora was worried about both Loofah and Cadbury. Her sweet father, who’d been dotty about animals, would have looked after them, but alas, he’d died recently and her mother regarded both animals as a tie and a needless expense.
Dora sighed and helped herself to blackberries in the hedgerows. Loofah was much too small for her. He’d need lifts soon to stop her feet scraping the ground. He also bucked, sat down and bit people, but she loved him far too much to sell him. Life was very hard when you had so many animal dependants. Dora edged a KitKat out of her jodhpur pocket to share with the two of them. Her mother, Anthea, was always warning Dora she’d get spots and never attract a boyfriend.
Who wanted soppy boyfriends? thought Dora scornfully.
Dora had thick, flaxen plaits and even thicker curly blonde eyelashes, which seemed designed to stop the peak of her hard hat falling over her turned-up nose. Her big eyes were the same drained turquoise as the sky on the horizon. Slender, small for her age, she was redeemed from over-prettiness by a determined chin and a mouth frequently pursed in disapproval.
And Dora had much to disapprove of. Her beautiful mother, Anthea, in appearance all dewy-eyed softness, was in reality catting around with loads of boyfriends, including an awful old judge and a rose-grower – both married – and playing the disconsolate, impoverished widow for all she was worth. Fed up with the school run and anxious to enjoy an unbridled sex life, Anthea clearly wanted Dora out of the way, locked up at Bagley Hall.
The sole plus for Dora was that for several years she had been augmenting her income by leaking stories to the press. Her mother’s romantic attachments had provided excellent copy.
Bagley Hall should prove even more remunerative. Hengist Brett-Taylor, the head, whom her mother fancied almost as much as Rupert Campbell-Black, was never out of the news. Her twin brother Dicky, who’d been boarding since he was eight and was so pretty he was the toast of the rugby fifteen, had torrid tales of the antics of the pupils.
But alas, her chilly eldest brother, Jupiter, as well as being MP for Larkshire, was chairman of the governors at Bagley Hall and, petrified of sleaze, had already given Dora a stern lecture about keeping her Max Clifford tendencies in check: ‘If I hear you’ve been tipping off the press about anyone at Bagley or in the family, particularly me, there’ll be big trouble.’
Jupiter was a beast, reflected Dora, appropriating the family home and all the money when her father died, so Dora, Dicky and their mother Anthea were now crammed into tiny Foxglove Cottage in Bagley village.
Ancient trees stroked the bleached fields with long shadows as Dora reached the outskirts of Larkminster. As she crossed the bridge, the cathedral clock struck eight. Ahead, she could see the beautiful golden houses of the Close, the market and the thriving bustling town. Trotting past St Jimmy’s, the highly successful boys’ school, entering the Shakespeare Estate, Dora was overtaken by an Interflora van heading nervously towards Larks Comp.
No one drove through the Shakespeare Estate by choice because of the glass and needles all over the roads. Screaming and shouting could be heard issuing from broken, boarded-up windows. Discarded fridges and burnt-out cars littered the gardens. An ashen druggie mumbled in the gutter. A gang of youths, hanging round a motorbike, hurled abuse at Dora as she passed.
Dora didn’t care. She called off Cadbury who was taunting a snarling pit bull on a very short lead and looked up enviously at the satellite dishes clustered like black convolvulus on the houses. Her mother was too mean to install Sky in Foxglove Cottage.
Next door to the Shakespeare Estate, as a complete contrast, was a private estate called Cavendish Plaza, which was protected by huge electric gates, security guards and a great abstract in the forecourt, sculpted by Dora’s gallery-owning father’s most awful artist, Colin Casey Andrews, which was enough to frighten off any burglar, thought Dora sourly.
Cavendish Plaza was one of the brainchildren of developer Randal Stancombe, who was slapping houses, shops and supermarkets all over Larkshire and whom her mother also thought was frightfully attractive, but whose hot, devouring, knowing dark eyes made Dora’s flesh crawl.
Cavendish Plaza had its own shops and access to the High Street on the other side. Dora, riding on, came to a chip shop with boarded-up windows and a pub called the Ghost and Castle, then stiffened with interest as she saw the notorious Wolf Pack slouching out of the newsagent’s, loaded up with goodies. Feral Jackson was breaking the cellophane round a chicken tikka sandwich.
Everyone knew Feral. Although not yet fourteen, he was already five feet nine with snake hips, three-foot-wide shoulders and a middle finger permanently jabbing the air. He’d been up before Dora’s mother at the Juvenile Court in the summer for mugging.
‘And gave me such a disgustingly undressing look when we remanded him in custody,’ her mother had complained.
In the end Feral had been sent for a month to a Young Offenders’ Institute, and if he recognized her as her mother’s daughter he’d probably knife her as well. Dora shot off down a side road.
Janna’s arrival at Larks was, in fact, causing universal excitement.
Rod Hyde, head of St Jimmy’s, picked up a magnifying glass to look at a photograph of Janna in the Larkminster Gazette. She had nice breasts and an air of confidence that would soon disappear. Pride comes before a fall. Rod Hyde was full of such little homilies. ‘Good schools are like good parents,’ he was always saying, ‘caring and demanding.’
Rod Hyde was very bald but shaved his remaining hair. He had a firm muscular figure, a ginger beard, and believed in exercise and cold baths. St Jimmy’s’ results had been staggeringly good this year and they were edging nearer Bagley Hall in the league tables.
As a local super head, Rod Hyde was certain his friends, who ran S and C Services, would soon send him into Larks on a rescue mission. He would much enjoy giving Janna Curtis guidance.
Randal Stancombe, property devel
oper, finished working out in his rooftop gymnasium. Before having a shower, he picked up his binoculars and looked down with pride on Cavendish Plaza, his beautiful private estate with its mature trees, still-emerald green lawns and swimming pools, where topless tenants were taking advantage of the Indian summer.
Randal’s hands, however, clenched on his binoculars as he turned them towards Larks Comp. He could see all those ruffians straggling in, scrapping, stopping to light fags or worse. Randal’s tenants were constantly complaining about stolen cars and streets paved with chewing gum.
Janna Curtis looked pretty tasty in her photograph in the Gazette, decided Randal. She might make bold statements about turning the school round, but this Lark had two broken wings. S and C Services were bound to keep her so short of money, she’d soon be desperate for sponsorship. Interesting to see how long she’d take to approach him. Randal loved having power over women.
Randal’s daughter Jade, a very attractive young lady, rising fourteen years of age, was starting her third year at Bagley Hall and dating a fellow pupil, Cosmo Rannaldini, the son of Dame Hermione Harefield, the globally famous diva. One forked out school fees mainly for the contacts. Randal would soon ask Dame Hermione to open his hypermall outside Birmingham.
Over at Bagley Hall, Hengist Brett-Taylor, who’d just spent five weeks in Umbria to avoid the middle classes and those with new money, was drafting a speech for the new pupils’ parents.
‘May I first issue a very warm welcome to all of you here tonight,’ he wrote. ‘But also point out what will rapidly become clear to you as the years roll by: that the headmaster of Bagley Hall is rather like the figurehead on an old wooden sailing ship. It is vaguely decorative and there is a clear understanding that one really ought to have one if one is to be seen doing the proper thing, but it is of course of absolutely no practical use whatsoever and does nothing.’
Hengist’s glow at nearing the top of the country’s league tables in both A and GCSE levels was slightly dimmed by having to face several more massive hurdles at the start of term. In addition, he had to address the first staff meeting, the first assembly, the drinks party or ‘shout-in’ for new staff, not to mention keynote speeches to new pupils and sixth-formers and finally the first sermon in chapel on Sunday week.