(1/20) Village School

by Miss Read

  The children in these parts are not, as a whole, great readers. A neighbouring schoolmaster, Mr Annett, put it succinctly:

  'Most parents take the viewpoint of "What the devil are you doing wasting your time with a trashy book, when the carrots want thinning!" Or the beans want picking, or the wood wants chopping, or the snow wants sweeping—any of the urgent outdoor matters which beset a country child more than the town one. So out they are sent, with a clump on the ear to help them, and it almost seems wrong to some of them to read.'

  Because of this attitude, and the children's own very understandable desire to help in outside activities in an agricultural area, they do not get accustomed to seeing or hearing thought expressed in plain English. A great number of them have great difficulty in spelling, other than phonetically, for they are not readers by habit and not familiar with the look of words. However, phonetically, they make the most gallant efforts, one of the nicest I ever received being the information that 'Donkeys like ssos' (thistles).

  So, after play, we settled down to writing together on the blackboard a composite account of the holidays.

  'John, tell me something that you did.'

  'Went to the seaside, miss.'

  How?'

  'Bus.'

  'By yourself?'

  'No. Lot of us kids went. Us went with the Mothers' Union, miss.'

  'Right. Now put all that into sentences that I can write on the blackboard.'

  There was a horrified silence. It was one thing to answer leading questions, but quite another thing to put them into even the simplest English.

  'Well, come along. You can start by saying, "During the holidays I went to the seaside."'

  John repeated this with some relief, hoping that left to my own devices I would do the whole composition for him. The first sentence was put up.

  'What shall we put next?'

  'I went in a bus,' said Anne.

  I put it up.

  'Now what?'

  'I went with the Mothers' Union.'

  'I went with some others.'

  'I went on a Saturday.'

  'I went with my sister.'

  I pointed out that although these were all good sentences in themselves, it became a little monotonous to start every one with 'I went.' It was while we were wrestling with different wordings of these sentences that footsteps and clankings were heard. Sylvia rushed to the door and revealed Mrs Crossley, or, as the children call her, 'The Dinner Lady.'

  She was balancing three tin boxes in an unsteady pile against her cardigan, and willing hands relieved her of them.

  'Only two canisters today,' she said, and the children sat rigidly, hoping to be the lucky person chosen to fetch it from the mobile dinner-van at the school gate. Anne and Linda were chosen for this envied task and while they were gone, I signed the daily chit for Mrs Crossley, to say that I had received the number of dinners ordered. Then I gave her the slip showing how many dinners I estimated that I should need for the next day.

  Mrs Crossley drives the dinner-van, loaded up about ten in the morning at the depot, and delivers dinners at about a dozen schools on her round of about twenty miles. Each school has a plate-heating oven which is switched on just before the dinners are due, and the tins are put in to keep warm with the plates. The big canisters are heat-retaining and very heavy to handle. Stews, hot potatoes and other vegetables, custard or sauces, are delivered in these and the meals are usually very good indeed. In the summer, salads are frequent, and the children eat most things heartily except fish. This, even when fried, is not relished, and recently it has been struck off the menu as there was so much wasted.

  Cathy was sent through to the infants' room to see if the tables were ready. Miss Clare's class had gone out for the last period of the morning to have their physical training lesson, leaving the classroom empty for the arrangement of three trestle-tables for the dinner children. Miss Clare had switched on the oven, which was in her room, and Cathy laid the tables for thirty. Those who went home to dinner were sent off; the others washed their hands and then we all took our places at the tables. It was ten past twelve and we were all hoping for something good in the tins.

  Miss Clare and I served out slices of cold meat, mashed potatoes and salad, and Sylvia and Cathy and Anne carried them round. Miss Clare sat at the head of one table and I at the other, and when we had finished the first course two big boys, John and Ernest, cleared away. It was followed by plums and custard. Jimmy Waites was still rather awed by his new surroundings and ate very little, but Joseph Coggs, who, I suspected, very seldom had a dinner as well-prepared as this, ate a prodigious amount, coming up for a third helping of plums and custard with the older children.

  When we had stacked the dirty crockery and cutlery ready for Mrs Pringle, and cleared the tables of their checked mackintosh tablecloths, the children went out to play and Miss Clare and I went over to the school-house to wash ourselves and tidy up ready for afternoon school.

  Mrs Pringle was surrounded by clouds of steam when I returned to the lobby.

  'Did you have a good holiday?' I asked her.

  'Not much of a holiday for me, scrubbing this whole place out!' was the rejoinder.

  'Well, it all looks very nice, anyway.'

  'How long for?' said Mrs Pringle acidly. She is one of the happy martyrs of this world, hugging her grudges to her and relishing every insult as a toothsome morsel. Why she carries on the job of school caretaker I can't think, unless its very nature, that of work quickly undone, appeals to her warped spirit. Children she looks upon as conspirators against cleanliness and order; and the idea of any sort of mess of their making being accidental, or, worse still, legitimate, is unbelievable to her.

  Her great loves are the two slow-burning tortoise stoves. These two ugly monsters she polishes till they gleam like jet, and it gives her real pain to see them lit, with the ashes dropping untidily round them. The coke cauldrons are a torture to her, for these make more mess, and during the winter months relations are more than usually strained between us.

  There is almost a battle when it comes to starting up the stoves at the approach of the cold weather. I refuse to have the children sitting in a cold schoolroom, incapable of work and the prey of any germs at large, when the stoves are there and mountains of coke stand between us and misery.

  Mrs Pringle's methods are subtle when I have given firm orders for the stove to be lit. For a day or two she stalls with 'Ran out of matches,' or 'Mr Willet did say he'd bring up the kindling wood, but he ain't done it yet,' but finding that I have lit the fire myself she gives in and continues, most reluctantly, to renew it each day. This does not mean to say that the matter is closed. Far from it; for should she have occasion to enter the room she will fan herself ostentatiously with her hand—often mauve with the cold—and say, 'Phew! How can you stick this heat, I don't know! Makes me come over real faint meself!' Sometimes the attack is on a broader front and the ratepayers are brought in as support.

  'Coke's going down pretty smartish. Shouldn't be surprised if we don't get a letter from the Office the way we gets through it. Stands to reason the Office has to keep upsides the ratepayers!'

  'The Office' is, of course, the local education office and the only real link between it and Mrs Pringle is the cheque which arrives from it for her services at the end of every month. Mrs Pringle, consequently, looks upon 'The Office' in rather the same way as she looks upon the Almighty, invisible and omnipotent.

  This afternoon I beat a retreat into my classroom, but was closely pursued by Mrs Pringle, dripping from the elbows.

  'What's more,' she said malevolently, 'we're a spoon short. You been mixing up paste again?'

  'No,' I said shortly, 'you'd better count them again.' This is an old feud, dating from five years ago when I once committed the unforgivable crime of borrowing a school spoon because I had mislaid the usual wooden one. Mrs Pringle has never allowed me to forget this deplorable lapse.

  At a quarter past one the ch
ildren came back into their desks, breathless and cheerful, and after we had marked the register we tackled our joint composition again. After a while afternoon somnolence began to descend upon them, and when I thought they had studied the example of fair English, which they had been driven into producing, long enough, I went to the piano and we sang some of the songs which they had learnt the term before.

  After play large sheets of paper were given out and the boxes of wax crayons; and the children were asked to illustrate either their day at the seaside or any other particular day that they had enjoyed during the past few weeks.

  Industriously they set to work, blue crayons were scrabbled furiously along the bottom of the papers for the sea and yellow suns like daisies flowered on all sides. The room was quiet and happy, the afternoon sun beat in through the Gothic windows and the clock on the wall stepped out its measured tread to home-time at half-past three.

  As most of the children stay to dinner, and those that do go home live so very near, it seems wiser to have a short break at midday, start afternoon school early and finish early. In the summer this means that the children get a long spell of sunshine outdoors, and in the winter they can be safely home before it becomes dark.

  We collected up our pictures and crayons and tidied up the room. The first day at school is always a long one, and the children looked sleepy.

  The infants, who had been let out earlier, could be heard calling to each other as they ran up the road.

  We stood and sang grace, wished each other 'Good afternoon' and made our way into the lobby. Jimmy and Joseph were standing there, anxiously waiting for Cathy.

  'Did you enjoy school?' I asked them. Jimmy nodded.

  'What about you, Joseph?'

  'I liked the dinner,' he answered diplomatically in his husky gipsy voice. I left it at that.

  Miss Clare was wheeling her bicycle across the playground. It struck me suddenly that she was looking old and tired.

  She mounted carefully and rode slowly away down the road, upright and steady, but it seemed to me, as I stood watching her progress, that it needed more effort than usual; and this was only the first day of term.

  How long, I wondered, would she be able to continue?

  ***

  I had my tea in the warm sunshine of the garden at the back of my school-house. The schoolmaster who had lived here before me was a great gardener, and had planted currant bushes, black and red, raspberries and gooseberries. These were safely enmeshed in a wire run to keep the birds off, and I bottled the crops or made jelly and jam in the evenings or in the holidays.

  I had planted two herbaceous borders, one on each side of the garden, both edged with Mrs Sinkins' pinks which liked the chalky soil. Vegetables I did not bother to plant, not only because of the lack of room, but also because kind neighbours gave me more than I could really cope with, week after week. Broad beans, shallots, peas, carrots, turnips, brussel sprouts, cabbage, they all came in generous supplies to my doorstep. Sometimes the donors were almost too generous, forgetting, I suppose, how relatively little one woman can eat. I have found before now no less than five rotund vegetable marrows, like abandoned babies, on my doorstep in one week.

  The difficulty is in handing these over to someone who might like them, without offending the giver. In a village this is doubly difficult as almost all are related, or close neighbours, or know exactly what is going on in the cottages nearby. I have been driven to digging dark, secret holes, under cover of night, and shovelling in many an armful of lettuce or several mammoth parsnips that have beaten my appetite.

  I made some jam in the evening with a basket of early black plums which John Pringle, Mrs Pringle's only son, and a near neighbour of mine, had brought me.

  The kitchen was very pleasant as I stirred. The window over the stone sink looks out on to the garden. A massive lead pump with a long handle stands by the side of the sink, and it is from this that I fill the buckets for the school's drinking water. When the water supply is laid on through the village, which may be in a few years' time, I have been promised a new deep sink by the managers.

  In one corner stands a large brick copper and my predecessors used this to heat water for their baths, lighting a fire each time, but I have an electric copper which saves much time and trouble. The bath is a long zinc one, which hangs in the porch outside the back door, and it is put on the kitchen floor at bath time and filled from the tap at the bottom of the copper and cooled with buckets from the pump. With a bath towel warming over the hot copper and the kitchen well steamed up it is very snug.

  The rest of the house downstairs consists of a large dining-room with a brick fireplace, a small hall and a small sitting-room. I rarely use this room as it faces north, but live mainly in the dining-room which is warmer, has a bigger fireplace and is convenient for the kitchen.

  Upstairs there are two bedrooms, both fairly large, one over the kitchen and sitting-room, and the other, in which I sleep, directly above the dining-room. Throughout the house the walls are distempered a dove grey and all the paintwork is white. It is a solidly-built house of red brick, with a red-tiled roof, and in its setting of trees it looks most attractive. I am very fond of it indeed, and luckier, I realize, than many country headmistresses.

  5. First Impressions

  IN their adjoining cottages at Tyler's Row the two new pupils at Fairacre School were safely in bed, but not yet asleep.

  Jimmy Waites lay on his lumpy flock mattress in a big brass bedstead which had once been his grandmother's. It had been the pride of her heart, and she had slept in it as a bride and until her death. The brass knobs at each corner, and the little ones across the head and the foot of the bed, had been polished so often that they were loose. His grandmother had told Jimmy that when she was a young woman she had tied a fresh blue bow at each bed-post, and the sides had been decently draped in white starched valances reaching to the floor. The edges of these she had crimped with a goffering iron. With a patchwork quilt on top, the bed must have been a thing of great beauty.

  These refinements had long since passed away. The remains of the patchwork quilt were still in use as an ironing cloth; but the bows and the valances had vanished. Even so, Jimmy was very proud of the brass bedstead. In one of the loose knobs he kept his treasures: a very old piece of chewing gum, a glass marble, and a number of leather discs which he had cut secretly from the flock mattress. This operation had, in part, contributed to the general lumpiness.

  Cathy shared this bed with him on the landing-bedroom. The stairs came straight up from the living-room to this room of theirs, and it was inclined to be draughty. A small window gave what light it could, but an old pear tree growing close against the side of the house spread its branches too near to allow much illumination. In the summer the light filtered through its thick green foliage, gave a curiously under-water effect to the room, as the shadows wavered against the walls. In the winter the skinny branches tapped and scraped the glass, like bony questing fingers, and Jimmy buried his head under the clothes to muffle his terror.

  His two older sisters slept downstairs, for they had to be up first, and were out of the house and waiting at the top of the road for the first bus to Caxley at seven each morning.

  His father and mother slept in the only other bedroom that opened out from the landing and was situated over the living-room. Until recently Jimmy had slept with them in his cot in the corner, but this he had now outgrown, and so he had been promoted to the brass bedstead. When one of his sisters married, which was to be this summer, the remaining one would probably take his place with Cathy in grandmother's bed, and he instead would have to sleep downstairs on the sofa. He did not like the idea of sleeping in 3. room of his own and resolutely put this fear from him at nights, determined to enjoy his present comforts.

  As he lay there, sucking his thumb, drifting between sleeping and waking, the sights and sounds and smells of his first day at school crowded thick upon him. He saw the orderly rows of desks; some of them, in
cluding his own, had a twelve-inch square carved on to the lid, and he had enjoyed rubbing his fat forefinger along the grooves.

  He remembered Miss Clare's soft voice; her big handbag and the little bottle of scent which she had taken from it. The top had rolled away towards the door and he had run to pick it up for her. She had dabbed a drop of cold scent into his palm for payment, but its fragrance had soon been lost in the ball of plasticine which he pummelled and rolled into buttons and marbles and, best of all, a long sinuous snake. He remembered the feel of it in his hand, dead, but horribly writhing as he swung it to and fro. Holding his stub of chalk, when he had tried to copy his letters from the blackboard, had not been so pleasurable. His fingers had clenched so tightly that they had ached.

  He remembered the clatter of the milk bottles when the children returned them to the steel crate in the corner. He had enjoyed his milk largely because he had drunk it through a straw and this was new to him. It was gratifying to see the milk sink lower and lower in the bottle and to feel the cold liquid trickling down in his stomach.

  He sighed, and wriggled down more closely into the lumpy mattress. Yes, he liked school. He'd have milk tomorrow with a straw, and play with plasticine snakes, and perhaps go and see Cathy again in the next room. Cathy … he was glad Cathy was there too. School was all very nice but there was nothing quite like home, where everything was old and familiar. Still sucking his thumb, Jimmy fell asleep.

  Next door Joseph Coggs lay on a decrepit camp bed and listened to his parents talking downstairs. Their voices carried clearly up the stairs to the landing-bedroom, and he knew that his father was angry.

  'Ninepence a day! Lot of nonsense! Pay four bob a week, near enough, for Joe's dinners alone? Not likely! You give 'un a bit o' bread and cheese same as you gives me, my girl'

  Arthur Coggs also went on the early bus to Caxley. He was employed as an unskilled labourer with a building firm, and he spent his days mixing cement, carrying buckets and wheeling barrows. At twelve o'clock he sat down with his mates to eat the bread and cheese, and sometimes a raw onion, which his wife had packed for him. Joseph knew those packed dinners by sight—thick slabs of bread smeared with margarine and an unappetizing hunk of dry cheese—and his spirits drooped at the thought of having to take such victuals to school, and, worse still, of having to eat them within sight and smell of the luscious food such as he had enjoyed that day.