03 Dear Teacher

by Jack Sheffield

  ‘Sympathy,’ murmured Sally thoughtfully.

  ‘Compassion,’ agreed Joseph with an encouraging nod.

  ‘Harmony,’ said Anne as if in a trance.

  I found myself staring out of the window. On the school field, children with suntanned faces ran and skipped and, in the window boxes, the fiery flowers of geraniums were vivid in the autumn sunshine.

  ‘A stunning speech,’ said Sally.

  ‘Almost evangelical,’ said Joseph.

  ‘What do you think, Jack?’ asked Anne.

  Everyone turned to look at me. I knew that hesitation would be fatal. ‘Er, yes, I agree,’ I said. ‘Er … harmony,’ I added.

  Vera scanned the rest of her speech and then picked up her free copy of Miss Denham’s motivational book. She was determined to put her philosophy into practice. ‘I really must show all the women in the Institute that we should avoid conflict and find inner peace,’ she continued, sitting down again at her desk and shuffling her pages back into order.

  ‘Well said, Vera,’ said Anne.

  ‘Also,’ said Vera, glancing quickly at Sally, ‘I thought I would use the vision of Margaret Thatcher for a happy and prosperous nation.’

  Sally spluttered into her coffee. It was widely known that Sally’s politics resided closer to Arthur Scargill’s than our new prime minister’s. ‘You mean Thatcher the milk-snatcher,’ grumbled Sally, who had never forgiven Margaret Thatcher for her controversial decision in October 1970, as education secretary in Ted Heath’s government, to abolish free school milk for children over seven. Anne gave Sally a ‘This is neither the time nor place’ look.

  ‘Sorry, Vera,’ said Sally. ‘It’s a wonderful speech.’

  Vera folded her speech neatly and replaced it carefully in her handbag.

  ‘Well done,’ said Joseph and, looking slightly relieved, walked out to the car park to drive back to Morton.

  ‘It will be excellent,’ said Anne reassuringly.

  ‘Avoid conflict,’ said Sally.

  ‘Inner peace,’ said Jo.

  ‘I’m sure it will go well for you, Vera,’ I said.

  Vera responded with a slightly nervous smile and settled down at her desk once again. She put a sheet of carbon paper between two sheets of white typing paper, fed them into her Royal typewriter and began to hammer out the title ‘Replacement of School Gates’.

  At the end of school the children sauntered down the drive, groups of mothers wandered over to Nora’s Coffee Shop and slowly the school became silent once again. I sat down at my desk and had just written in the school logbook ‘County Hall authorized the replacement of the school gates’ when Anne, Sally and Jo suddenly burst into the office.

  ‘You had better come and see this, Jack,’ said Anne.

  We all walked out of school and down the driveway towards the sound of raised voices.

  ‘But it’s on t’list,’ insisted Mr Trump. His little white van was parked under the horse-chestnut trees at the front of the school and his colleague, dressed in white overalls, was attempting to paint the school gates.

  ‘What is the point of painting these gates, only to replace them on Monday?’ shouted Vera.

  ‘If it’s on t’list it ’as t’be done,’ persisted Mr Trump.

  ‘Never mind your list, what about common sense?’ said Vera.

  Ruby the caretaker had left her cleaning and joined us on the school drive.

  ‘You tell ’im, Miss Evans,’ yelled Ruby, waving her broom.

  ‘You will pack up immediately and stop wasting tax payers’ money,’ shouted Vera.

  ‘Hear, hear!’ shouted Jo and Sally.

  ‘But it’s on t’list,’ said Mr Trump nervously waving his clipboard.

  Vera finally snapped. ‘You stupid little man,’ she shouted. I had never seen her so angry. Then she grabbed his clipboard, ripped off the pink maintenance sheet and tore it up before his eyes. ‘Now it’s not on the list any more, is it?’ She stuffed the torn pieces in the bib pocket of his overalls and walked back up the drive.

  Mr Trump and his friend jumped back into the van and roared off while Ruby and Sally cheered.

  At that moment a smart, top-of-the-range Land-Rover turned into the school gates and drove smoothly up the drive. The distinctive figure of Lady Alexandra Denham wound down her car window and slowed up alongside the president of the Ragley and Morton Women’s Institute. Vera was striding, red-faced with fury, towards the school entrance.

  ‘Good afternoon, Vera,’ said Lady Denham.

  ‘Oh, good afternoon, Lady Denham,’ said Vera, quickly trying to regain composure.

  ‘Looking forward to this evening?’ said Lady Denham.

  ‘Of course, Lady Denham,’ said Vera, a little breathlessly.

  ‘Just remind me, Vera,’ said Lady Denham as she stepped out of the Land-Rover, ‘what’s your subject for tonight?’

  ‘Peace and harmony, Lady Denham,’ said Vera, her fury gradually subsiding.

  ‘Jolly good show, Vera,’ said Her Ladyship with a grin. ‘You can’t beat a bit of peace and harmony.’

  Chapter Three

  Jimmy Savile Cleans Our Windows

  Following the new window-cleaning contract from County Hall, Witherspoons Window Cleaners of Easington cleaned the school windows today and will return each month.

  Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:

  Monday, 1 October 1979

  IT WAS 8.30 a.m. on the first day of October and, outside the staff-room window, the season was changing. The hammock webs of busy spiders glistened in the morning sunlight and in the hedgerow the red hips of dog roses heralded darker days. Robins and wrens sang their autumn songs to claim their territory, while goldfinches plundered the seeds of the tall teasels.

  Meanwhile, Ruby the caretaker pushed her galvanized bucket to one side and leaned on the staff-room door. It was clear that the wonders of nature were not uppermost in her mind.

  ‘Ah want t’look like ’er in Abba,’ said Ruby.

  Ruby Smith weighed twenty stones and, in her extra-large double X, bright-orange overall, she looked a long way from a Swedish superstar.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Not that blonde lass,’ said Ruby – ‘t’other one.’

  It was unusual for Ruby to be so late in putting away her mop and bucket. Her cheeks were brightly flushed with the exertion of mopping the wood-block floor.

  ‘She’s called Anni Frid,’ said Jo, glancing up from her Nuffield Book of Science Experiments.

  ‘That’s a funny name,’ said Ruby.

  Sally put down her Cosmopolitan magazine. Her knowledge of pop music was generally regarded as second to none. ‘Jo’s right, Ruby, and the blonde one is called Agnetha,’ agreed Sally. ‘Originally they were called ‘Bjorn and Benny, Agnetha and Anni’, but that was a bit of a mouthful, so they decided on the acronym ABBA.’

  Ruby looked puzzled. She thought acronyms worked in a circus.

  Vera walked into the staff-room from the school office and handed out the attendance registers. She had heard the conversation and was puzzled by Ruby’s sudden interest in new hairstyles. With six children and an unemployed husband, Ruby rarely had enough spare cash to have a hair-do. However, Vera had taken Ruby under her wing and always took an interest in the somewhat dysfunctional life of our cheerful caretaker.

  ‘So what is it about this singer that you like, Ruby?’ asked Vera.

  ‘It’s ’er fancy perm, Miss Evans,’ said Ruby. ‘It’s reight smart an’ Jimmy says mine’s same colour. So ah’m thinking of going t’Diane’s ’Air Salon.’

  ‘Good idea, Ruby,’ said Vera. ‘Diane made a lovely job of Nora Pratt’s hair when you won that singing competition.’

  Ruby smiled with happy memories of a special day in her life.

  ‘By the way, who’s Jimmy?’ I asked.

  Ruby’s cheeks flushed even more. ‘Jimmy Witherspoon, Mr Sheffield – that new window cleaner from Easington.’ She pointed out of the win
dow at a grubby white van in the car park. The words JIMMY THE SHINE were printed in large letters on the side.

  ‘ ’E says ’e’s got t’contract t’clean them big windows outside ’cause o’ that new union rule,’ said Ruby breathlessly.

  Vera selected an official-looking letter from her desk and frowned. ‘It’s all here, Mr Sheffield,’ she said stonily. ‘The union representative, a certain Miss Plumtree, has written to inform us that caretakers must not clean windows above six feet in height.’

  I vaguely remembered the spate of recent circulars from County Hall that explained the new Health and Safety rules relating to caretakers. The rules were so complicated I had left Vera to make sense of them. I decided to go outside and meet our new window cleaner.

  Jimmy Witherspoon was a short, wiry man with a Status Quo T-shirt, grubby denim jacket, skin-tight blue jeans and battered Kicker boots with an incongruous red-leather, flower-shaped cut-out attached to his boot-lace. Around his neck he wore a tarnished chain with a large shiny pendant on which the word Jimmy was inscribed.

  He was roping a large extendable wooden ladder to the roof rack of his van and, as I approached, he shook his incredibly long hair in an affected way. Dyed platinum blond and parted down the centre, it hung in cascading waves round his shoulders. A large white towelling headband proclaiming in bright-red letters LOVE MACHINE completed the ensemble.

  ‘Now then, now then, now then,’ said Jimmy cheerfully with a brown-toothed smile.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘ ’Ow’s about that, then?’ said Jimmy, nodding towards the windows.

  He reminded me of someone but I couldn’t place him. ‘Oh, yes, er, thank you, Jimmy,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Ruby will be very grateful.’

  ‘Y’not wrong,’ said Jimmy with an evil leer. He tapped the side of his nose with a nicotine-stained finger.

  Puzzled, I just stared at him. He seemed to be speaking another language. Then the penny dropped. He was trying to imitate Jimmy Savile, the Leeds-born disc jockey. ‘Now then, now then, now then,’ was one of Jimmy Savile’s catchphrases. Quite frankly, though, if you took away Jimmy Witherspoon’s long, flowing hair he was really nothing like the Yorkshire icon.

  ‘Is there anything to sign, Jimmy?’ I asked, eager to get back inside.

  ‘Jus’ m’pink sheet, Mr Sheffield, an’ then ah jus’ need a quick word wi’ Ruby afore ah go.’

  I signed his sheet and left him looking at his reflection in the van window while he stroked his flowing locks.

  Ruby glanced at him as she hurried out of school.

  Jimmy leaned casually against his van and shouted across the car park: ‘Ah’ll be in T’Royal Oak tonight, Ruby.’

  ‘If ah go, it’ll be wi’ my Ronnie,’ retorted Ruby.

  ‘Ah’ll buy y’one o’ them fancy cocktails,’ yelled Jimmy with a nonchalant flick of his hair. ‘An’ ah’ll mek sure it ’as a humbrella in it.’

  As Ruby trotted down the cobbled drive she reflected that in all her married life Ronnie had never bought her a cocktail. At the school gates she paused and looked back at Jimmy, who was adjusting his headband in his rearview mirror, and she smiled to herself. When she finally arrived at her cramped little council house at number 7, School View, she stopped to look at the overgrown garden and shook her head in despair. The unkempt lawn was littered with old motorcycle parts. Ronnie had promised to tidy the garden three years ago but always managed to find an excuse.

  Ruby’s husband, Ronnie Smith, was one of the country’s two million unemployed and she had given up hope that he would ever get a job. Apart from pigeon-racing, his only hobbies included managing the Ragley Rovers football team and drinking large quantities of Tetley’s bitter.

  Thirty years ago, in 1949, as a slim, attractive sixteen-year-old, Ruby had fallen in love with Yorkshire’s unlikeliest soldier. National Service awaited the country’s eighteen-year-olds and Ronnie, as a new conscript, was about to earn twenty-eight shillings a week. Although the average wage at the time was eight pounds, eight shillings and sixpence, this amount was a fortune for the habitually unemployed Ronnie.

  When Ronnie left the army he had learned little of any use. His frequent punishments had included whitewashing lumps of coal, cutting a lawn with a pair of scissors and scrubbing the cookhouse floor with a toothbrush. As Ruby sat at her kitchen table and drank tea from a chipped Robertson’s Golly mug, she thought about her children.

  Her eldest son, twenty-eight-year-old Andy, was a corporal in the army and twenty-six-year-old Racquel, a chocolate-box packer at the Joseph Rowntree factory, lived in York with her husband. Her other four children still lived with Ruby in their council house. Duggie, a twenty-four-year-old undertaker’s assistant with the nickname ‘Deadly’, loved his mother’s cooking so much he vowed he would never leave home. Nineteen-year-old Sharon was going steady with the local milkman; seventeen-year-old Natasha had recently left Easington School and started work as an assistant in Diane’s Hair Salon; and the baby of the family, six-year-old Hazel, was a rosy-cheeked happy little girl in Jo Hunter’s class. Ruby loved them all and looked round the silent kitchen. She remembered the happy days of her life when they were growing up around her and she missed all their tears and tantrums.

  She also wondered what it would be like to meet Jimmy Witherspoon in The Royal Oak and run her fingers through his gorgeous hair. It really was spectacular. Then she glanced at Ronnie’s spare Leeds United bobble hat hanging on the coat peg on the kitchen door and sighed deeply. As she walked into her cluttered kitchen to clear up the breakfast bowls she began to sing ‘I am sixteen, going on seventeen’ from her favourite musical, The Sound of Music.

  Back in school, after I had collected the children’s dinner money my morning lessons went well and I was delighted that, even though Jodie Cuthbertson’s comprehension still left a lot to be desired, her spelling had finally improved. She was beginning to use her dictionary at last.

  ‘There y’are, Mr Sheffield,’ said Jodie as she put her English comprehension notebook on top of the pile on my desk. She had written: ‘Lots of mummies used to live in Ancient Egypt. They wrote in a funny language called hydraulics.’ When the bell went for morning playtime, I was ready for my morning coffee, particularly after Tony Ackroyd had written: ‘One horsepower is the amount of energy needed to pull one horse.’

  Vera had prepared five mugs of hot milky coffee and was showing Anne the front page of her Daily Telegraph when I walked into the staff-room. ‘Doesn’t she look wonderful in that scarf?’ she said in admiration. The front-page photograph showed a confident-looking Mrs Thatcher standing alongside Herr Schmidt, the West German chancellor, while reviewing a guard of honour in Bonn.

  ‘She could do with being back at home to sort out this ITV strike,’ said Sally grumpily. ITV workers wanted a 5 to 10 per cent pay rise to end their seven-week strike but there seemed little hope of a resolution.

  Vera ignored the perceived criticism of her political heroine and changed the subject. ‘And Miss Henderson rang, Mr Sheffield.’ She glanced at her spiral-bound notebook. ‘She said she would be in The Royal Oak at seven thirty.’

  I looked up. ‘Laura?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Sheffield,’ replied Vera with the merest hint of disapproval.

  Anne, Sally and Jo suddenly seemed to find the view out of the staff-room window of particular interest. For the rest of the school day thoughts of the two sisters, Beth and Laura, kept flicking across my mind.

  * * *

  At a quarter past seven I pulled up near the duck pond outside The Royal Oak. The bar was crowded when I walked in as the members of the Ragley Rovers football team were eager to quench their thirst after a brief training session. Their manager, Ronnie Smith, was already on his second pint of Tetley’s bitter and Ruby was sitting at the bench seat under the dartboard with her son Duggie. In the far corner, the familiar click-click of a domino game could be heard as four old farmers, all of them wealthy enough to purchase The Royal Oak, battled fier
cely to win the five-pence stake, or ‘one shilling’ as they called it, in their weekly game of threes-and-fives.

  In the taproom Don Bradshaw, the landlord, was standing on a chair behind the bar, fixing a shelf bracket to the wall. Don was an ex-wrestler and the electric drill looked tiny in his giant fist. His wife, the buxom Sheila, was bending over to hold the chair steady. Meanwhile, Ragley’s favourite bin men, Dave Robinson, the Ragley Rovers captain, and his cousin, Malcolm Robinson, were staring in utter confusion at this DIY project. As Dave was a six-feet-four-inch goalkeeper and Malcolm was a five-feet-four-inch midfield maestro, they viewed this dramatic change in their familiar surroundings from a different perspective.

  ‘What’s goin’ on, Don? Y’can’t ’ave a telly in our taproom,’ said Big Dave. ‘It’ll be an extraction.’

  ‘Y’reight there, Dave,’ said Little Malcolm, who always agreed with his cousin. ‘It’ll be a big extraction.’

  ‘Distraction,’ corrected Stevie ‘Supersub’ Coleclough and then wished he hadn’t.

  Stevie, the frail number 12 who rarely got a game, was the only member of the football team with any sort of academic qualification and regarded himself as the brains of the group. Unfortunately his intellect was not immediately evident from his latest multicoloured tank top, yet another gift from his colour-blind Aunty Maureen from Pontefract. She had certainly exceeded herself on this occasion with a startling red, white and blue horizontal-striped creation. Maureen had attempted to integrate large letters into the pattern across the chest. However, instead of the intended word STRIKER, after difficulty with the letter K, it finally looked like STRIPPER.

  ‘Shurrup, y’big soft stripper!’ shouted Big Dave.

  Stevie’s cheeks glowed bright red, clashing horribly with his freckles and red hair. He glanced down forlornly at his chest and shut up.

  ‘Pubs in London ’ave tellies,’ shouted Sheila Bradshaw from the other end of the bar. She looked in admiration at Don. ‘ ’E’s not backwards in coming forwards is my Don.’ Sheila leaned over the bar once again in her low-cut blouse to reveal her astonishing cleavage and, momentarily, the footballers were distracted.