(1/20) Village School (4 page)

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 children 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.