03 Dear Teacher

by Jack Sheffield

  ‘Shall I be mother?’ she said whimsically and she picked up the delicate silver tea strainer and poured the tea from the elegant silver teapot. Then she smiled that familiar warm smile and nodded towards an old advertisement that stated boldly: Eat Sweets and Grow Thin – Chocolate is a Cure for Weak Hearts. At least that’s what a certain German food expert, Dr Frederick Bosser, had believed.

  It was a happy time and we chatted about her plans for her new school library and the momentum that seemed to be gathering in the new government for some form of common school curriculum. Then, right out of the blue, she mentioned Laura.

  ‘Laura’s going out with Desmond, her new boss.’

  ‘Oh, good. I’m pleased for her,’ I said.

  Beth looked curiously at me for a moment. ‘I’m sure she still thinks a lot about you, Jack.’

  ‘She was always good company,’ I replied.

  Beth rotated the tiny bowl of assorted sugar cubes in front of her. ‘Yes,’ she said simply. We both stared out of the window deep in our own thoughts. ‘I always dreamed of being a headteacher, Jack,’ said Beth, suddenly changing the subject.

  ‘I know,’ I replied.

  ‘But it’s not everything …’

  Then the spell was broken as a street busker across the street began playing the haunting theme from Doctor Zhivago on an ancient accordion. Fifteen minutes later, Beth paid the bill and we walked out into the sunshine.

  After window-shopping in Stonegate, we wandered into York Minster and, immediately, gazed around us in awe at the sights within this wonderful building. Only the tap-tap of heels on the stone floor disturbed the hushed silence and we paused in front of the choir screen, carved with the figures of the Kings of England from William I to Henry VI. They looked down at us dispassionately and steadfastly, fixed in time, staring into the still air and silent spaces.

  From the Minster we walked towards the great gateway of Bootham Bar and there, across the road, excited groups of children, with mothers and fathers in close attendance, were filing into the art gallery. Beth and I walked into the main hall, where a large crowd had gathered and an officious-looking local government officer stood up to introduce the main guest, who had flown in from America.

  ‘It gives me great pleasure to welcome the distinguished artist from across the seas, the man who was described in the Arts section of the Yorkshire Post as “a post-Impressionist genius of shape and colour”. So please welcome the American pop artist Mr Randy Finkleman III.’

  We all clapped while a gangling figure ambled to the front and stood there in skin-tight blue, stonewashed Wrangler jeans and a New York Jets T-shirt. Then he flashed his perfect white teeth, shook his carefully permed Art Garfunkle hair and tossed the end of his pink silk scarf casually over his shoulder. Unfortunately it snagged on his pendulous and very sparkly single earring and there followed an embarrassing moment while the lady curator of the art gallery helped him to untangle it.

  Then he stood feet astride in his high-heeled cowboy boots and addressed the audience. ‘Mah good friends, it’s a plee-sure t’be back in your pretty lil’ town of York, England. Ah do declare mah exhibition well an’ truly open.’

  The first part of the collection was based on his early life that included fishing for his supper in a boat off New York harbour. I quickly concluded that Randy was not merely a fisherman but more a piscatorial artist.

  Thirty-six of Randy’s paintings were displayed on the first large wall of the gallery and the children’s art exhibition followed on. Betsy Icklethwaite’s painting had been mounted immediately next to the American legend’s final piece of work, a colourful impression of Roy Rogers’ horse, Trigger.

  Beth and I met up with Sally, Anne and Jo and studied the list of exhibits printed on the programme. Number 37 was ‘“Daddy’s Best Friend” by Betsy Icklethwaite, age 6’.

  ‘I see what you mean, Sally,’ said Beth. ‘It really is a terrific painting.’

  Suddenly Randy and his entourage arrived and began postulating with knowing looks and self-satisfied nods in front of us.

  ‘This is quite wonderful,’ said the art critic of the local paper. ‘Such immediacy of line and colour.’ He stroked his goatee beard, stared at Betsy Icklethwaite’s painting and nodded with the assurance of an artistically superior human being.

  ‘I agree,’ said the lady curator, not to be outdone.

  ‘Very, er … impressionistic,’ said the local government officer.

  The press photographer, in a hurry to get to his next appointment, a Max Bygraves sing-along at the local home for retired gentlefolk, captured the moment. The art critic smiled serenely, the lady curator was pleased she’d had her roots done and the local government officer assumed his ‘I’m in charge’ look. Randy was puzzled as he knew he had never painted a zebra watching television. However, as he lived his life in a transcendental parallel universe, it didn’t seem to matter so long as people kept telling him he was the best thing since Picasso and sliced bread, preferably in that order.

  So it was that little Betsy Icklethwaite’s prize cow was immortalized and the newspaper cutting featured for the rest of the school year on the staff-room noticeboard.

  Beth and I enjoyed our time together and she agreed to call into Bilbo Cottage on her way home. I bought a fish-and-chips supper and, at eight o’clock, we settled down to watch the Eurovision Song Contest, broadcast from The Hague, in the Netherlands. Beth laughed as Terry Wogan described the Luxembourg entry that featured a large man dressed as a penguin. Sadly, after the United Kingdom’s success in 1976, when Brotherhood of Man won with ‘Save All Your Kisses for Me’, this year’s entry, ‘Love Enough for Two’ by Prima Donna, was a disappointing third and the contest was won by Ireland’s Johnny Logan with ‘What’s Another Year’. But it was a relaxing end to the day and Beth kissed me on the cheek as she left.

  For the first time in many months, I washed the dishes with a smile on my face.

  Three miles away in Ragley village, life was not progressing quite so smoothly for Billy Icklethwaite. At the recent North of England Show at Ryedale, Billy had won the coveted award for the finest cow in Yorkshire and was determined to share his success with his farming friends in the Pig and Ferret. When he arrived home, after several pints of Tetley’s bitter, he clearly picked the wrong moment to present the engraved trophy to his wife with the words, ‘Thish ish f’you, shweet’art.’

  Betty read the inscription ‘Best Beast 1980’ and was not impressed, as Billy quickly found out. Little Betsy was tucked up in bed at the time and never did get the chance to paint a post-Impressionist masterpiece entitled, ‘Where Mummy Put Daddy’s Trophy’.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Who Shot JR?

  School closed today for the annual May Day holiday and will reopen on Tuesday, 6 May. Children from Mrs Pringle’s country dancing group will take part in a display of maypole dancing on the village green on Monday, 5 May.

  Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:

  Friday, 2 May 1980

  TIMOTHY PRATT CAREFULLY applied a small quantity of superglue to JR Ewing’s left ear. With the infinite care of a surgeon he attached the small piece of plaster and leaned a cast-iron boot scraper against it to hold it in place. Then he stood back to admire his handiwork. ‘Bloody vandals!’ he muttered and walked back into his Hardware Emporium.

  JR Ewing was by far his favourite Dallas character. Sue Ellen Ewing was too flashy for his taste and Bobby Ewing was just too good-looking. He liked the way JR’s stetson was tilted at a jaunty angle over one eye, although that might have been caused by a slight fault in the plaster cast. Even so, he knew the Dallas range of garden gnomes, displayed on the forecourt of his Emporium, would prove even more popular than the seven dwarfs. If he could just find out who was damaging them, then life would be perfect.

  It was lunchtime on Friday, 2 May, and the Revd Joseph Evans had walked into the staff-room at a critical moment in our discussion.

  Jo was animat
ed. ‘But it has to be his wife, Sue Ellen,’ she pleaded.

  ‘It’s too obvious,’ I said.

  ‘And she would be too drunk to pull the trigger,’ added Anne decisively.

  ‘It’s probably Cliff Barnes who shot him,’ I said. ‘They were always arguing.’

  ‘Goodness me, has someone been shot?’ asked a confused Joseph.

  ‘JR,’ said Vera, without emotion, her head buried in her Daily Telegraph.

  ‘JR?’ said Joseph.

  ‘Yes, Joseph. I’m afraid to say that JR Ewing has been shot,’ said Vera stonily.

  ‘Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that,’ said Joseph, none the wiser. ‘Let’s hope he gets better soon.’

  Vera was reading an article by Mary Whitehouse, the ‘clean-up television’ campaigner. After attending her ‘Survival in the Eighties’ lecture in the Tempest Anderson Hall in the Museum Gardens in York, chaired by the distinguished Michael Alison MP, Vera had added her name to the thirty thousand members of the National Listeners and Viewers Association. In Vera’s opinion, violence on television should be banned. On the other hand, she thought it would be interesting to find out who shot JR.

  Meanwhile, in the school hall, the merry sounds of English country dancing could be heard at full volume. Sally Pringle was hard at work preparing a performance of maypole dancing with the girls in her class. The May Day celebrations, to be held on the village green on Monday, 5 May, were always a very special attraction and the whole village turned out to enjoy their public holiday. This year’s entertainment included the parade of the May queen, an exhibition of maypole dancing, a local group of morris dancers and Old Tommy Piercy’s famous hog roast.

  At the end of school, Ruby was polishing the office door handle, something she always did when she wanted a chat. ‘Ah’m reight proud of our Natasha,’ said Ruby. Her daughter Natasha had been selected by the village hall committee to be the May queen and Ruby remembered the day long ago when, in 1950, as a slim teenager, she had been queen for a day.

  ‘I’m really pleased for you, Ruby, and we’ll all be there to see the parade,’ I said.

  ‘And the Buttle twins are really excited to be her attendants,’ said Jo. ‘Mrs Buttle brought in their dresses to show my class.’

  ‘Ah’m gonna press our Ronnie’s suit,’ said Ruby, polishing the handle with a sudden fierce determination. ‘ ’E’ll look smart … or ’e’ll know what for,’ she added menacingly.

  On Saturday morning I pulled up outside Nora’s Coffee Shop in bright May sunshine. I had half an hour to spare before driving on to Morton village to pick up Beth. All the local headteachers had been invited to look round the site of the Coppergate excavation. From there, we had decided, we would go to the Odeon cinema, so a good day was in store.

  As I got out of my car I heard loud music. Clint Ramsbottom was walking down the other side of the High Street with his big brother, Shane. On his shoulder Clint carried his huge black plastic Hitachi ghetto-blaster. The name 3-D SUPER WOOFER was printed in large white letters on the front in between the stereo speakers, from which a deafening sound emerged.

  Ominously, Shane was also carrying something over his shoulder. It was a rifle and I presumed he was going ‘rabbiting’. Both men waved in acknowledgement and I waved back. Conversation was pointless because of the noise. However, as they strutted along, nodding their heads in time to ‘Rat Trap’ by the Boomtown Rats, unknown to Clint the new technology of the 1980s was about to cross his path.

  The members of the Ragley Ladies Keep Fit Club were jogging towards them, including Petula Dudley-Palmer. Attached to her waist was a tiny portable cassette player, from which emerged a pair of wires culminating in tiny ear-pieces.

  After looking longingly at a photograph of Omar Sharif in her Daily Express, Petula Dudley-Palmer had donned her lime-green Lycra jogging suit, scarlet ankle warmers and a fluorescent yellow headband. She was in a world of her own as she jogged in time to Abba’s ‘Mamma Mia’. Her husband, Geoffrey, had responded with a mixture of horror and astonishment when his wife began to fantasize about not only having a figure like Olivia Newton John but also a skin-tight outfit to match. Predictably, he decided he would do all he could to support her latest whim. His contribution was the revolutionary Sony Walkman. Although the early models were very expensive, with little change from one hundred pounds, he knew it would keep his wife happy for a short while.

  It was a seminal moment in the life of Clint Ramsbottom, local farm labourer and would-be eighties fashion icon. As the ladies trundled past, he looked in astonishment at the wires that led to the tiny ear-pieces in Petula Dudley-Palmer’s ears and then stared in dismay at his ghetto-blaster, which was the size of a small coffin. Clint knew, in that moment, his life had changed.

  He had never heard of Akio Morita, Sony’s Japanese co-founder and champion of the new technology, but Akio knew him … or, rather, people like Clint. He understood that the Clints of this world would go to great lengths to listen to their music in their cars and in the streets. So Akio’s latest convert stared not at the shapely bottoms of the Lycra-clad ladies but at the small plastic box attached to Petula Dudley-Palmer’s waistband. For Clint there was no turning back and, when Amelia Duff looked out of her Post Office doorway, little did she realize that it was the last time she would ever complain about Clint and his ghetto-blaster.

  Meanwhile, in Pratt’s Hardware Emporium, Timothy Pratt was washing glue off his hands. Tidy Tim had few luxuries in his life but he always bought good-quality soap from Prudence Golightly at the General Stores. Cussins Imperial Leather was his favourite. The smell was fragrant and the lather was rich. He washed his hands thoroughly and took care to replace the soap so that the lettering on its convex surface was the right way up. Then he dried his hands on a blue-and-white-striped towel and hung it back over the rail so that the stripes were exactly horizontal. When everything was in order he stepped back and nodded in satisfaction. Tidy Tim liked horizontal stripes.

  Then, attracted by the noise of Clint’s ghetto-blaster, he went to stand by the front door of his Emporium. Tidy Tim stared hard at Shane Ramsbottom’s rifle, glanced down at his neat formation of garden gnomes and nodded knowingly. Shane was definitely a suspect.

  The Three Degrees were singing ‘My Simple Heart’ on the jukebox when I walked into the Coffee Shop but, strangely, Dorothy wasn’t swaying to the music as she usually did. I perched on a stool at the counter next to Little Malcolm.

  ‘ ’Ello, Mr Sheffield,’ said Little Malcolm.

  ‘Hello, Malcolm,’ I said and then glanced towards the forlorn figure of Dorothy.

  ‘How are you, Dorothy?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s upset, Mr Sheffield,’ said Malcolm quickly. ‘Summat t’do wi’ a freebie.’

  ‘Norra freebie, Malcolm … it’s called a phobia. Ah read it in Smash ’Its, so it mus’ be true,’ retorted Dorothy and absent-mindedly stirred another three spoonfuls of sugar into Little Malcolm’s tea. ‘It said a lorra creative people get ’em, these phobias … ’cept f’Lynda Carter o’ course.’

  I recalled that Lynda Carter, in her superhero guise of Wonder Woman, was Dorothy’s idol. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Dorothy. So what’s the phobia?’ I asked.

  ‘Dreams, Mister Sheffield. Ah jus’ can’t stop dreaming.’

  Little Malcolm sipped his tea and winced but gallantly said nothing. I surveyed the display of jam doughnuts on the counter. They looked as depressed as Dorothy.

  ‘It’s just a coffee, please, Dorothy … Er, so what are your dreams about?’ I asked somewhat reluctantly. Conversations with Dorothy rarely followed a logical path.

  ‘Ah keep dreaming Wonder Woman’s losing ’er powers an’ she’s waiting for a super’ero t’save ’er.’

  Little Malcolm’s neck blushed crimson under his council donkey jacket and, as he sipped his extra-sweet tea, he wondered if Dorothy would ever dream about a five-feet-four-inch bin man coming to her rescue.

  Nora Pratt was sitting on a sto
ol behind the counter and reading the Yorkshire Evening Press. ‘This is intewesting,’ she said: ‘that weally good dancer, Fwed Astaire, is eighty an’ it says ’e’s gonna mawy a thirty-five-year-old, Miss Wobyn Smith, who wides wacehorses.’

  ‘Ah think it’s wonderful,’ said Dorothy, fluttering her false eyelashes at Little Malcolm. ‘Ah’ve always liked older men.’

  In that moment, Little Malcolm vowed to buy a car so that on their next date they wouldn’t have to go to a dance in a bin wagon.

  As I waited for my coffee I looked up high on the wall, where the theatrical memories of Nora’s time in the Ragley Amateur Dramatic Society were displayed. Nora was wearing the same Alpine leather corset in the posters of Snow White, Aladdin and Puss in Boots, but this did not detract from the overall impression that, in the firmament of thespian gems, Nora knew with absolute conviction that she was the jewel in the crown.

  Finally, I sat down and enjoyed the usual hubbub of conversation. Today’s topics included whom Prince Charles might marry, how to solve the Rubik Cube and, of course, who shot JR?

  ‘Ah think it’s Kwisten, Sue Ellen’s sister,’ said Nora.

  ‘Y’mean ’er who wears Maxi-Moist Lipstick from Max Factor with eighty-three per cent moisturizer?’ said Dorothy without looking up from filing her nails.

  Nora stared at the five-feet-eleven-inch would-be model and wondered why it was that Dorothy lived in a strange parallel universe.

  Beth was waiting for me when I pulled up outside her house. Next to her front door, the Zephirine Drouhin climbing rose was bursting with vigorous shoots and new life. She smiled as she walked down the path in her fashionable light-beige mackintosh with button-down epaulettes. It flapped open in the breeze to reveal a floral-patterned dress that gave a first hint of summer days ahead.