by David Nobbs
‘There were two things I didn’t reckon much to,’ said Henry.
Auntie Kate waited.
‘Doesn’t tha want to know what they were?’ said Henry.
‘Aye. Oh aye. I do. What didn’t tha reckon much to, Henry?’ said Auntie Kate.
‘Children’s party and Auntie Laura’s bairns. I hate kids.’
Perhaps it was a mistake, holding him back from school till he’d settled down, thought Auntie Kate. Certainly Henry had not distinguished himself at the children’s Christmas party in the Parish Hall. Local ladies had given entertainments comprising charades, sketches and musical items. A Mr Elland from Troutwick had made interesting shapes out of newspapers – all of which, he emphasised, would later be sent for salvage. Patrick Eckington and one or two other children had given turns. Father Christmas had put in an appearance, and there had been a gift of savings stamps for each child. They had played games including musical chairs. The evacuee children had been rowdy. So had the Luggs. Lorna Arrow had been sick. Henry had been paralysed with shyness and had just stared at everybody and reverted to sucking his thumb.
He didn’t tell Auntie Kate the thing that he had hated most, which was being tapped by old Percy Boyce-Uppingham as if he were a barometer. He didn’t tell her because he had fallen in love with Belinda Boyce-Uppingham, and everything to do with the Boyce-Uppinghams was therefore too private to be talked about. Old Percy Boyce-Uppingham’s stick had made a deep impression on him. Its effect was seminal, he later decided, wondering at his youthful ability to feel to the full the horrors of being patronised many years before he even knew of the existence of the word ‘patronising’.
‘Auntie Kate?’
His solemnity was comical. He spoke with the air of someone who has thought long and hard about a subject of deep importance, as indeed he had. But she had herself under control. She wouldn’t laugh at him now.
‘Aye. What is it?’
‘I saw me dad on top of me mam doing summat that weren’t strangling, and I don’t know what it were, and when I asked me mam she were right cagey about it. Does tha know what they were doing, Auntie Kate?’
Auntie Kate didn’t reply. She was leaning on the window-sill and shaking.
‘Only I thought tha might know what it were cos I thought happen Uncle Frank might have tried it with thee,’ said Henry.
Auntie Kate threw back her head and roared with laughter. She went bright red with mirth.
Henry went red too. The shame of being laughed at and by Auntie Kate of all people was too much. The terrible hot shame of it.
Auntie Kate stopped laughing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
And then, the unexpected happened. Henry Pratt, frightened of being laughed at, frightened of his own father, frightened of falling into water, frightened of railway engines, frightened of children, and frightened of being ejected from wombs, discovered that he had a fighting spirit.
‘It’s not fair to laugh at me because I don’t know things,’ he said. ‘I can’t know everything. I’m only little.’
‘Oh dear. We’ve made a puddle, haven’t we?’
It was Henry’s first day at school. The exciting world of education was about to open up before him. He’d made a puddle.
His mother had walked with him down the lane to the village. The school was through the village, over the hump-bridge, on the right, beyond the Parish Hall. It was a square, stone building with high, Gothic windows and solid triangular gables. There was a large bell over the porch. He had his sandwiches in Fiona’s old, stained satchel. He’d begun to want to go before he’d even crossed the playground.
Miss Forrest, the headmistress, tall and efficient, had pointed him in the direction of the junior classroom, and there he had met Miss Candy for the first time.
Miss Candy was fifty-three years old, and rode to school from Troutwick on a motor bike. She had three chins, and skin like leather. Her nose was large, her eyes were too close together. Her body had no definable shape. Her grey hair was pinned up into elaborate curls and rolls. A tuft of darker hair sprouted from the middle of her middle chin. Those who said that her moustache resembled the Fuehrer’s were exaggerating.
There were children’s paintings all round the walls of the classroom. Some of the paintings were just about recognisable as crude impressions of various local scenes. Others were less good. Pale winter sun streamed in through the high Gothic windows. The little desks were arranged in five groups for pupils of different ages. There were three small portable blackboards on easels. In front of the large, fixed blackboard there hung a blind covered with a picturesque representation of a farmyard. Yet it remained a classroom, filled with twenty-five strange children and presided over by a teacher of fearsome aspect. The pressure on his bladder grew rapidly, and he was far too shy to be able to ask to be permitted to relieve it.
Miss Candy sat him in a group with five of the youngest children, and asked him his name.
‘Henry,’ he mumbled.
‘Oh dear. That’s a little unfortunate, Henry, because we already have a Henry, don’t we, Henry?’
‘Aye, miss,’ said a fair-haired boy in Henry’s group.
‘We can’t have two Henrys in the same group, can we, Henry?’ said Miss Candy.
‘No, miss,’ said the fair-haired boy, whose name was Henry Dinsdale.
‘Have you got another name, Henry?’ said Miss Candy.
‘Aye,’ said Henry.
‘Well what is it?’ said Miss Candy.
‘Pratt,’ said Henry, and a boy in the group giggled.
‘Hush, Jane, there’s nothing funny about names,’ said Miss Candy to this boy, who was actually a girl. This was Jane Lugg, who came from a regrettably long line of Luggs.
‘Haven’t you got another Christian name?’ said Miss Candy.
Henry nodded miserably.
‘Well what is it?’
‘Ezra,’ he mumbled, hot with shame, wild with fury.
‘Ezra,’ said Miss Candy. ‘Well, I’m glad to say we don’t have any other Ezras here, so we’ll be able to call you Ezra, won’t we, Ezra?’
‘Aye,’ mumbled Henry, glaring at Henry Dinsdale, who had forced him to become an Ezra and inherit the curse of being a parrot-strangler.
It was lucky that Henry didn’t know that Henry Dinsdale’s real name was Cyril, but he’d had to be called Henry because there was already a Cyril. He had only just got over the problems associated with this change, and Miss Candy judged that to call him by a third name might provoke a severe identity crisis. So, Cyril remained Henry and Henry became Ezra.
The remaining members of Henry’s group were Simon Eckington, the younger of the two Eckington boys from the Post Office, Cyril Orris, whose father was a farmer, and Pam Yardley, an evacuee.
There was no sign of Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. Henry was glad of that as he made his puddle.
‘You’ll have to go to the utility room, Ezra,’ said Miss Candy. ‘Take your trousers and pants off, wash them in the sink, and hang them on the pipes to dry. Show him the way, Henry, and bring me the bucket, the mop and the disinfectant.’
Cyril/Henry led Henry/Ezra to the utility room/locker room/boiler room, and there he spent his first morning at school.
In one corner there was a large sink. In another corner was the boiler. Hot pipes ran round the dark-green walls. There were many pegs on which hung satchels and coats, and all round the floor there were lockers. There was a window of frosted glass. There was nowhere to sit.
Henry took off his trousers and pants and washed them with a bar of green carbolic. He had never washed clothes before. The soap didn’t produce lather, just a greeny-white slime. The world of rinsing was also an unexplored continent to him, and despite his best efforts, much of the soap proved impossible to remove. He gave up, and put the long, baggy shorts and thick yellowing pants on the pipes to dry. Time passes slowly when you’re five years old and have nothing to do except stand and watch your clothes drying. That m
orning was an eternity of misery to Henry, standing with his fat legs bare, and his shirt not even covering his cowering little willie, in the hot little room with the noisy boiler and the frosted-glass window. His legs ached. There was a sudden eruption of children’s voices and screams. It must be dinner-time, but nobody came into the utility room, and eventually the noise died down again. There was a distant slamming of doors, and silence reigned, save for the roaring and gurgling of the boiler.
Please, God, he said, as he stood beside his steaming clothes, I’m sorry I never came to see thee in Thurmarsh, but I didn’t really know about thee, but now I do, so I will come in future. Please, God, kill Henry Dinsdale so I don’t have to be an Ezra. Amen, and lots of love. Henry.
He began to wonder if everybody had gone home and left him. Perhaps he was locked in. Several times he felt that he would cry, but he fought against it.
Suddenly children were pouring into the utility room and looking at him and giggling as they collected their coats if they were going home to dinner or their sandwiches if they weren’t. One older boy said, ‘Look at his little willie,’ and Patrick Eckington said, ‘I can’t. I forgot me magnifying glass,’ and there was laughter, and then Miss Candy was there, saying, ‘Your clothes are dry. Why haven’t you put them on?’ and he mumbled, ‘Didn’t tell me to,’ and Miss Candy, who had a bottomless supply of minatory saws of her own invention, said, ‘Mr Mumble shouted “fire” and nobody heard,’ and he put his pants and shorts on with difficulty because the soap had caked hard, and the afternoon was a blur, and that was his first day at school, and it was to be the first of many, and they would all be like that, and life was awful.
There was still no sign of Belinda Boyce-Uppingham.
The snows came. Huge drifts swept up to the dry-stone walls. The ash woods were a magical tracery of white. Henry rushed into the kitchen with a snowball, and hurled it wildly in his excitement. It knocked a plate of best Worcester porcelain off the dresser. The plate smashed. Uncle Frank, who was never angry, strode abruptly from the room.
‘Snow isn’t funny here, Henry,’ explained Auntie Kate. ‘Uncle Frank’s been out for hours, making sure his sheep are all right.’
Henry felt that awful hot shaming feeling all over.
Uncle Frank was out for hours again, with Billy and Jackie, taking fodder to any sheep they could find, but there were many more cut off in the huge drifts.
‘Won’t they die?’ Henry asked Uncle Frank that evening.
‘Grown up sheep are very tough,’ explained Uncle Frank. ‘We don’t mind early snows so much. It’s when we get snows in t’ lambing season that we’re in trouble.’
Henry was very thoughtful. If the sheep could survive out there, he thought, he wouldn’t make any more fuss about going to school.
That Saturday afternoon, after the snows had stopped, and the sun was shining crisply, there was tobogganing down the lower slopes of Mickle Fell. Uncle Frank asked him if he’d like to use the girls’ old toboggan. He tried to get out of it, on the grounds that it was unfair to sheep to enjoy the snow, but really because he was frightened. But Uncle Frank insisted, and suddenly it was important not to seem a coward in front of Uncle Frank.
The children of Rowth Bridge hurtled down the white slopes with apparent fearlessness on that ice-blue Saturday afternoon in war-time. Some had toboggans, some wooden boards, some tea-trays. The older children set off from quite high up. Some of them were fighter pilots, dive-bombing the vicious Hun.
Henry trudged up the slope somewhat fearfully. Patrick Eckington hurtled past. Surely this was high enough? And then he saw her. Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. Ravishing. High above him.
He couldn’t start from below her, so he trudged on. Between him and Belinda a sturdy young man was carrying a tea-tray.
At last Belinda stopped and turned. The sturdy young man stopped beside her. They stood and waited for him.
He approached them, wheezing breathlessly. The sturdy young man turned out to be Jane Lugg. He wanted to speak to Belinda, but no words would come.
They began their descent. As his wooden toboggan gathered speed, Henry grew terrified. Faster and faster he went. Jane Lugg on her tea-tray was outclassed. Belinda Boyce-Uppingham, streamlined on her superb metal bobsleigh, was narrowly ahead of him.
Their speed increased. The field below was full of tiny figures.
Belinda Boyce-Uppingham was heading for the side of the field, where a slight incline slowed the toboggans and enabled you to stop quite gracefully. But Henry’s toboggan was heading down to the bottom of the field, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Belinda dismounted from her bobsleigh gracefully. Jane Lugg landed underneath her tray in a clumsy, laughing heap. Henry’s toboggan breasted the snows piled against the wall. It soared over the top, hurtled towards the thinner snow of the lower field, and landed with a bruising crunch. It gathered speed again. Wide-eyed and petrified he saw the trees at the edge of the ash wood rushing towards him.
He missed the trees by inches, and shot straight into the icy waters of the infant Mither. It was not the last river that Henry Pratt would fall into, but it was easily the smallest.
After that, things were better at school, and he began to settle in. Not quickly. Not easily. But steadily.
Within a week he had received two overtures of friendship. One he accepted, one he rejected.
The overture that he accepted was from Simon Eckington. Like him, Simon was shy. And Simon’s father was also away at the war. His mother had her hands full running the Post Office and General Store, and his elder brother Patrick bullied him unmercifully. He was glad to find a good friend.
The overture that he didn’t accept was from Pam Yardley. She was an evacuee, from Leeds. She had been taken in by the Wallingtons. Jim Wallington was the bus driver. Pam Yardley made the mistake of appealing for friendship on the grounds that they were both evacuees. Henry denied this angrily. He didn’t add the clincher which prevented any possibility of friendship. Pam Yardley was a girl. Girls were useless, with one glorious exception. That exception was Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. Pam Yardley was not Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. Therefore she was useless.
The great strength of Belinda Boyce-Uppingham was that she was a beautiful and wonderful human being, despite her family.
The great weakness of Belinda Boyce-Uppingham was that she didn’t go to the village school. Henry plucked up courage and, blushing, asked Auntie Kate why this was.
‘The Boyce-Uppinghams send their children to private schools when they are young and then to public schools,’ explained Auntie Kate.
It sounded to Henry as if the Boyce-Uppinghams were somewhat confused people, who had no cause to go around smugly tapping people as if they were barometers.
The school day started with a hymn and a prayer. Then they did painting and drawing. Henry’s paintings were beautiful in his mind, but ghastly messes by the time they reached the paper. The younger children moulded plasticine and the older ones carved wood. Sometimes they would dance and even sing, quietly, so as not to disturb Miss Forrest’s class. Sometimes they would dress up and perform little plays. Most of the class liked this part of the day, but Henry was doubtful.
There followed a bad time. This was the break. The playground was divided sexually by a tall wire fence. Miss Candy had argued against this. ‘Put them in cages and they’ll behave like animals,’ she had said. ‘Put them together and they’ll behave like animals,’ her superior had retorted. Henry didn’t like the break because it exposed him to the bullying of his superiors. His tobogganing had not transformed him into a hero overnight. It had to be weighed against the puddle. It wasn’t certain yet whether he was to be counted as an evacuee or not. More evidence was needed before judgement was passed on him.
After the break there came the best part of Henry’s day – the lessons. They learnt reading and writing, and the basics of arithmetic, and he proved good at these things.
Dinner came next. The risk of bu
llying was less great than in the break, because many of the children went home. On the wall of the playground, however, a goal had been marked in chalk, and here football was often played. Henry had nothing against football, except that he couldn’t play and always got hurt. There were also three stumps chalked against the wall, and when the summer came Henry would learn that his lack of talent extended to cricket also. These perils, when added to the lingering threat of brawn, made dinner a dangerous time.
In the afternoon, they applied their arithmetic, and their reading and writing, to various practical ends, like running a shop, or planning the farming year, or holding auctions, or even, as they got older, writing a local children’s newspaper.
We have seen Miss Candy from the outside, a shapeless, greying motor-cyclist with an excess of chins, hair in unfortunate places, and a distant hint of the porcine in her features. Come with me now on a journey into the interior.
Miss Candy had always known that she would be a teacher. She had believed that she would be a good, perhaps even a great teacher. She was steeped in educational theory. She identified with those two alliterative lady educationalists, Maria Montessori and Margaret McMillan.
It was because of the influence of Maria Montessori that there was no rivalry in Miss Candy’s class. Each child went at his or her own pace. There were no rewards. Punishment was reserved for naughtiness and breaches of communal discipline, and was never used as a weapon against the slow-witted. The communal discipline included tidying up the classroom before going home. Miss Candy believed that Maria Montessori, the great Italian, would approve, if only she could ever see Miss Candy’s class of five-to ten-year-olds at Rowth Bridge Village School.
Being herself from Bradford, it was natural that Miss Candy associated herself even more closely with Margaret McMillan, who did much of her best work in that city between 1893 and 1902. Margaret McMillan believed that many schoolchildren went through school life using only a minimum of their powers and expressing only a fraction of their personalities. She believed in the importance of nursery schooling, where children could be given adventure, movement, dancing, music, talking, food and rest within the school environment. Extracts from her writings hung on the wall of Miss Candy’s bedroom. ‘You may ask why we give all this to the children? Because this is nurture, and without it they can never really have education. For education must grow out of nurture and the flower from its root, since nurture is organic.… Much of the money we spend on education is wasted, because we have not laid any real foundation for our educational system….’