03 Dear Teacher (2 page)

As I walked towards the school gates a few mothers looked over their shoulders at the arrival of Mrs Dudley-Palmer in her distinctive Oxford Blue 1975 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. She got out of her car and approached me, clutching seven-year-old Elisabeth Amelia and five-year-old Victoria Alice.

‘Good morning, Mr Sheffield,’ she said with a polite smile. Mrs Dudley-Palmer was a short, plump thirty-five-year-old who thought of herself as a cut above the rest. She was wearing a stylish light-grey coat with a mink-fur collar. ‘I’ve brought my Elisabeth Amelia back to your charming little school but I have an appointment at a private school in York this afternoon. I’ll call in later today to let you know my decision whether or not to send her there.’ Mrs Dudley-Palmer had made it clear that when Elisabeth Amelia reached the age of eight she would switch to private education. However, it was often difficult to take Mrs Dudley-Palmer seriously as she seemed to live in a world of her own and her distinctive wide-eyed stare gave her a surprisingly startled look.

Leaning against the school wall, Mrs Margery Ackroyd, mother of Tony, Theresa and Charlotte, nodded towards Mrs Dudley-Palmer. ‘All fur coat ’n’ no knickers,’ she
whispered
to her friends. They all laughed. ‘Off y’go, Tony,’ she said. ‘Look after y’sisters an’ keep that lid on y’shoebox.’

Meanwhile, at the school gates, seven-year-old Jimmy Poole, a small, sturdy boy with a mop of curly ginger hair and a distinct lisp, was staring up towards the heavens.

Curious, I walked up to him. ‘Hello, Jimmy. What are you looking at?’

‘Mith Maddithon thaid you can tell the time by looking at the thun,’ said Jimmy, still squinting up at the sky.

‘Your teacher’s called Mrs Hunter now, Jimmy.’

‘It’s that big polithman’th fault,’ said Jimmy knowingly.

I glanced up at the sun. ‘So what time is it, Jimmy?’

He shook his head mournfully. ‘With I knew, Mr Theffield, but I can’t thee the numberth.’ Celestial mysteries quickly forgotten, he wandered off to play conkers with Tony Ackroyd, who put down his shoebox and took out a conker threaded on to a length of baling twine.

As I walked through the throng of excited children, I glanced up at the silent bell in the tall, incongruous bell-tower. It was the highest point of our Victorian school building with its steeply sloping grey-slate roof and high arched windows. In the entrance hall I checked my wristwatch and, on the stroke of nine o’clock, I pulled the ancient bell rope to announce the beginning of another school year.

It was the early autumn of 1979. Mrs Thatcher was
settling
into her new job as prime minister, Cliff Richard was top of the pops with ‘We Don’t Talk Any More’ and Larry Hagman, as the scheming JR Ewing in
Dallas
, was about to become television’s greatest villain of all time. Suddenly denim jeans were no longer flared: instead, they were straight, and stone-washed or paint-splattered. Stephen Hawking, regarded as the greatest scientist since Einstein and a cruel victim of an incurable disease of the nervous system, bravely announced there were ‘black holes’ in space. Back on earth, some things didn’t change and Yorkshire’s Geoffrey Boycott continued to grind out his runs in the Test Match against India at the Oval.

As I rang the bell I looked through the open entrance door and watched the late-comers scurry through the gates and dash up the cobbled driveway. Beyond the wrought-iron railings Ragley village was coming to life. On the village green, outside The Royal Oak, old Tommy Piercy was sitting on the bench next to the duck pond and feeding the ducks. All the shops on the High Street – the Post Office, Diane’s Hair Salon, Nora’s Coffee Shop, Pratt’s Hardware Emporium, the Village Pharmacy, Piercy’s Butcher’s Shop and Prudence Golightly’s General Stores & Newsagent – had opened their doors. Early-morning shoppers with their wickerwork baskets walked down the High Street, which was flanked by pretty terraced cottages with reddish-brown pantile roofs and tall chimney stacks. Only the occasional noisy farm tractor disturbed the peace of this picturesque Yorkshire village.

I walked into my classroom, sat at my desk and surveyed the twenty-three expectant faces in front of me. This was my third class of upper juniors in Ragley School and it was heart-warming to see their excitement at their new tins of Lakeland crayons, pristine exercise books, new HB pencils and a Reading Record Card complete with their name on the top.

A new boy, ten-year-old Darrell Topper, had put a note on my desk. I opened it and smiled; it was one for the collection. It read: ‘Please excuse our Darrell from PE as his big sister took his shorts for hot pants.’

After registration I checked each child’s reading age using the Schonell Graded Word Reading Test while they completed some simple comprehension exercises. Sadly, eleven-year-old Jodie Cuthbertson seemed to have regressed during the school summer holiday. In answer to the question ‘How many seconds in a year?’ Jodie had written: ‘January 2nd, February 2nd, March 2nd …’

When the bell rang for morning assembly, I felt that familiar sense of history. For over a hundred years the headteacher had gathered all the children of Ragley village together to begin another school year. My theme this morning was ‘Friendship’ and I spoke about how we should look after one another – especially the youngest children, who had just begun full-time education. I tried to encourage the new starters to speak.

Benjamin Roberts, a confident four-year-old in Anne’s class, raised his hand. ‘My name is Ben,’ he said. He
frowned
. ‘ ’Cept when I’m naughty,’ he added as an afterthought; ‘then my mummy calls me Benjamin.’

‘So, Ben, what did you want to say about friendship?’ I asked.

‘Well, my uncle Ted is my best friend and we went fishing at Scarborough,’ said Ben.

‘And what happened?’ I asked.

‘ ’E sat in ’is little boat all day and came back with crabs.’

Anne gave me her wide-eyed ‘Well, you did ask’ look from the back of the hall and I moved on to Tony Ackroyd, who wasn’t looking his usual cheerful self.

‘What about you, Tony?’ I asked.

‘M’best friend is Petula an’ … ah think she’s gone for ever.’

‘I’m really sorry to hear that, Tony,’ I said and, not wishing to dwell on the loss of a family member, I moved on to the next child. After Jimmy Poole had described the antisocial antics of his Yorkshire terrier, Scargill, – or, as Jimmy called him, ‘Thcargill’ – I said, ‘So, boys and girls, we must all be friends.’

Suddenly, the twins, six-year-old Rowena and Katrina Buttle, waved their hands in the air simultaneously. ‘Our mummy says we’re like different-coloured crayons …’ said Rowena.

‘… But we all live in the same tin,’ said Katrina.

At times like these I realized why I loved being a teacher. I might not have the best-paid job in the world but it did have its rewards.

‘Time for t’bell,’ announced Jodie Cuthbertson, our new bell monitor.

It was half past ten and I had volunteered to do the first playground duty. I collected my coffee from Vera and walked on to the school field, where Jimmy Poole was standing all alone.

‘Hello, Jimmy. Why are you standing here while all your friends are playing with a ball at the other end of the field?’ I asked.

‘Becauth I’m the goalkeeper, Mithter Theffield,’ said Jimmy simply.

Nearby, five-year-old Terry Earnshaw was taking his role of Luke Skywalker very seriously and he eventually defeated five-year-old Damian Brown, the nose-picking Darth Vader, by flicking the elastic on his mask on to his ears. Meanwhile, the Buttle twins, as the two androids, C3PO and R2D2, tried valiantly to save Jimmy Poole as the lisping Obi-Wan Kenobi. Finally, with a pragmatism that resided somewhere between the Communist Party and the local Co-Op, seven-year old Heathcliffe Earnshaw said pacifically, ‘OK, let’s all rule t’G’lactic Empire.’

At the end of playtime I looked into Jo’s classroom, where a group of children had resumed their paintings as part of their ‘Seaside’ project. Six-year-old Hazel Smith was painting blue stripes across the top of her A3 piece of sugar paper.

‘Is that the sky?’ I asked cheerfully.

She looked at me with a puzzled expression. ‘No, Mr Sheffield, jus’ paint.’

‘Ah, yes, of course,’ I said, feeling suitably repri-manded.

‘An’ this is Mary the Mermaid,’ explained Hazel. ‘She’s got a lady top ’alf an’ a fish bottom ’alf. She’s a good swimmer an’ she won’t get pregnant.’ It occurred to me that children seemed to grow up faster these days.

On a nearby table, Elisabeth Amelia Dudley-Palmer seemed to prove the point. She was busy trying to complete her School Mathematics Project card concerning long multiplication. Jo walked in, glanced at her exercise book and frowned.

‘You need to work hard at your mathematics so you will be good at sums,’ said Jo.

‘Don’t worry, Miss,’ said Elisabeth Amelia. ‘Daddy has an excellent accountant.’

At twelve o’clock Jodie rang the dinner bell and I walked into the school office as Vera was checking Anne and Jo’s dinner registers.

‘What’s for lunch?’ I said. Anne Grainger leaned out of the doorway and sniffed the air. Her sense of smell was renowned. She could recognize a damp gabardine raincoat at fifty yards. Today, however, it was the unmistakable smell of damp cabbage. Anne, with the experience of twenty-five years of school dinners behind her, sniffed the air like a French wine taster. The merest hint of the subtle bouquet of Spam fritter reached her sensitive nostrils and she nodded in recognition. ‘Spam fritters, mashed potato and cabbage,’ she said confidently.

While the sweet pear-drop smell of the aerosol fixative, used to prevent pastel drawings from smudging, was obvious to the rest of us, the higher echelon of school odours had really only been mastered by Anne and Vera.

‘Correct,’ agreed Vera, half closing her eyes in deep concentration, ‘with perhaps the merest possibility of diced carrots.’

Jo stared in awe at this exhibition of advanced sensory perception, folded up her wall chart of ‘Seaside Shells’, and walked into the school hall to join the queue for her first school dinner of the year.

I followed her and saw Heathcliffe Earnshaw pushing into the front of the queue. ‘Go to the back of the line, Heathcliffe,’ I said.

‘But there’s somebody there already, Mr Sheffield,’ replied Heathcliffe, quick as a flash.

Just behind me, Anne Grainger turned away to stifle her laughter while I scrutinized the cheerful face of the ex-Barnsley boy. There was definitely something about him that you couldn’t help but like.

After lunch, back in the staff-room, Vera was reading the front page of her
Daily Telegraph
and shaking her head in dismay. Mr Mark Carlisle, the education secretary, was considering the introduction of a Continental-style school day starting at 8.00 a.m. and closing at 2.00 p.m. as part of the government cuts of £600 million per year. Also, the Yorkshire Ripper had claimed his twelfth victim in Bradford and had sent a tape recording to George
Oldfield
, head of the CID in West Yorkshire, taunting the police in a Wearside accent.

‘What a world we live in,’ said Vera in despair. ‘It can’t get worse.’

But at that moment it suddenly did … much worse!

Anne came into the staff-room, white as a sheet. ‘Jack … everybody … I’ve just seen a mouse … a big mouse!’

Jo and Sally immediately lifted their feet off the floor and Vera leapt towards her metal filing cabinet and pulled out her ‘Telephone in emergencies’ folder.

‘Where was it?’ I asked.

‘Walking bold as brass into Ruby the caretaker’s cupboard, so I slammed the door and locked it,’ said Anne.

‘We need to ring the pest controller at County Hall immediately, Mr Sheffield,’ said Vera.

I nodded and smiled grimly. Vera was wonderful in emergencies. ‘Thanks, Vera. We’ll do it now.’

Thirty minutes later a dirty green, rusty old van pulled up in the school car park. The words ‘Maurice Ackroyd,
PEST CONTROLLER
’ were crudely painted on the side of the van. I walked out to meet him.

‘ ’Ow do,’ said Maurice. ‘Ah’m Maurice the Mouseman from Pest Control.’ His huge front teeth and wispy moustache reinforced my belief that Maurice was born for this vocation. He was a small, unshaven, wiry man wearing a battered flat cap, in spite of the hot weather, and a filthy collarless long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs firmly double-buttoned. His baggy cord trousers were held up
with
a length of baling twine and his trouser-leg bottoms were tucked firmly into his socks. A pair of shabby steel-toe-capped builder’s boots completed the ensemble.

‘Hello, er, Maurice,’ I said. ‘Thanks for coming. I think we’ve got a mouse.’

Maurice sucked air through his teeth and then shook his head. ‘ ’Owd on, ’owd on, not so ’asty, Mr Sheffield. It could be rats, tha knaws,’ he said with a hopeful glint in his eye.

‘Rats! I hope not,’ I said in alarm.

‘Rats is everywhere, Mr Sheffield – y’never far from a rat,’ said Maurice, nodding in a very knowing way.

‘But we should have to close the school … and it’s the first day of term.’ I could already see the headline in the
Easington Herald & Pioneer
.

‘Don’t fret, Mr Sheffield: ’elp is at ’and,’ said Maurice with false modesty, while stroking the words
‘PEST CONTROLLER’
on the side of his van with obvious affection. Then he leaned back and surveyed the school building like Clint Eastwood before a gunfight. ‘Ah allus start by giving it two coats o’ lookin’ over. Y’gotta think like t’little buggers afore y’catch ’em.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said.

‘Ah come from a long line o’ rodent-catchers, tha knaws. Rodents ’ave allus run in our family,’ said Maurice proudly.

‘Oh, that’s good,’ I said unconvincingly.

He wrinkled up his pointed nose and sniffed the air. ‘We use t’psychol’gy,’ he added proudly.

‘I see,’ I said … but I didn’t.

Afternoon lessons were haunted by the thought that I would have to shut the school and it was a gloomy group of teachers who assembled in the staff-room at afternoon playtime to hear the verdict of Maurice the Mouseman.