(1/20) Village School (9 page)

He had gone through to see Miss Clare, who was now back with us, to tell her how sorry he was to accept her notice of resignation at the end of the term.

'I shall put the advertisement in
The Teachers' World
and possibly
The Times Educational Supplement
this week,' he said on his way back. 'I doubt if we shall get anyone to start in January, but Mrs Finch-Edwards may be willing to come until we get suited.' He paused and stroked the gloves nervously. Loose fur, I noted with distaste, began to settle heavily on
The Wind in the Willows
lying ready for English Literature lesson on my desk. 'How do you get on with her?'

'Very well,' I said firmly, and he departed, looking relieved. I blew my desk clean and called peremptorily for a little less noise from my class.

During these last few weeks of term preparations for the concert kept us in a bustle. Mrs Finch-Edwards called in one afternoon a week to coach the infants in the plays and the action songs she had chosen for them. She and Mrs Moffat were spending almost every afternoon snipping and sewing the costumes, shouting cheerfully above the hum of their machines and becoming fast friends in the process.

'What I should like better than anything,' confessed Mrs Moffat one day to this new friend, who had banished the bogy of loneliness, 'would be to have a dress shop!'

'Me too!' rejoined Mrs Finch-Edwards, and they looked at each other with a wild surmise. There was a vibrating moment as their thoughts hovered over this mutual ambition.

'If it weren't for the family, and the house, and that,' finished Mrs Moffat, her eyes returning rather sadly to her seam.

'If it weren't for hubby,' echoed Mrs Finch-Edwards, gazing glumly at a gusset. They sewed in silence.

John Burton, Sylvia Long and Cathy Waites, who were aU ten, sat for the first part of the examination which would determine their future schooling, one bitterly cold morning. The rest of the class were in Miss Clare's room, and the solemnity of the occasion and the need for complete quietness so that the three entrants would do their best, had been impressed upon the whole school.

It was very peaceful as the three children tackled the problems. It was an intelligence test, intended to sort out the children capable of attempting the papers to be set next February, from those who were not capable of attempting any further effort at all.

A
wicked draught blew under the door, stirring the nature chart on the wall. The clock ticked ponderously, cinders clinked into the ash pan, and a rustling in the raffia cupboard sounded suspiciously like a mouse.

Cathy, frowning hard, went steadily through the paper; but John and Sylvia sighed, chewed their pens and occasionally gave a groan. At half-past eleven they finished, handed in their papers and smiled with relief at each other and vanished into the playground. John's paper, as I suspected, was sadly unfinished; Sylvia's was no better, but Cathy's looked much more hopeful.

The only dark child among the Wakes' family had certainly more intelligence than her flaxen-haired brothers and sisters.

The day of the concert dawned and the afternoon was spent in getting the school ready for the hundred or so parents and friends we expected to be in the audience at seven o'clock.

The partition was pushed back, groaning and creaking, and Mr Willet, John Pringle, Mrs Pringle, Miss Clare and I erected the stage at the end of the infants' room and piled desks outside in the playground, praying that the weather would stay fine until the next morning.

The children had been sent home early, theoretically to rest, but a knot of them clustered open-mouthed in the playground to watch the preparations, despite increasingly sharp requests to go home and stay there.

Mrs Pringle, with a nice regard for social strata, had arranged the first row of chairs for the school managers and their friends. Armchairs from my house and her own, some tall, some squat, stood cheek by jowl with a settee that Mr Roberts had lent from the farm opposite. All this cushioned comfort would be shared by the vicar, who was chairman of the managers, his wife, Mr and Mrs Roberts, Colonel Wesley-very shaky and deaf but one of the more zealous managers—and wealthy Miss Parr, the only female manager.

'You'd better put two or three more comfortable chairs in case Mrs Moffat and Mrs Finch-Edwards get time to come in,' I told Mrs Pringle.

'This row's for the gentry,' pointed out Mrs Pringle. 'There's plenty of ordinary chairs for the rest.'

At the back of the hall, which was the side of my classroom, were rows of plain benches on which I knew the boys would stand and gape at the distant stage. We had never yet got through a concert without several deafening crashes, but so far we had had no injuries. I hoped our luck would hold.

The children were dressing in the lobby superintended by Mrs Moffat and Mrs Finch-Edwards, their mouths puckered up with holding pins. The air quivered with excitement.

Miss Clare, resolutely refusing to sit in the gentry's row, had her own chair set by the side of the stage and instituted herself as prompter and relief pianist.

Mr Annett had come over to help and I could hear him at the further lobby door collecting the shillings which were going to swell the school funds. The rows gradually filled and the air became thick with shag tobacco smoke.

A twittering row of fairies creaked excitedly up on to the platform behind the drawn curtain and I spoke to the vicar through the crack. He struggled up from the depths of Mr Roberts' settee, still clutching his leopard-skin gloves, and gave everyone present a warm welcome.

The fairies took a deep breath and up went the curtain in spasmodic jerks. The concert had begun.

***

It was a most successful evening. No one was hurt when three benches overturned, though a very loud word which was uttered at the time caused Joseph Coggs to look at me with eyes like saucers.

'You hear that man?' he whispered. 'He swored!'

Mr Annett told me that he had collected nearly five pounds at the door and that everyone had been most complimentary about the costumes. Mrs Moffat and Mrs Finch-Edwards bridled with pleasure when they heard this in the lobby where they were packing clothes wearily into baskets and boxes. The vicar took Miss Clare home and I reminded him of the Christmas party on the last day of term during the next week.

The night sky was thick with stars as the people dwindled away into the darkness.

'What about them desks, miss?' said Mr Willet at my elbow. 'They might get wet.'

'Forget them!' I said, turning the key in the school door. It had been a very long day.

On the last Saturday of term I caught the bus to Caxley to buy presents for the children with some of the concert money. I struggled round Woolworth's buying little dolls, balls, coloured pencils, clockwork mice and decorations for the Christmas tree, and spent the next hour searching the rest of the town for more elusive toys. In the market-place I came across Mr Annett.

'Do you want a lift?' he asked. 'I'm just off.'

I consulted my shopping list. There seemed nothing more of extreme urgency and I gratefully climbed into the car.

'I sometimes wonder about Christmas,' said Mr Annett meditatively, looking at my feet which I was resting, in an unlovely way, on their outer edges. We edged gingerly down the crowded High Street, demented shoppers darting before us, screaming at their children to 'Stay there—Lor' the traffic—Stay there!'

'The thing to do,' I said as we gained the lane that leads to Beech Green and Fairacre, 'is to get absolutely everything in the summer and lock it in a cupboard. Then order every scrap of food from a shop the week before Christmas and sit back and enjoy watching everyone else go mad. I've been meaning to do it for years.'

'Come and have tea with me,' said Mr Annett, swerving into the school playground before I had a chance to answer. His school-house was bigger than mine and also had a bathroom, but poor Mr Annett's towels were grey, I noticed, and the floor needed cleaning. The dust of several days lingered on the banisters, and it was quite obvious that his housekeeper did not overwork herself.

His sitting-room, however, though dusty, was light and sunny, with an enormous radiogram in one corner and two long shelves above it stacked with gramophone records. In the other corner was his 'cello, and I remembered that Mr Annett was a keen member of the Caxley orchestra.

Mrs Nairn, a wispy little Scotswoman, brought in the tea, and smiled upon me graciously.

'Your brother rang up while you was out,' she said to Mr Annett, 'and said to tell you he'll be down next Friday tea-time, and he's bringing two bottles of whisky and a bird ready cooked.'

This news delighted Mr Annett.

'Good, good!' he said, dropping four lumps of sugar carefully into my cup. 'That's wonderful! He's here with me for a week or more over Christmas. He's just had a book published in America, you know, and he's expecting big sales.'

As I knew that his brother was a professor of mathematics at one of the northern universities and occasionally brought out books with such titles as 'The Quadrilateral Theory and its Relation to the Quantitative Binomial Cosine,' I felt unequal to any cosy chit-chat about the new publication, and contented myself with polite noises at this good news.

I did not get back until seven and spent the rest of the evening packing presents in blue tissue paper for boys and pink for girls and thanking my stars that there were only forty children in Fairacre School.

It was the last afternoon and the Christmas party was in full swing. Lemonade glasses were empty, paper hats askew, and the children's faces flushed with excitement. They sat at their disordered tables, which were their workaday desks pushed up together in fours and camouflaged with Christmas tablecloths. Their eyes were fixed on the Christmas tree in the centre of the room, glittering and sparkling with frosted baubles and tinsel.

Miss Clare had insisted on dressing it on her own, and had spent all the previous evening in the shadowy schoolroom alone with the tree and her thoughts. The pink and blue parcels dangled temptingly and a cheer went up as the vicar advanced with the school cutting-out scissors.

Round the room were parents and friends, who had come to share the fun of the party and to see the presentation of a clock and a cheque to Miss Clare on this her last school day.

The children had all brought a penny or two for a magnificent bouquet which was now hidden under the sink in the lobby, out of harm's way. The youngest little girl, John Burton's sister, was already in a fine state of nerves at the thought of presenting it at the end of the proceedings.

The floor was a welter of paper, bent straws and crumbs, and I saw Mrs Pringle's mouth drooping down, tortoise-fashion, as she surveyed the wreckage. Luckily the vicar clapped his hands for silence before she had a chance for any damping remark.

The room was very quiet as he spoke, simply and movingly, of all that Miss Clare had meant in the lives of those of us there that afternoon. It was impossible to repay years of selfless devotion, but we would like her to have a token of our affection. Here, he looked helplessly round for the parcel and envelope, which Mrs Pringle found for him and thrust hastily into his hand as though they were hot potatoes.

Miss Clare undid them with shaking fingers, while a little whisper of excitement ran round the room. There was the sudden clang of the paint bucket from the lobby, and little Eileen Burton emerged triumphantly with the bouquet and presented it with a commendable curtsey, amid a storm of clapping.

Miss Clare replied with composure, and I never admired her more than on this occasion. A reserved woman herself, I think that this was the first time that she realized how warmly we all felt towards her. She thanked us simply and quietly, and only the brightness of her eyes as she looked at the happy children told of the tears that could so easily have come to a less courageous woman.

PART TWO

Spring Term

10. Winter Fevers

T
HE
Christmas holidays had slid away all too quickly. On the morning after we had broken up, I was busy writing Christmas cards, when a hammering had come at the front door.

On the step stood Linda and Anne. Linda carried a small parcel with much care, and when I invited them in she put it on the table among the half-finished cards.

'It's from both of us,' she announced proudly.

It turned out to be a bottle of scent called 'Dusky Allure.' A female of mature charms pranced on the label, inadequately clad in what looked like a yard of cheese-muslin. A palm tree and a few stars added point to the title. The children beamed at me as I unscrewed the top.

'It's simply wonderful!' I told them, when I had got over the coughing attack. 'And very, very kind of you.'

I pressed biscuits and lemonade upon them, and they sat on the edges of their chairs, demure and gratified, while I finished off the cards. In the quiet room one's lemonade went down with a gurgle, and they exchanged mirthful looks and turned pink.