05 Please Sir! (33 page)

‘And what’s the news?’ asked Sally.

Ruby looked around the staff-room at our expectant faces. ‘Our Andy’s comin’ ‘ome,’ she said triumphantly.

It was true. The war with Argentina was over. After Argentine planes had killed forty-three British troops at Bluff Cove, over eleven thousand Argentinian soldiers had surrendered in a final battle at Port Stanley. ‘White flags are flying,’ Mrs Thatcher had announced to a cheering House of Commons.

Everyone jumped up and there was a burst of spontaneous applause. ‘Oh, Ruby,’ said Anne, ‘that’s wonderful news.’

‘And do you know when he’s coming home?’ I asked.

‘Some time next month, so ah’ve ‘eard,’ said Ruby.

Vera got up from her chair, put her arms round our tearful caretaker and gave her a hug. ‘I’m so pleased for you,’ she said.

‘An’ thanks t’you, Miss Evans,’ said Ruby quietly. ‘A bit o’ prayin’ didn’t do no ‘arm, did it?’

Vera smiled. ‘It never does, Ruby … It never does.’

Meanwhile, outside on the school field, the concept of life and death was being accommodated at a different level. Terry Earnshaw’s understanding of
life
and
girls
, but not necessarily in that order, continued to be a little fragile.

‘Oh!’ shouted Victoria Alice, ‘a wasp!’ She jumped back as the fierce little insect landed on the grass in front of her. Terry saw his moment had come to demonstrate he was a true super-hero and he promptly stamped on it.

Victoria Alice stared in horror. ‘Oh, Terry, you’ve killed it!’ she exclaimed.

‘Ah know,’ said Terry puffing out his chest, ‘an’ ah weren’t frit either.’ Past tenses had always eluded young Terry.

‘Mummy says when you die you go to heaven,’ said Victoria Alice.

They both stared at the dead wasp for what seemed like an eternity, until Terry, becoming restless, broke the silence. ‘Well, it’s tekkin’ its time abart it,’ he said testily.

* * *

At lunchtime, in the corner of the staff-room, Sally had taken out a bag of muesli and was munching away as if her life depended on it. She clearly wasn’t her usual cheery self. Her daughter, Grace, was now over sixteen months old and was toddling around, opening cupboard doors and giving Sally a few sleepless nights because of teething problems. Also, it appeared that Sally had begun yet another diet.

‘I’m starving,’ she said mournfully while eyeing up the box of biscuits on the coffee table. She took out of her shoulder bag a small Penguin paperback with the words
Audrey Eyton’s Extraordinary F-PLAN Diet
emblazoned on the front cover. The sub-text read: ‘At last! Look great and feel fabulous with this effective and healthy new diet’.

‘This is my new slimming book,’ she said, ‘and the idea is you have a high-fibre diet, so you should feel satisfied on fewer calories.’

Anne and Jo suddenly looked interested. ‘What do you do?’ asked Anne.

‘Well, every day I drink half a pint of skimmed milk and never go beyond fifteen hundred calories,’ said Sally, holding up another little paperback, this one entitled
F-PLAN: Calorie and Fibre Chart
, ‘and I check the calorie count in this book.’

‘So, is it working?’ asked Jo and then immediately wished she hadn’t as Vera and Anne gave her a stern look.

Sally grinned. ‘Hope so … but I could murder a custard cream.’

* * *

On Friday evening Beth and I went into York to the Odeon cinema and settled down to share a bag of Liquorice Allsorts and enjoy
On Golden Pond
, with Jane Fonda, Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. Beth explained that, apparently, the father–daughter rift in the film was echoed in real life and, as I carefully selected all the coconut whirls in the pitch darkness, I wondered if that made acting the part easier.

It was Saturday morning and a dawn of pearl grey crested the distant hills as the first fingers of sharp shadows spread across the land. A new day had begun.

The rattle of the letter-box woke Beth. Since getting married, I had begun to have a newspaper delivered at the weekend. ‘The paper’s here,’ she said sleepily, ‘and I’d love a cup of tea if you’re going downstairs to collect it,’ she added coyly. Married life had seemed to suit us both and, with the exception of my having no wardrobe space any more, life was bliss.

When Beth emerged, in her dressing gown and with tousled hair, I was eating my Weetabix and reading the paper. There was the usual mixed bag of news. Arthur Scargill and forty thousand miners had brought forty-four Yorkshire pits to a halt and the American President, ex-film star Ronald Reagan, had told the House of Commons that Britain’s young men had fought in the Falklands ‘not for mere real estate’. Meanwhile, on the back page, Bobby Robson said he would consider replacing Ron Greenwood as the England manager … if he was offered the job. Also, the price of four-star petrol had gone up again by 7p to 169p per gallon. It was tough keeping pace with inflation.

Beth looked up at the kitchen clock. ‘I’m having my hair done at nine,’ she said, ‘so shall we go into Ragley together?’ Diane’s Hair Salon was fully booked this day of the Summer Ball.

‘Yes, fine,’ I said through a mouthful of cereal. ‘I’ll drop you off on my way to the barber’s.’ My hairdressing experience was due to be in complete contrast to Beth’s two hours of pampering. Trev the barber, known locally as ‘Chainsaw Trev’, was an old-fashioned, no-frills barber who provided a standard ‘short back and sides’ and a shave that involved an executioner’s chair, copious lathering, stropping a cut-throat razor, followed by a styptic pencil to stop the inevitable bleeding and a boiling-hot towel held up with tongs and dropped on the patient’s face – in other words, ten minutes of hell.

Shortly before nine o’clock, I dropped Beth off in Ragley High Street. ‘See you in the Coffee Shop around eleven,’ she said and I drove off to Easington for my appointment with Chainsaw Trev.

In the meantime, Ragley village went on as normal. In her back garden, Amelia Duff, the Ragley postmistress, was feeding her chickens with an interesting mix of chickweed, dandelions and stale bread. Tidy Tim had just finished cutting his lawn in regimented rows of perfect, weed-free parallel stripes. ‘Nature’s all reight, Mr Sheffield,’ Timothy had once explained to me, ‘so long as she’s kept in’er place, if y’get m’meaning.’ In Pepperpot Cottage on Morton Road, Joyce Davenport, the doctor’s wife and Vera’s dearest friend, was assembling a bowl of nettle tops, vegetable stock, peas and coriander to make her famous chilled pea and nettle soup, and, incongruously, she was humming along to the latest Bucks Fizz record.

Outside The Royal Oak, mothers and children were sitting by the pond and feeding the ducks. The ducks, in turn, were showing their appreciation by preening themselves and splashing happily in the warm sunshine. On the village green, Katrina Buttle was holding a buttercup under her twin sister’s chin and studying the reflected glow of the bright petals in the early-morning sunshine.

Meanwhile, Heathcliffe Earnshaw and his brother Terry were sitting on the roof of their garden shed and eating huge sticks of rhubarb. Next to their grubby knees they had a large brown paper bag full of sugar. In turn they dipped the end of their rhubarb into the bag and then they chewed the sweetened stalk. It was their idea of Saturday morning heaven.

At eleven o’clock I ordered a coffee and a Wagon Wheel in Nora’s Coffee Shop. Dorothy Humpleby was studying her horoscope in the
Easington & District Pioneer
.

‘Yurra Leo, aren’t you, Mr Sheffield?’ asked Dorothy.

‘Yes, Dorothy.’

‘Well, in y’Starscope it says ’ere, “The feeling of anticlimax could be giving you the blues: you could well have made a mistake in your past with a romantic involvement.”’

‘That’s not vewy bwight, Dowothy,’ shouted Nora. ‘Mr Sheffield only wecently got mawwied.’

* * *

It was over lunch at Bilbo Cottage that I suddenly remembered to compliment Beth on her new hairdo, although to my undiscerning eye it didn’t look any different. To be perfectly honest, if I hadn’t seen her walk into the salon, I wouldn’t have guessed. Her hair looked just the same to me. Fortunately, it was the early stage of our married life and, at that time, I had no idea of the cost.

Conversely, Beth suggested I go to a ‘proper hairdresser’ in future as I now looked like an escaped convict, whereas I was pleased I had got my money’s worth. Beth glanced at her watch. ‘I said I’d help Sally with the art display at the show, Jack, so we’d better get going.’ It was the day of the Annual Morton and Ragley Agricultural Show and one of the main events in the local calendar.

We walked out to my emerald-green Morris Minor Traveller with its ash-wood frame and brightly polished chromium grill and I gave my chrome and yellow AA badge an involuntary polish.

‘Jack … have you ever thought about changing this car?’ asked Beth.

I looked at her in horror. ‘Change my car … my lovely car?’

She grinned. ‘I’ll take that as a “no”, shall I?’

It took me the full four miles to the grounds of Morton Manor to recover from the shock.

The show comprised all the classic English village attractions including the Ragley and Morton brass band, a coconut shy, bowling for a pig, cream teas, home-made cakes and a fancy-dress parade.

Sarah Louise Tait’s magnificent black-and-white rabbit, Nibbles, won the Pets’ Competition with Tony Ackroyd’s tortoise, Yul Brynner, a close second. Dominic and Damian Brown had brought their father’s psychopathic ferret, Frankenstein, but it was unplaced as the judges couldn’t get close enough to make a decision, such was the ferocity of its attack on the wire mesh of its cage. In the meantime, Jimmy Poole’s Yorkshire terrier, Scargill, was disqualified for nipping the ankles of the chief judge, along with Cleopatra, Jodie Cuthbertson’s talking parrot, who told the whole of the Women’s Institute committee who were walking by at the time to ‘f*** off!’

In the Women’s Institute refreshment tent, a bottle of Joseph’s courgette wine with no label had got mixed in with Vera’s fresh mint lemonade and traditional ginger beer. So it was that Walter Sparrow, the president of the Ragley and Morton Temperance Society, was unwittingly enjoying a glass of Joseph’s home brew with an alcohol content of ten per cent and announcing to the world that his arthritic hip was no longer painful and didn’t the two octogenarian ladies serving the drinks look ‘en-shanting’.

On the showground, Virginia Anastasia Forbes-Kitchener, in her skin-tight jodhpurs, won the show jumping with a clear round on her spirited horse, Banjo, much to the delight of her father. ‘Good show, old girl,’ shouted the major. His words of encouragement could be heard in the Women’s Institute tent, where Vera was judging the Six Butterfly Buns competition although her mind was elsewhere. The Summer Ball was only a few hours away and she knew it was decision time.

* * *

As we approached Morton Manor the scent of honeysuckle was in the evening air.

Having driven past a narrow, cobbled yard and a row of sleepy cottages with leaded windows, I parked in a small grassy field. Then we slipped through a gap in the tall yew hedge and walked along an avenue of espaliered pears, joining other couples heading towards the turreted, Yorkshire-stone manor house. The gravel pathway meandered under a pergola of metal arches supporting fragrant sweet peas, bright climbing clematis and Victorian roses. Beth’s fingers lightly caressed a row of lavender plants and she paused to enjoy the scent of the mauve flower spikes. Thomas, the gardener, had worked hard and, next to the stone pillars of the entrance porch, tubs of pink aubretia, fiery red pelargoniums, green-and-cream variegated ivy and trailing magenta lobelia vividly enhanced the summer scene. The light breeze stirred Beth’s summer dress and I sensed the whisper of silk against her skin.

The major, immaculate in dinner suit and sporting regimental medals, was there waiting to greet us and, by his side, stood Vera. She was holding a rose in her hand, a pale-pink Blush Noissette, and, in her beautiful evening gown, looked the perfect English lady.

‘Welcome to the newly-weds, what?’ said the major, shaking my hand and kissing Beth lightly on the cheek.

Vera and Beth were soon engaged in conversation and the major leant over and whispered in my ear, ‘A fine filly, don’t you think, my boy?’

‘I agree, Major,’ I replied, though I wasn’t entirely sure whether he was referring to Beth or Vera.

* * *

It was a relaxing evening, a time for the meeting of friends and of happy reunion in the balmy air. During the champagne reception, conversation ebbed and flowed among the ‘country set’.

‘Our cars used to be made by
British
manufacturers,’ said the major. ‘And Morris and Austin dominated the roads,’ added the son of the local M P, keen to join in but secretly hoping for time alone with the shapely Virginia. The conversation then turned to the problems at Yorkshire County Cricket Club, where no one seemed to want Geoffrey Boycott as club captain. There was great unrest among the men of Ragley and Morton, who longed for Yorkshire supremacy on the cricket fields of England.

The nine-piece band struck up a slow waltz and the wine flowed. Waiters with silver trays kept appearing with mouth-watering canapés and Beth and I danced under the glittering chandeliers. We saw Anne trying, with limited success, to teach John how to quickstep, while Dan and Jo glided around the polished ballroom floor like professionals. Eventually, the six of us collected our drinks and walked out to join Colin and Sally in the octagonal bandstand overlooking the croquet lawn. Together we swapped stories of learning to dance as we sipped our wine and gazed at the charming scene.