(2/20) Village Diary (14 page)

The train journey back to Caxley was a tedious crosscountry affair lasting over three hours. Luckily Mr and Mrs Annett were shopping near the station and gave me a lift to Fairacre, so that I did not have to wait another hour for the local bus.

The school-house was unnaturally quiet, when the sound of the Annetts' car had died away. I prowled round, savouring the joys of the newly-returned. The clock had stopped at four-twenty, the house was flowerless, and, in the kitchen, the dishcloth hung dry and stiff, arched over the edge of the sink, like a miniature canvas tunnel.

I put the kettle on for that first inspiring cup of tea, and resumed my prowling upstairs. Tibby, curled up comfortably in a patch of sunlight on my eiderdown, stretched out luxuriously, all claws extended, gave a welcoming yowl, half-yawn, half-mew, and resumed her interrupted slumbers again.

Mrs Pringle had been detailed to feed the cat, and when I returned to my singing kettle, I noticed that every morsel of food had been used. As I had left an imposing variety of delicacies, including cold meat, cold fish, dried cat-food and two tins of another variety much appreciated by Tibby, as wed as half a pint of milk daily, my companion had obviously been living like a lord, and I could see that I should have the unenviable job of restoring her to a more humble way of life.

With all the windows in the house opened, I sat down with my tea tray and thought how lovely it was to be back. I feel like a sword in a scabbard, I told myself, and instantly decided that a sword was much too dashing. Perhaps a cup, hanging again on its accustomed hook on the kitchen dresser, would be a better simile. At any rate, to be a village schoolmistress, with a fine border of pinks just breaking before me, and the sound of rooks cawing overhead, seemed a very right and proper thing to be, and I envied no man.

The second half of the term has started in a blaze of sunshine. Yesterday the temperature was up in the eighties, and we had the schoolroom door propped open with the biggest upturned flower-pot that Mr Willet could find. The green paint on the doors and windows of Fairacre School has long since faded to a soft silvery green, like a cabbage leaf with a fine bloom on it. It is a most beautiful colour, and I regret that we are due to be repainted in the summer holidays. The managers have not decided on the new colour, I hear, but Mr Willet tells me that Mr Roberts, the farmer, favours a deep beetroot, Colonel Wesley 'a sensible chocolate,' and the vicar is pressing for green once again. I am doing a little subtle propaganda each time I see the vicar, and supporting his claim, as the least objectionable of the three colours.

The children spend their play-time and dinner hour in the shade of the elm trees, at the corner of the playground. The heat thrown up from our poorly-asphalted playground is unbelievable, and the two buckets of drinking water, which Mr Willet carries over from my kitchen daily, have been increased to three.

The distant clatter and hum of Mr Roberts' grass cutter at work, is a real high summer sound, and while the children loll in their desks, fidgeting as the backs of their knees stick uncomfortably to the edge of their wooden seats, they can hear the swallows screaming as they flash by St Patrick's spire next door, and the drone of a captive bee who has blundered through the Gothic window.

The flowers have burst into bloom in this heat, and the cottage gardens blaze with irises, lilies, cornflowers and peonies. Miss Clare brought a bunch of her white jasmine to the infants' room and Jimmy Waites brought me a bouquet of roses, but it is a pity to pick these lovely things while the weather is so phenomenally hot, for they dropped in a day.

I have never seen the elder bushes so covered in flowers, and, until this year, had never realized what beautiful trees they are with their hundreds of floating white faces, ad tilted at the same angle, each composed of a myriad tiny flowers, each flower having five petals star-wise, with five golden stamens projecting above and looking like a
tremblant
piece of jewellery. The bushes in this summer heat are dazzling. Their luminous quality, compounded of their massed moons against young green leaves, which Sir Alfred Munnings has caught so brilliantly in paint, has never struck me so forcibly as during this vivid sped of weather.

The road through Fairacre, which the rural district council saw fit to tar and gravel a few weeks ago much to the joy of the schoolchildren—who arrived late because 'we was helping the steam-roder man'—is now a sticky black mess, which is ruinous to shoes, and is driving ad the dogs in the neighbourhood mad, as the tar squelches between their paws.

Last night, as I returned from taking Miss Clare some gooseberries, I rounded the sharp corner into the viflage and nearly ran down Joseph Coggs and his two little sisters, who were squatting in the middle of the road, popping tar bubbles with leisurely forefingers.

The car screeched to an abrupt stop, while I lashed the amazed trio with my tongue. Joseph was as shaken as I was, and inclined to be tearful.

'We wasn't doing no harm,' he faltered, underlip quivering.

'You wasn't doing no good either,' I retorted wrathfully, letting the hand brake go—and it wasn't until I had changed into third gear, and was cooling down slightly, that my ungrammatical echo burst fully upon me.

Amy spent Saturday afternoon and evening with me, as James had been called away on a mysterious errand connected with the firm's business, which necessitated absence from home for the whole of the week-end.

As we sat in the shade of the apple trees, topping and tailing gooseberries for bottling, Amy surprised me by asking:

'Tell me, what do you do with your time when you're not in school?'

'Why, this sort of thing!' I replied, holding up a whiskery giant, 'I have to do ad the things that other women do, I suppose. I wash my clothes, and iron them, and bake cakes, and mend things, and fetch in coal and clean the windows—' I could have continued the list indefinitely, but I could see that that was not ready what Amy wanted to know. How did I use my leisure, and more particularly, was I happy here, living alone—a solitary woman, exposed to the interested gaze of my village neighbours and with virtually no private life of my own? Did I ever crave for city pleasures, for crowds, for shops, for excitement? Would I like to change my way of life? Wasn't I in danger of becoming a vegetable?

I don't know whether Amy believed me when I answered truthfully, that I was completely happy; for single women living alone like me—and there are thousands of us up and down the country—are often the object of pity and speculation. Amy had voiced the unspoken queries of many married people that I knew.

Amy said sternly that with the world in the state it was, and the misery that surrounded us on every side, she was surprised to hear me say that I was happy. To which jeremiad I replied sturdily that I knew just as much about the world's miseries as she did, but still remained incorrigibly content, and that nobody would find me apologetic for being so.

'But don't you feel you ought to be more ambitious?' persisted Amy, slightly nettled. 'Do you want to do nothing better than be schoolmistress at Fairacre School?'

'It suits me,' I said equably. Amy said: 'Tchah!' which I'd always hoped to hear somebody say one day, and nicked tops and tads off with a vicious snapping of scissors. I was mildly sorry that I had riled her, but I thought over our conversation when she had departed in the glorious car, and came to the conclusion that we should never see things in the same light. For Amy is the victim of today's common malaise—too much self analysis; while I, finding myself remarkably uninteresting, am only too pleased to observe others and the natural objects around me. Thus I am spared the pangs of self-reproach, and, as my lot is cast in pleasant places, find endless cause for happiness and amusement.

One of Mr Roberts' calves strayed into the garden last night. The only damage it did was to lean heavily against a wooden post which supports a rose tree, while it scratched its back, leaving the post at a sad angle.

Mr Willet and I put it straight during play-time. I held it nervously, while Mr Willet, perched on a kitchen chair, smote it mightily on the top with a mallet. At every massive shudder I expected either to have my hand mangled or for Mr Willet to crash through the chair seat, but luck was with us.

'There!' he said at length, surveying his handiwork from aloft. He suddenly caught sight of someone in the lane, invisible to me on my lower plane.

'Now who might that be?' he pondered, eyes screwed up against the sun.

'The vicar?' I hazarded, picking a few pinks. Mr Willet was applying all the fierce concentration of a villager confronted with a stranger.

'No. This chap's got a new panama hat on.'

'Mr Roberts?'

'No, no. I knows 'ee,' Mr Willet said testily. Silence fell. I picked a few more pinks, while Mr Willet remained rooted to the kitchen chair.

'Must be a gentleman,' observed Mr Willet. 'Blows 'is nose on a 'and kerchief.' I found this social nicety very interesting, but did not like to pursue it further.

'He's coming this way,' continued my look-out. 'Why-' his voice fed an octave with disappointment. 'It's only that chap Mawne.' He checked suddenly, and added hastily: 'But there, I expect you'll be pleased to see him. You run along, miss. I'll put the chair back. You don't want to keep him waiting.'

Mr Mawne had called to see if I would go with him to the Caxley Orchestral Society's concert next week. He has tickets for Wednesday evening's performance, and I have offered to drive him in. The Annetts and other friends will be playing, and it should be a very pleasant evening.

Exactly twenty minutes after accepting Mr Mawne's invitation, Mrs Pringle arrived with a basket full of cleaning rags to store in her special cupboard in the lobby. She gave me an alarmingly coy smirk.

'Enjoy yourself on Wednesday,' said Mrs Pringle.

So much for Fairacre's efficient bush telegraph.

Miss Clare, Mr Willet and I were gossipping in the empty classroom after school today. Mr Willet was sitting on the old desk against the side wall.

'See this?' he said to Miss Clare. She went over and peered down at the desk, where his homy forefinger was pressed. There, carved in the ribby top were the letters A.G.W.

'Alfred George Willet,' said the owner, with pride. 'Done 'em in poetry once. Chipped away careful under my book. We was supposed to be learning some bit about Westminster Bridge with a dud soul passing by. Old Hope was a great one for poetry, wasn't he?'

Miss Clare, who is a few years older than Mr Willet, agreed. She was a pupil teacher in the same infants' room, when Mr Hope was headmaster at Fairacre. I have heard many tales of this interesting man, who used to live in the house I now occupy.

He was village schoolmaster for several years. His life was tragic, for his only child, Harriet, died at the age of twelve; his wife fed ill and he became addicted to drink. Soon after the first World War he left Fairacre and took a post in the north. He wrote verse himself, and his pupils were set inordinate amounts of poetry to learn weekly. I have often heard the older people in Fairacre tell of his powers of story-telling, and his pupils produced a play by Shakespeare annually, in the vicarage garden, no mean accomplishment in a small, unbookish village.

I should like to have known Mr Hope, that sad gifted man, whose small nervous handwriting fills so many pages in an earlier school log-book in my desk drawer. He was thought much of, but he was not beloved. As far as I can gather from latter-day comments, he was feared by many of his pupils, and looked upon as 'a crank' by their parents. One rarely hears of pity for him, which seems strange to me. I was interested to hear Miss Clare and Mr Willet exchanging memories as they surveyed the youthful Willet's handiwork of many years ago.

'Fine old temper he had,' observed Mr Willet. '"Out in the lobby, boy," he shouted at me, when he saw this. And out I went, touched my toes and got six. You wants to try a bit more of that, miss,' he added, in a half jocular way that did not cloak his inner belief in the adequacy of Mr Hope's methods. Miss Clare shook her white head slowly.

'There was too much of it, Alfred,' she said gravely. 'You bigger boys treated that far-too-frequent caning as a huge joke. You had to—otherwise you were afraid that your companions would think you cowardly. In fact it had two bad effects. Its frequency undermined Mr Hope's authority in the end—I'm sure that was one of the reasons that took him so often to "The Beetle." And secondly, the little ones in my room were terrified of him. They heard the shoutings and the canings, and I know for a fact that they dreaded him coming into the infants' room.'

'I don't think they minded that much,' said Mr Willet. 'We was all used to a tight rein then—big and little. Remember how we used to sit on these forms, with no backs to rest against? Got spoke to pretty sharp too if we sagged a bit.'

'It was quite wrong,' said Miss Clare firmly, 'to expect children to sit as they did then; and as for folding their arms across their backs—well, I told Mr Hope flatly, that I would not train the babies to sit so. It was one of the few things I did have words about. Mostly, he was very reasonable and helped me a great deal with the preparation of lessons.'

'Never made no friends, did 'ee?' mused Mr Willet, fingering his stained moustache. 'Looked down on us working class, and tried to keep in with the gentry too much.'

'Oh come,' protested Miss Clare, 'I'm sure he didn't look down on anyone! He found his home and family, and the school-house garden and his books and poetry, filled his free time. As for the gentry, don't forget that those that he had dealings with were his school managers, and it was necessary to see quite a bit of them, as a matter of school routine. No, you're not quite fair to Mr Hope.'

Mr Willet lumbered off the desk lid that had set so many far-off things stirring, and unconsciously summed up the enigma of Mr Hope.

'Fact is, I never understood the chap. He was a fish out of water in Fairacre, and to us folk—well, he smelt a bit odd.'

Mrs Pringle collects our metal milk-tops 'for blind dogs,' as she herself asserts. Despite careful explanation on my part to the children, I am quite sure that they imagine that Mrs Pringle purchases spectacles in various sizes to fit myopic pekes or bloodhounds, as this phrase is in general use. It was while she was stuffing these tops into her shiny black bag, that she told me a little more about education in Fairacre over forty years ago.