by Laurie Lee
‘Well, now, I’m sure they didn’t.’
‘They did! They said: “You’re Laurie Lee, ain’t you? Well, just you sit there for the present.” I sat there all day but I never got it. I ain’t going back there again!
But after a week I felt like a veteran and grew as ruthless as anyone else. Somebody had stolen my baked potato, so I swiped somebody else’s apple. The Infant Room was packed with toys such as I’d never seen before — coloured shapes and rolls of clay, stuffed birds and men to paint. Also a frame of counting beads which our young teacher played like a harp, leaning her bosom against our faces and guiding our wandering fingers….
The beautiful assistant left us at last, and was replaced by an opulent widow. She was tall, and smelt like a cartload of lavender; and wore a hair net, which I thought was a wig. I remember going close up and having a good look - it was clearly too square to be hair.
‘What are you staring at? ’ the widow inquired.
I was much too soft-hearted to answer.
‘Go on. Do tell. You needn’t be shy.’
‘You’re wearing a wig,’ I said.
‘I can assure you I’m not! ’ She went very red.
‘You are. I seen it.’ I said.
The new teacher grew flustered and curiously cross. She took me upon her knee.
‘Now look very close. Is that really a wig? ’
I looked hard, saw the net, and said, ‘Yes.’
‘Well, really!’ she said, while the Infants gaped. ‘I can assure you it’s not a wig! And if you only could watch me getting dressed in the morning you’d know it wasn’t one either.’
She shook me from her knee like a sodden cat, but she’d stirred my imagination/To suggest I might watch her getting dressed in the morning seemed to me both outrageous and wonderful.
This tiny, white-washed Infants’ room was a brief but cosy anarchy. In that short time allowed us we played and wept, broke things, fell asleep, cheeked the teacher, discovered the things we could do to each other, and exhaled our last guiltless days.
My desk companions were those two blonde girls, already puppyishly pretty, whose names and bodies were to distract and haunt me for the next fifteen years of my life. Poppy and Jo were limpet chums; they sat holding hands all day; and there was a female self-possession about their pink sticky faces that made me shout angrily at them.
Vera was another I studied and liked; she was lonely, fuzzy, and short. I felt a curious compassion for stumpy Vera; and it was through her, and no beauty, that I got into trouble and received the first public shock of my life. How it happened was simple, and I was innocent, so it seemed. She came up to me in the playground one morning and held her face close to mine. I had a stick in my hand, so I hit her on the head with it. Her hair was springy, so I hit her again and watched her mouth open up with a yell.
To my surprise a commotion broke out around me, cries of scandal from the older girls, exclamations of horror and heavy censure mixed with Vera’s sobbing wails. I was intrigued, not alarmed, that by wielding a beech stick I was able to cause such a stir. So I hit her again, without spite or passion, then walked off to try something else.
The experiment might have ended there, and having ended would have been forgotten. But no; angry faces surrounded me, very red, all spitting and scolding.
‘Horrid boy! Poor Vera! Little monster! Urgh! We’re going to tell teacher about you! ’
Something was wrong, the world seemed upset, I began to feel vaguely uneasy. I had only hit Vera on her wiry black hair, and now everybody was shouting at me. I ran and hid, feeling sure it would pass, but they hunted me down in the end. Two big righteous girls hauled me out by the ears.
‘You’re wanted in the Big Room, for ’itting Vera. You’re ’alf going to cop it! ’ they said.
So I was dragged to that Room, where I’d never been before, and under the savage eyes of the elder children teacher gave me a scalding lecture. I was confused by now and shaking with guilt. At last I smirked and ran out of the room. I had learnt my first lesson, that I could not hit Vera, no matter how fuzzy her hair. And something else too; that the summons to the Big Room, the policeman’s hand on the shoulder, comes almost always as a complete surprise, and for the crime that one has forgotten.
My brother Jack, who was with me in the Infants, was too clever to stay there long. Indeed he was so bright he made us uncomfortable, and we were all of us glad to get rid of him. Sitting pale in his pinafore, gravely studying, commanding the teacher to bring him fresh books, or to sharpen his pencils, or to make less noise, he was an Infant Freak from the start. So he was promoted to the Big Room with unprecedented promptness, given a desk and a dozenatlases to sit on, from which he continued to bully the teachers in that cold clear voice of his.
But I, myself, was a natural Infant, content to serve out my time, to slop around and whine and idle: and no one suggested I shouldn’t. So I remained long after bright Jack had moved on, the fat lord of my nursery life, skilled at cutting out men from paper, chalking suns on the walls, making snakes from clay, idling voluptuously through the milky days ‘with a new young teacher to feed on. But my time was slowly running out; my Big Room bumps were growing. Suddenly, almost to my dismay, I found that I could count up to a hundred, could write my name in both large and small letters, and subtract certain numbers from each other. I had even just succeeded in subtracting Poppy from Jo, when the call came down from on high. Infant no longer, I was being moved up - the Big Room was ready for me.
I found there a world both adult and tough, with long desks and inkwells, strange maps on the walls, huge boys, heavy boots, scratching pens, groans of labour, and sharp and sudden persecutions. Gone for ever were the infant excuses, the sanctuary of lisping charms. Now I was alone and unprotected, faced by a struggle which required new techniques, where one made pacts and split them, made friends and betrayed them, and fought for one’s place near the stove.
The stove was a symbol of caste among us, the tub of warmth to which we cleaved during the long seven months of winter. It was made of cast-iron and had a noisy mouth which rattled coke and breathed out fumes. It was decorated by a tortoise labelled ‘Slow But Sure’, and in winter it turned red hot. If you pressed a pencil against it, the wood burst into flames; and if you spat on the top, the spit hopped and gambolled like tiny ping-pong balls.
My first days in the Big Room were spent in regret for the young teacher I’d left in the Infants, for her braidedbreasts and unbuttoning hands and her voice of sleepy love. Quite clearly the Big Room boasted no such comforts ; Miss B, the Head Teacher, to whom I was now delivered, being about as physically soothing as a rake.
She was a bunched and punitive little body and the school had christened her Crabby; she had a sour yellow look, lank hair coiled in earphones, and the skin and voice of a turkey. We were all afraid of the gobbling Miss B; she spied, she pried, she crouched, she crept, she pounced-she was a terror.
Each morning was war without declaration; no one knew who would catch it next. We stood to attention, half crippled in our desks, till Miss B walked in, whacked the walls with a ruler, and fixed us with her squinting eye. ‘Good a-morning, children!’ ‘Good morning, Teacher!’ The greeting was like a rattling of swords. Then she would scowl at the floor and begin to growl ‘Ar Farther …’; at which we said the Lord’s Prayer, praised all good things, and thanked God for the health of our King. But scarcely had we bellowed the last Amen than Crabby coiled, uncoiled, and sprang, and knocked some poor boy sideways.
One seldom knew why; one was always off guard, for the punishment preceded the charge. The charge, however, followed hard upon it, to a light shower of angry spitting.
‘Shuffling your feet! Playing with the desk! A-smirking at that miserable Betty! I will not have it. I’ll not, I say. I repeat -1 will not have it! ’
Many a punch-drunk boy in a playground battle, outnumbered and beaten to his knees, would be heard to cry:
‘I will not have it!
I’ll not, I say! I repeats I will not have it! ’ It was an appeal to the code of our common suffering, and called for immediate mercy..span>
So we did not much approve of Crabby - though she was responsible for our excellent reflexes. Apart from this, her teaching was not memorable. She appears in my recollection as merely a militant figure, a hunched-up little creature allspring-coils and slaps - not a monster by any means, but a natural manifestation of what we expected of school.
For school in my day, that day, Cabby’s day, seemed to be designed simply to keep us out of the air and from following the normal pursuits of the fields. Cabby’s science of dates and sums and writing seemed a typical invention of her own, a sour form of fiddling or prison-labour like picking oakum or sewing sacks.
So while the bright times passed, we sat locked in our stocks, our bent backs turned on the valley. The June air infected us with primitive hungers, grass-seed and thistledown idled through the windows, we smelt the fields and were tormented by cuckoos, while every out-of-door sound that came drifting in was a sharp nudge in the solar plexus. The creaking of wagons going past the school, harness-jingle, and the cries of the carters, the calling of cows from the 17-Acre, Fletcher’s chattering mower, gunshot from the warrens - all tugged and pulled at our active wishes till we could have done Miss B a murder.
And indeed there came the inevitable day when rebellion raised its standard, when the tension was broken and a hero emerged whom we would willingly have named streets after. At least, from that day his name was honoured, though we gave him little support at the time….
Spadge Hopkins it was, and I must say we were surprised. He was one of those heavy, full-grown boys, thick-legged, red-fisted, bursting with flesh, designed for the great outdoors. He was nearly fourteen by then, and physically out of scale - at least so far as our school was concerned. The sight of him squeezed into his tiny desk was worse than a bullock in ballet-shoes. He wasn’t much of a scholar; he groaned as he worked, or hacked at his desk with a jack-knife. Miss B took her pleasure in goading him, in forcing him to read out loud; or asking him sudden unintelligible questions which made him flush and stumble.
The great day came; a day of shimmering summer, with the valley outside in a state of leafy levitation. Crabby B was at her sourest, and Spage Hopkins had had enough. He began to writhe in his desk, and roll his eyes, and kick with his boots, and mutter; ‘She’d better look out. ’Er,— Crabby B. She’d better, that’s all. I can tell you. …’
We didn’t quite know what the matter was, in spite of his meaning looks. Then he threw down his pen, said; ‘Sod it all,’ got up, and walked to the door.
‘And where are you going, young man, may I ask?’ said Crabby with her awful leer.
Spadge paused and looked her straight in the eye.
‘If it’s any business of youm.’
We shivered with pleasure at this defiance, Spadge leisurely made for the door.
‘Sit down this instant!’ Crabby suddenly screamed. ‘I won’t have it! ’
‘Ta-ta,’ said Spadge.
Then Crabby sprang like a yellow cat, spitting and clawing with rage. She caught Spadge in the doorway and fell upon him. There was a shameful moment of heavy breathing and scuffling, while the teacher tore at his clothes. Spadge caught her hands in his great red fists and held her at arm’s length, struggling.
‘Come and help me, someone!’ wailed Crabby, demented. But nobody moved; we just watched. We saw Spadge lift her up and place her on the top of the cupboard, then walk out of the door and away. There was a moment of silence, then we all laid down our pens and began to stamp on the floor in unison. Crabby stayed where she was, on top of the cupboard, drumming her heels and weeping.
We expected some terrible retribution to follow, but nothing happened at all. Not even the trouble-spark, Spadge, was called to account — he was simply left alone. From that day Crabby never spoke to him, or crossed his path, or denied him anything at all. He perched idly in his desk, his knees up to his chin, whistling in a world of his own. Sometimes Miss B would consider him narrowly and if he caught her glance he just winked. Otherwise he was free to come and go, and to take time off as he pleased.
But we never rebelled again; things changed. Crabby B was replaced by a new Head Teacher - a certain Miss Wardley from Birmingham. This lady was something quite new in our lives. She wore sharp glass jewellery which winked as she walked, and she sounded her ‘ gees ’ like gongs. But she was fond of singing and she was fond of birds, and she encouraged us in the study of both. She was more sober than Crabby, her reins looser but stronger; and after the first hilarity of her arrival and strangeness, we accepted her proper authority.
Not that she approved very much of me. ‘Fat-and-Lazy’ was the name she called me. After my midday dinner of baked cabbage and bread I would often nod off in my desk. ‘Wake up!’ she would cry, cracking my head with a ruler,‘ you and your little red eyes! ’ She also took exception to my steady sniff, which to me came as natural as breathing. ‘ Go out into the road and have a good blow, and don’t come back till you’re clear.’ But I wouldn’t blow, not for anyone on earth, especially if ordered to do so: so I’d sit out on the wall, indignant and thunderous, and sniff away louder than ever. I wouldn’t budge either, or come back in, till a boy was sent to fetch me. Miss Wardley would greet me with freezing brightness. ‘A little less beastly now? How about bringing a hanky tomorrow? I’m sure we’d all be grateful.’ I’d sit and scowl, then forget to scowl, and would soon be asleep again….
My brothers, by this time, were all with me at school. Jack, already the accepted genius, was long past our scope or help. It was agreed that his brains were of such distinction that they absolved him from mortal contacts. So he was left in a comer where his flashes of brilliance kept him twinkling away like a pin-table. Young Tony came last, but he again was different, being impervious either to learning or authority, importing moreover a kind of outrageous cheekiness so inspired that it remained unanswerable. He would sit all day picking holes in blotting paper, his large eyes deep and knowing, his quick tongue scandalous, his wit defiant, his will set against all instruction. There was nothing anyone could do about him, except to yelp at the things he said.
I alone, the drowsy middleman of these two, found it hard to win Miss Wardley’s approval. I achieved this in the end by writing long faked essays on the lives and habits of otters. I’d never seen an otter, or even gone to look for one, but the essays took her in. They were read out aloud, and even earned me medals, but that’s nothing to boast about.
Our village school was poor and crowded, but in the end I relished it. It had a lively reek of steaming life: boys’ boots, girls’ hair, stoves and sweat, blue ink, white chalk, and shavings. We learnt nothing abstract or tenuous there — just simple patterns of facts and letters, portable tricks of calculation, no more than was needed to measure a shed, write out a bill, read a swine-disease warning. Through the dead hours of the morning, through the long afternoons, we chanted away at our tables. Passers-by could hear our rising voices in our bottled-up room on the bank; ‘ Twelve-inches-one-foot. Three-feet-make-a-yard. Fourteen-pounds-make-a-stone. Eight-stone-a-hundred-weight.’ We absorbed these figures as primal truths declared by some ultimate power. Unhearing, unquestioning, we rocked to our chanting, hammering the gold nails home. ‘Twice-two-are-four. One-God-is-Love. One-Lord-is-King. One-King-is-George. One-George-is-Fifth….’ So it was always; had been, would befor ever; we asked no questions; we didn’t hear what we said; yet neither did we ever forget it.,.
So do I now, through the reiterations of those days, recall that schoolroom which I scarcely noticed - Miss Wardley in glory on her high desk throne, her long throat tinkling with glass. The bubbling stove with its chink of red fire; the old world map as dark as tea; dead field-flowers in jars on the windowsills; the cupboard yawning with dog-eared books. Then the boys and the girls, the dwarfs and the cripples; the slow fat ones and the quick boney ones; giants a
nd louts, angels and squinters - Walt Kerry, Bill Timbrell, Spadge Hopkins, Clergy Green, the Ballingers and Browns, Betty Gleed, Clarry Hogg, Sam and Sixpence, Poppy and Jo - we were ugly and beautiful, scrofulous, waited, ring-wormed, and scabbed at the knees, we were noisy, crude, intolerant, cruel, stupid, and superstitious. But we moved together out of the clutch of the Fates, inhabitors of a world without doom; with a scratching, licking and chewing of pens, a whisper and passing of jokes, a titter of tickling, a grumble of labour, a vague stare at the wall in a dream. … ‘ Oh, miss, please miss, can I go round the back? ’
An unwilling nod permits me. I stamp out noisily into a swoop of fresh air and a musical surge of birds. All around me now is the free green world, with Mrs Birt hanging out her washing. I take stock of myself for a moment, alone. I hear the schoolroom’s beehive hum. Of course I don’t really belong to that lot at all; I know I’m something special,, a young king perhaps placed secretly here in order to mix with the commoners. There is clearly a mystery about my birth, I feel so unique and majestic. One day, I know, the secret will be told. A coach with footmen will appear suddenly at our cottage, and Mother (my mother?) will weep. The family will stand very solemn and respectful, and I shall drive off to take up my throne. I’ll be generous, of course, not proud at all; for my brothers there shall be no dungeons. Rather will
I feed them on cakes and jellies, and I’ll provide all my sisters with princes. Sovereign mercy shall be their portion, little though they deserve it….
I return to the schoolroom and Miss Wardley scowls (she shall curtsy when I am king). But all this is forgotten when Walt Kerry leans over and demands the results of my sums. ‘Yes, Walt. Of course, Walt. Here, copy them out. They ain’t hard -1 done ’em all.’ He takes them, the bully, as his tributary right, and I’m proud enough to give them. The little Jim Fern, sitting beside me, looks up from his ruined pages. ‘Ain’t you a good scholar! You and your Jack. I wish I was a good scholar like thee.’ He gives me a sad, adoring look, and I begin to feel much better.