06 Educating Jack

by Jack Sheffield

  It was a happy occasion and Rupert was in a reflective mood. ‘Do you know, Jack,’ he said wistfully, ‘the sun never used to set on the British Empire.’

  ‘Times change, Major,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly, my boy,’ he said, ‘and time is something that is slipping away.’ He looked at Vera and she gave him a gentle smile. Meanwhile, she was reflecting on those happy days in her life, strung together like a necklace of special memories.

  The festive evening was drawing to its close when Joseph found time for a private word with Vera. ‘I think we should put a date in the church diary … for December,’ he said simply.

  Vera squeezed his hand. ‘The spirit of the Lord has always been in your eyes, Joseph,’ she said quietly.

  ‘And in your soul, my dear sister,’ said Joseph.

  ‘We’re moving on with our lives, Joseph,’ said Vera. ‘It’s a new beginning – for both of us.’

  It was almost midnight when Rupert was saying good-night to Vera.

  ‘So what do you say, my dear?’ He leant forward and took her hand in his. ‘Shall we get married sooner rather than later … at Christmas time?’

  Vera bowed her head. It was time for a decision. Her youth was gone now, left on a distant shore. A new life was about to begin. She looked at the man she loved and said simply, ‘Yes.’

  Chapter Three

  Ruby’s Great Expectations

  All the children sent Get Well cards to Mrs Smith. The school governors agreed to an extension of Mrs Earnshaw’s contract as temporary caretaker to the end of November.

  Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:

  Monday, 11 October 1982

  ‘AH’M GONNA GERRA job, Miss Evans,’ said Ronnie Smith, ‘in t’packaging industry.’ He removed his Leeds United bobble hat and nervously flattened a few wisps of greying hair.

  Ronnie was Ruby the caretaker’s habitually unemployed husband, whose life revolved around his racing pigeons, managing the Ragley Rovers football team, frequent visits to the bookmaker and, of course, a regular intake of Tetley’s bitter.

  And pigs might fly, thought Vera. She gave Ronnie a steely look. ‘And what have you in mind, Ronald?’ she asked evenly.

  Ronnie looked down at the advertisement in the Easington Herald & Pioneer. ‘It’s a technical assistant,’ he said.

  ‘And what exactly does that mean?’ asked Vera.

  ‘Well, it’s a technical assistant, in t’packaging industry,’ he said.

  ‘And what will you be packing, Ronald?’ asked Vera with a hint of impatience.

  ‘Well, er, Easter eggs, Miss Evans,’ said Ronnie, ‘an’ ah need a ref’rence.’

  It was 8.30 a.m. on Monday, 11 October in the school office. I closed the Yorkshire Purchasing Organization catalogue and looked up from my desk. This was definitely more interesting than ordering powder paint.

  At number 7, School View, Ruby was propped up in a single bed in the front room. She had returned home from hospital and was now convalescing. This had resulted in the reorganization of the furniture and general jumble that cluttered her house. Sue Phillips, our tall blonde Chair of the Ragley Parent Teacher Association and staff nurse at the hospital in York, was in attendance.

  ‘Ow’s it lookin’, Mrs Phillips?’ asked Ruby, looking down at the scars on her legs.

  ‘Fine, Ruby,’ said Sue. ‘They’re healing well and Nurse Wojciechowski will be calling in each day to change the dressings and do some physio.’

  ‘Ah know ’er,’ said Ruby darkly. ‘’Er brother plays f’my Ronnie’s football team. She dunt take no prisoners.’

  ‘Well, Ruby,’ said Sue with a smile, ‘we all have our own bedside manner.’

  ‘Ah know, an’ ’ers is like ’Itler.’ Ruby pushed a few strands of damp wavy chestnut hair away from her eyes. ‘Anyway, don’t worry, ah know which side m’bread’s buttered an’ ah’ll do as ah’m told … it’s t’only way ah’ll get back t’school.’

  ‘You need plenty of rest first, Ruby,’ said Sue as she packed up her medical bag.

  ‘Be that as it may, but ah need t’earn some money,’ said Ruby disconsolately. ‘We can’t live on fresh air.’

  Sue looked down at one of Ragley village’s most popular characters and held her hand. ‘Ruby, shall I make you a cup of tea before I get off to work?’ Then she looked dubiously through the open kitchen door at the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink.

  ‘No, thank you kindly,’ said Ruby. ‘Our Natasha should be back soon. She only does part-time at Diane’s.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sue, surveying the cluttered room, ‘I’ll call back after work to check on you.’ She picked up her bag, smoothed her smart blue uniform and paused at the front door. ‘And where’s Ronnie?’ she asked as an afterthought.

  ‘Out somewhere trying t’get a job,’ said Ruby sadly, ‘but ah’ll believe it when ah see it.’

  ‘What’s the job, Ruby?’

  ‘’E sed summat abart t’packaging industry, whatever that is.’

  ‘Well, you never know, Ruby … there’s always a first time,’ said Sue.

  ‘This is my Ronnie we’re talkin’ about ’ere,’ said Ruby, shaking her head. ‘Y’know what they say – a tiger never changes its spots.’ She looked down at her dumpy, work-red hands. ‘There was a time ah ’ad great expectations, but not any more.’ Sue nodded knowingly, let herself out and drove off down the High Street towards York.

  Ruby was a year short of her fiftieth birthday and life was beginning to wear her down. At twenty stones and in her extra-large, bright-orange overall, she had been a familiar sight skipping round the school with her mop and galvanized bucket, singing songs from her favourite film, The Sound of Music. That was until the accident. Now everything had changed. Her world had become a struggle.

  Ruby and Ronnie had six children. Thirty-one year-old Andy was a sergeant in the army and twenty-nine-year-old Racquel had just had a baby girl. Krystal Carrington Ruby Entwhistle was now seven weeks old and Ruby’s pride and joy. The highlight of her day was when Racquel brought her rosy-cheeked daughter to visit. Ruby’s other four children shared their cramped council house. Twenty-seven-year-old Duggie was an assistant to the local undertaker and his nickname ‘Deadly’ was appropriate. He was content to sleep in the attic with his Hornby Dublo trainset, a packet of Castella cigars and the posters of his Abba pin-up, the blonde and beautiful Agnetha Fältskog. Meanwhile, twenty-two-year-old Sharon was saving up to get married to Rodney Morgetroyd, the son of the Morton village milkman with the Duran Duran looks, and twenty-year-old Natasha worked part-time in Diane’s Hair Salon. The baby of the family, nine-year-old Hazel, was a cheerful and hardworking little girl in Sally Pringle’s class. As chief breadwinner it had always been a tough life for Ruby … never more so than now. She sat back and stared at Ronnie’s spare bobble hat on top of an untidy pile of racing-pigeon magazines on the sideboard. It was then she wondered if miracles happened to ordinary folk and not just those people in the Bible that the vicar talked about. Ruby closed her tired eyes and prayed.

  ‘Y’can ’ave a trial,’ said Norman Nesbit, packaging supervisor at the local chocolate factory in York. ‘We start off packagin’ Easter eggs six months afore they go on sale in t’shops, so this is a busy time an’ another pair o’ ’ands would be, well, er, ’andy so t’speak.’

  Ronnie stared at the huge conveyor belt. Chocolate eggs appeared at one end in rapid succession and a lady who resembled a Russian weightlifter wrapped foil round each one. Further along, two women, deep in conversation, put them in cardboard boxes with metronomic ease and without ever appearing to look at what they were doing. Finally they were stacked on a pallet and whisked away on a forklift truck.

  ‘An’ that’ll ’ave t’go,’ he added, pointing to Ronnie’s bobble hat. ‘It’s not ’ygienic. You ’ave t’wear a special white ’at an’ coat.’

  Ronnie nodded but wasn’t happy. He felt naked without his favourite bobble hat. Soon, looking like an advert for a P
ersil commercial, he sat on a high stool opposite the Russian weightlifter.

  ‘Y’sit ’ere wi’ ’Elen an’ wrap t’eggs in foil as they come past, ten seconds f’each one,’ said Norman. ‘Ah’ll go start ’er up an’ come back shortly t’see ’ow y’gettin’ on.’

  Ronnie looked across the conveyor belt to his new colleague. ‘Nah then,’ he said nervously. He was unaware of Helen’s charisma bypass, although he did notice that on her neck she displayed a tattoo of a love heart with the word TROY underneath. Even so, this was definitely not the woman who launched a thousand ships.

  ‘Foil,’ said Helen with a glassy-eyed stare.

  ‘Y’what?’ said Ronnie.

  ‘Foil,’ she repeated. ‘We do t’foil, they do t’boxes.’

  Two other women further down the conveyor belt looked at Ronnie and shook their heads in dismay. ‘We’ve gorra reight one ’ere, Elsie,’ said one of them. ‘’E’s not ’xactly Shakin’ bloody Stevens, is ’e?’

  ‘Y’not kiddin’, Doris,’ replied her friend. ‘Looks like summat cat’s dragged in.’

  With a roar the conveyor belt started up and the first chocolate egg came Ronnie’s way. He picked it up clumsily and it cracked in his hand, but he wrapped it anyway just as the second arrived. This one he dropped, so he decided to eat the broken pieces as fast as he could. When the next one arrived, in panic he threw it back, where it landed on top of the next egg and both shattered. Again he scooped up the broken pieces. Helen pressed the emergency stop button and looked at Ronnie, who was eating the broken chocolate as fast as he could shove it in his mouth.

  Norman wandered back, shook his head and looked at the clock. ‘Guinness Book o’ friggin’ Records,’ he said.

  ‘Y’what?’ said Ronnie.

  ‘Y’sacked,’ said Norman, ‘after two minutes an’ thirty-five seconds.’

  Back in Ragley School, we decided to encourage all the children to send a Get Well card to Ruby. In the reception class Anne picked up a stick of chalk and in large neat letters printed ‘Get well soon Mrs Smith’ on the blackboard.

  ‘Now, children,’ she said, ‘Mrs Smith, our caretaker, is poorly at home so I want us all to cheer her up … shall we do that?’

  It sounded fun and everyone nodded.

  Anne had distributed her new collection of safety scissors with their rounded ends and the children were soon busy cutting pieces of white card. By the end of school they had all drawn a picture with a thick pencil on the folded card, coloured it in with wax crayons and written a sentence inside. Two of her brightest five-year-olds, both sons of local farmers and fast approaching their sixth birthdays, had created wonderful messages, although they had yet to discover capital letters. Ted Coggins had written, ‘get well soon and i hope you arnt all thin’, and Charlie Cartwright, in scratchy lower case, had penned his own personal stream of consciousness, ‘my hamster dide last week it was orfull i hope you don’t di i hav a verooker luv charlie’.

  Meanwhile, in the other classes, eight-year-old Ben Roberts had written, ‘I hope you get well soon Mrs Smith cos my ball is stuck in that gutter outside your boiler house’. Seven-year-old Sonia Tricklebank appeared keen to give Ruby a secret present. ‘Get well soon Mrs Smith,’ she had written. ‘My mummy gave me a Lion bar and I thort you wud like it so I have hidden it at the bottom of our mucky washing basket xx from Sonia’. And so it went on … sincere messages from the heart, written as only children can.

  * * *

  During lunchtime we gathered in the staff-room, collected the cards in a decorated shoebox and settled down for a welcome cup of tea. Vera was reading her Daily Telegraph. ‘They’re raising the Mary Rose,’ she said suddenly, ‘and the Prince of Wales has donned diving gear to view it. What a brave young man we have for our future king.’ Vera loved the royal family.

  ‘Fifteen forty-five,’ mumbled Sally, our resident historian, from the other side of the staff-room, through a mouthful of garibaldi biscuit.

  I looked up. ‘Pardon?’

  Sally took a sip of her tea. ‘It was Henry the Eighth’s great Tudor flagship, Jack, and over four hundred men died when it sank in the Solent.’

  Vera made some rapid calculations. ‘Four hundred and thirty-seven years,’ she mused. ‘Wonder what state it will be in?’

  ‘Probably the same as him,’ said Sally, nodding towards the window. A forlorn Ronnie was walking past the school entrance in the direction of The Royal Oak and I recalled Ruby’s description of her work-shy husband: ‘Seven stone drippin’ wet an’ neither use nor ornament.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Vera, ‘doesn’t look as though he got the job.’

  ‘What job?’ we all chorused.

  ‘Something to do with the packaging industry,’ said Vera, ‘at the chocolate factory.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Sally, rummaging in her open-weave ethnic shoulder bag. She took out a brightly coloured paper bag full of assorted sweets and offered it round. ‘Well, whatever happens, think on the bright side,’ she said. ‘There’ll always be a pick ’n’ mix in Woolworths.’

  During afternoon school I called in to Anne’s classroom to borrow her set of magnifying glasses for a science experiment. All the children were painting on large sheets of A3 paper. Little Katie Icklethwaite looked up and gave me a toothy smile. ‘Ah’m painting our farm,’ she said.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I said. ‘I like the black pig in the garden.’

  ‘’S’norra pig, Mr Sheffield,’ said Katie, ‘it’s a rat. We’ve got some reight big uns,’ she added proudly.

  Then Katie looked at her collection of poster paints and scratched her head. ‘Ah’ve no blue for t’sky,’ she pondered. Suddenly inspiration crept across her paint-splattered face. ‘Ah know – ah’ll mek it night time.’ She dipped her brush in the pot of black paint and carried on cheerfully.

  It was five o’clock when Vera and I walked out of school to visit Ruby. I carried the box of Get Well cards and Vera suggested we pick up a bag of grapes from the General Stores.

  When we walked in, Miss Golightly was serving Elsie Crapper and her granddaughter Patience. The little girl pointed to a packet of Fruit Pastilles and Elsie searched in her purse for some change. Patience put the first pastille in her mouth and looked up at Miss Golightly on the other side of the counter. ‘Ah can eat these and me teef won’t break ’cause they’re not plastic like me grandma’s,’ she said. With lips pursed, Elsie paid quickly, took the child’s hand and marched swiftly out of the shop.

  At the back of the queue, Betty Buttle was in conversation with Margery Ackroyd, the village gossip. Margery was eager to hear the latest on Ruby’s recovery. ‘Well ah’ve ’eard she’s ’aving terrible trouble wi’ ’er bowels,’ whispered Betty with a knowing look. ‘In fac’ ah think at night she ’as t’wear them in-confidence pads.’

  We bought the grapes, crossed the High Street and walked into the council estate to number 7, School View. Natasha answered the door. ‘Come in, Mr Sheffield, Miss Evans, mek y’self at ’ome. Me mam’s in t’front room an’ ah’m mekkin’ ’er tea.’ She returned to the kitchen and the rich aroma of burnt bacon. Ruby was sitting up in her bed.

  Vera sat on the crumpled eiderdown and held her hand. ‘So how are you, Ruby?’

  Ruby put on a brave smile. ‘Ah’m coming on fine, Miss Evans. Ah were upset at first when ah ’eard you’d anointed a new caretaker, but ah understand and ah’ll be back at work in no time.’

  ‘There’s no rush, Ruby,’ I said.

  ‘There is now, Mr Sheffield,’ said Ruby firmly. ‘Ah gorra new ’ealth visitor. It’s that Miss Wojciechowski an’ all ’er questions, questions, questions. Me brain’s spinnin’. It were like t’Spanish composition.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Vera.

  ‘An’ she’s too oighty-toighty f’me, Miss Evans,’ said Ruby. ‘Not normal like you.’

  Vera looked perplexed for a moment. ‘Er, well, thank you, Ruby.’

  ‘An’ my Ronnie’s not ’appy,’ she added da
rkly.

  ‘And why is that, Ruby?’ I asked.

  ‘’Is fav’rite chair ’ad to go upstairs,’ said Ruby, ‘an’ all ’is motorcycle parts ’ad t’go back in t’garden.’ The oily smears on the hearthrug bore testimony to this revelation. ‘Ah don’t want t’make a song ’n’ dance about it,’ added Ruby, ‘but if my Ronnie don’t get a job soon ah’ll swing for ’im. A loaf o’ bread ’as jus’ gone up t’thirty-two pence so it’s ’ard mekkin’ ends meet.’

  She looked out of the window as the dustbin wagon rumbled past. ‘T’only good thing about being poor,’ she said quietly, almost to herself, ‘is that it costs nowt.’ There was silence apart from the scraping of a frying pan in the kitchen. ‘An’ ah’m worried about our Duggie, Miss Evans,’ said Ruby.

  ‘And why is that?’ asked Vera.

  ‘’E’s gorra new woman-friend,’ said Ruby.

  ‘I see,’ said Vera, removing her spectacles and looking thoughtful.

  ‘So who’s the new girlfriend?’ I asked.

  Vera frowned at me. Clearly there was more to this than met the eye.

  ‘It’s norra girl-friend, Mr Sheffield,’ said Ruby with a sigh. ‘It’s more a woman-friend. She won’t see forty again.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Vera, shaking her head in dismay.

  ‘’Xactly, Miss Evans, that’s ’ow ah feel. ’E sez ’e likes mature women.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll get over it,’ said Vera with a forced smile.

  ‘Yes, but it’s that divorced woman from t’shoe shop in Easington, Miss Evans,’ said Ruby. ‘Once she’s got ’er claws in, there’s no lettin’ go.’

  ‘Perhaps Ronnie could have a word with him,’ said Vera.

  ‘Ah don’t think so, Miss Evans,’ said Ruby, ‘’cause ’e’s as much use as a choc’late fireguard. Mind you, Miss Wojciechowski said its prob’ly jus’ a phrase our Duggie’s going through,’ said Ruby.