Beginnings

by Debbie McGowan

  “Oh, yes, Miss! My mummy and daddy have been trying to have another baby since I was little. I saw her last night, and she is so teeny-weeny. And she looks like me, Granny said.”

  “She’s a very lucky little sister.” Miss Hampster held the door open, and Jess bounced in, her blonde ponytail bobbing up and down as she skipped across the room. “Leave them on my desk, Jess,” Miss Hampster suggested. Jess nodded and did just that, and then went back outside to wait for the bell to ring.

  Parkside Primary was an excellent school, the first choice for most of the families in the area. It had been built quite recently, thus it had modern, well-equipped classrooms, and a beautifully landscaped wildlife garden. The headteacher was a traditional school mistress but keen to try out new ideas, so her staff felt they all contributed something vital to the school, and this positive atmosphere meant the children excelled. Indeed, the only time staff left was because of retirement, which meant Miss Hampster was the only new, young teacher in the entire school, with most of the others having worked in the old school, prior to it having been rebuilt and renamed.

  So, whilst Miss Hampster was her current class’s favourite teacher ‘in the world’, she had yet to teach any of the other children and still felt very inexperienced, compared to her colleagues. Today, Mrs. Hennessy, who taught the fourth-year class, was coming in to observe the morning’s lessons. It was the final stage of Miss Hampster’s induction into the profession, and a chance for Mrs. Hennessy to properly get to know the children before they moved up in September. Miss Hampster was so nervous that she had forgotten her lesson plans, and now frantically set about rewriting them in note form.

  “Hi, Jackie,” Mrs. Hennessy said as she came into the room.

  “Oh, good morning, Siobhan. I can’t believe what I’ve done.” Miss Hampster was becoming increasingly flustered. “I’ve left my lesson plans at home. I’m just trying to jot them down from memory. I’ve got all of the resources ready, but—”

  “Jackie, slow down, hun!” Mrs. Hennessy said, laughing. “It’s fine. Just pop them in to me when you get a chance. I know you’ll have prepared—over-prepared, in fact.”

  Miss Hampster took a deep breath and nodded.

  “Thanks, Siobhan. It’s so nerve-racking, being observed.”

  “Yeah, it is. It’s horrid, but don’t worry about a thing. I’m here for my benefit as much as yours today, OK?”

  “OK.”

  The bell sounded, and soon after, the third years queued outside their classroom door. Miss Hampster was standing there, greeting each pupil as they arrived. She granted them permission to go inside, stopping any who weren’t dressed quite right, or were a little too excitable, just to slow them in their tracks. It was a strategy that she’d found worked wonders with this age of children.

  “Good morning, third years.” She beamed at them from the front of the classroom a moment later.

  “Good morning, Miss Hampster,” they returned in unison.

  “What a lovely greeting!” She smiled, making eye contact with them all individually. “Do you remember that we have a very special guest this morning?”

  Some of the girls nodded and put their hands in the air.

  “Yes, Ellie?”

  “I remember, Miss,” Eleanor said.

  “Excellent. Who else can remember?”

  All of the children put their hands up, and Miss Hampster laughed gently.

  “That’s fantastic, children. I’m going to count to three, and after three, let’s give Mrs. Hennessy one of our best welcomes ever! Ready? One, two, three!”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Hennessy,” the class greeted loudly.

  Mrs. Hennessy smiled down at them. “Good morning, children. Thank you very much for inviting me to your lessons today.” Mrs. Hennessy scooped her long, wavy, red hair back over her shoulders and resumed her seat. She made eye contact with Miss Hampster and nodded encouragingly. So far, so very impressive. The children’s behaviour was impeccable, and they evidently adored their teacher, which made her wonder how she was going to drag them away, come the new school year. They were going to have to come up with a transition strategy, and soon.

  “All right, then,” Miss Hampster began. “Before we take the register—” At these words, Eleanor got up and went to the front of the room, standing to attention and waiting. “Jess has some really good news to share with us all.” She looked across at Jess. “Would you like to announce it?”

  “Yes, Miss,” Jess said and was on her feet right away. “I’ve got a new baby sister. Her name is Daisy, and she was born yesterday afternoon.”

  The rest of the class applauded.

  “Thank you, everybody, and thank you, Jess,” Miss Hampster said. “You’ve brought in some cakes to celebrate, haven’t you? We’ll leave those until after playtime, if that’s all right?” Jess nodded. “Does anyone else have any good news to share with us this morning?”

  Three of the boys put their hands up high in the air. One of them was jumping up and down. Miss Hampster laughed.

  “Robert. It looks very important.”

  “Yes, Miss. Sorry, Miss.” He managed to stop jumping but kept his hand in the air.

  “OK. What’s your good news, Robert?”

  “We beat St. Mark’s four-three, Miss.”

  “That’s excellent! Well done!” Miss Hampster said, and again the rest of the class clapped. “How many of you are in the football team?” she asked. A couple more of the boys put up their hands, bringing the total to five. “Nice work. Keep it up! OK, boys, hands down now. We’ll save any other good news for after lunch, I think, children. Ellie, over to you.”

  Miss Hampster perched on the edge of her desk and waited, while Eleanor read out the list of names and marked off those who were present. At the end, she passed the register to her teacher to check, and then took it back to deliver it to the school office. In her absence, the rest of the class were instructed to retrieve their history project work. They’d been investigating the Romans, and each had a different aspect of Roman settlement in Britain that they were researching. In a couple of weeks’ time, all of the children would be presenting their work to the rest of the class.

  As two of the brightest girls in the year, Eleanor and Jess had been working together, along with Robert and Jonathan, who were both clever boys, but worked far better with girls than with other boys. They were researching ‘Roman Roads and Places’; Robert especially was interested in cars and bikes, so he was in charge of finding out about Roman transport. Jonathan was quite artistic and had therefore been given the task of presenting all of their work, which, Eleanor had ruled, would be done through a vast road map—currently taking up three double desktops—of Roman Britain, with the main roads marked on it, along with their contemporary equivalents, major towns and cities, and moving diagrams of transport, road construction and anything else of relevance or interest.

  Both Eleanor and Jess were currently reading through all of the books they had collected about the Roman Empire, with Jess trying to find out how the road builders were able to make such long, straight roads, whereas Eleanor was investigating what the roads were constructed from. They’d even brought books in that they had borrowed from the local library, many of which were way beyond their current level of ability, but Miss Hampster wasn’t going to discourage them, for they both had extraordinary potential, and she could well see them going on to be doctors or lawyers, as she put in their highly prophetic end-of-year report.

  Once they’d finished researching roads, they were going to move on to the places aspect of their ‘remit’—a word that Jonathan had picked up from his dad, who was an engineer—although they only had to figure out where the main Roman towns were, as other children were working on the houses, food, clothing, jobs, and so on.

  With all of the class briefed on what they needed to do in the first part of the morning, Miss Hampster circulated, checking progress and giving guidance where needed. Mrs. Hennessy followed her lead, spe
nding a short time with each group, chatting about what they were doing, asking each child to give her an example of something they had learned during the project.

  Listening in to some of these conversations, Miss Hampster was so proud. Some of the quieter girls really struggled to participate, but even little Suzie was able to boast that she had found out that the Romans ate ice cream, although it was more like a Slush Puppie, as it was made from ice and fruit. Miss tried not to worry too much about how delighted Suzie was with the idea that the emperor would throw slaves to the lions if their ice and snow melted before he got his ice cream, and instead praised her for all of her hard work.

  When Miss arrived at Jess and Eleanor’s table, all four children were hard at it, although she knew if she were judging the success of this activity as a relatively objective outsider, then it was failing in the sense that they weren’t working as a group as such, for each had clearly defined, individual tasks. She tried them with a couple of prompts on ways of working together, and they shrugged noncommittally. They were motivated and independent, and they were learning, so she didn’t want to push the point too forcefully. She checked all was well, gave them some pointers on ways to stretch themselves a little more, and moved on.

  “Jess,” Eleanor whispered, “can I borrow your glasses, please?”

  “Sure.” Jess took them off and passed them over. “Why?”

  “This writing is soooo tiny!” Eleanor held up the encyclopaedia and pointed to the footnote she had been squinting at for the past five minutes. She quickly positioned one of the lenses of Jess’s glasses to use it as a magnifying glass, read the paragraph, and passed them back. “Thanks,” she said.

  “It’s OK.” Jess put them on again so she could continue with her own reading and note-taking. She glanced at Eleanor’s notes. “You can’t read that tiny writing, but your handwriting is really tiny, too!”

  “Yeah.” Eleanor sighed and put her pencil down. “I’m going to have to do it again, but bigger.”

  “It’s all right, Ellie. I can do it,” Jonathan offered.

  Miss Hampster could hear their conversation from across the classroom and smiled to herself.

  “Thanks, Jonathan,” Ellie said, relieved. She could do bigger writing if she had to, but it got messier at the same time.

  “Guess who I saw yesterday,” Robert whispered boastfully to the rest of the group.

  Jess eyed him doubtfully, thinking it probably wasn’t going to be anyone interesting, but she still wanted to know. “Who?”

  “Mrs. Hennessy’s daughter. She’s in the same year as us at St. Mark’s.”

  “How d’you know it’s her daughter?” Eleanor asked.

  “She looks like her mum.”

  “So?”

  “Plus, Miss was there.”

  “Oh.”

  “How come?” Jess asked.

  “Dunno. I think they were just watching the match, but her daughter was in full kit.”

  Eleanor shrugged. “Maybe she’s one of their subs?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Robert said. “Girls can’t play football. Not with boys.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cos they can’t.”

  “Humph,” Eleanor said, disgruntled. “Well my little sister’s only four, and she already plays better than my brother.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s cos your brother’s poo. At footy, I mean. He’s cool, though. And he’s dead good at running.”

  Eleanor scowled at him, and he grinned.

  “Maybe we should start a girls’ team, Ellie,” Jess suggested.

  “Yeah. We’d definitely beat the boys.”

  “Ha ha. No you wouldn’t,” Robert said smugly. “Boys are better at that sort of thing. Girls are good at other stuff.”

  “Like cooking and things, you mean?”

  “Not just cooking. You and Jess are much cleverer than me and the other boys on the team.”

  “That’s not because we’re girls!” Jess protested.

  “It is!”

  “Is not.”

  “Is so.”

  “OK, children, settle down,” Miss Hampster interjected. “I’ll be over to see you in a couple of minutes, and I’m hoping that you’ll have an excellent Roman cart to show me, Robert.”

  “Sorry, Miss,” he said and obediently got back to work.

  “Miss’ll be on our side anyway,” Jess got in as a last jab, and then returned to running her finger down the pages of the book in front of her.

  Robert stuck his tongue out at her, but she didn’t see, or decided to ignore it.

  “Everything all right?” Mrs. Hennessy asked.

  “Yes, Miss,” Robert nodded without looking up.

  “You played excellently yesterday, incidentally, Robert.”

  “Thanks, Miss,” he said self-consciously.

  “So, what are you working on here?” She pointed at the lines Jonathan was drawing onto the map of Britain.

  “This is Dere Street, Miss,” he explained knowledgeably, although he was just doing what Ellie told him to. She’d pencilled in a line, and he was tracing over it in felt-tipped pen.

  Mrs. Hennessy sensed she wouldn’t get much more out of him than the name of the road, so she just nodded and smiled, and made her way around the table to the corner where the two girls were squashed together with their piles of books.

  “And what are you researching, Jess?”

  “I’m trying to find out how they made the roads so straight, Miss, but the books all say different things, and I don’t know which one is right.”

  “Hmm, that’s a tricky one, isn’t it?”

  “Do you think I can just say that they had lots of precision instruments, and there were surveyors specially trained to use them?”

  “Gosh!” Mrs. Hennessy was quite taken aback by Jess’s vocabulary. “I think that sounds perfect, but you’d best check with Miss Hampster before you write it up properly.”

  “OK, Miss, thanks.” Jess smiled and continued with her reading.

  “What have you found out, Eleanor?”

  “I’ve discovered that the roads were made from gravel, mixed with clay and chalk, with big flat stones on the top, so they’d be like Victorian cobbled streets, a bit.”

  “That’s very interesting.”

  Eleanor frowned. “And very bumpy.”

  Mrs. Hennessy laughed. “True enough. I’ll leave you to it.” She leaned in closer. “Come and see me after the summer holidays about your football idea, girls.”

  Jess and Eleanor looked at each other and grinned.

  ***

  At lunchtime, the children were all outside playing, enjoying a well-deserved break after a morning of highly impressive work, with their history projects well on the way to completion, followed by a science lesson, incorporating some basic sex education. Jackie Hampster worked incredibly hard for her pupils, and it showed in both the respect and love they had for her, and in their achievements this year.

  “I’m telling you, anyone who can get Robert Simpson working deserves a medal,” Siobhan Hennessy joked. She and Jackie Hampster were sitting in the staffroom, and Siobhan had reached the end of her post-observation feedback. It was excellent in all regards. The children were engaged, the activities were challenging, and Jackie was on top of their behaviour the second it looked as if it might veer off in the wrong direction, which had only happened the once in three hours.

  “Oh, Rob’s a very hard worker,” Jackie agreed, “if he’s doing things that interest him. Come and watch an English lesson sometime, and you won’t see quite the same level of commitment and enthusiasm, I assure you.”

  “Yes, well, just don’t tell the inspectors when they visit,” Siobhan warned with a wink; it went without saying. “I’m wondering… How would you feel about putting both of our classes together, maybe once a week, between now and the end of term?”

  Jackie thought about it for a moment and nodded. “That sounds like a great idea. I could do with the experience
of teaching some of the other children, and it’ll help ease them into…” She gulped.

  Siobhan patted her arm. “It’s tough, saying goodbye to your first class, but it gets easier, I promise.”

  “I hope so.” Jackie grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser. “And at least I get to see them around school a while longer. How do you cope?”

  Siobhan shrugged and smiled. “I try not to think about it. I do hear from past pupils every so often, and that makes it all worthwhile. OK, let’s have a look through our diaries—see where we can team up. And well done. You’re a fantastic teacher.”

  “Thanks,” Jackie said. She took out her planner, and they set to work.

  ***

  The sixth of September: the first day of their last year in primary school. Jess arrived at the school gates slightly ahead of Eleanor. They’d seen each other just once during the summer holidays.

  “Hi, Jess.”

  “Hi.”

  There was nothing more Eleanor could think of to say. She and Jess had never been the sort of friends to hold hands or anything like that, but now she put her arms around her and gave her the tightest hug. For little baby Daisy, at just seven weeks old, had died, suddenly, in her sleep.

  * * * * *

  The Treehouse

  Kris Johansson lived in a big, big house. It was tall, and old, and always cold. It had three floors, with vast rooms containing hardly any furniture at all. The carpets didn’t reach the walls, and the walls seemed to stretch forever heavenwards, the ceilings so high that the lights did not light them, and nor did the brightness of the day spilling in through the great bay windows. And in this enormous, tumbledown old house, there were many Johanssons, plucked from many branches of the family tree and deposited in England for months at a time, before returning home, to be replaced by others.

  Kris, his older brother Lars, and their parents, resided on the ground floor. Currently, their paternal grandparents were staying in a room on the first floor, along with a distant cousin called Eric, who was albino and refused to leave his darkened room in daylight. The rooms of the second floor were occupied by Anders, whose surname was not Johansson, a great uncle, through a marriage that was no more.

  The garden was a huge, rambling mess of ancient trees and overgrown vines that bore nothing but leaves and insects. At the far end of the garden was a passageway leading to nowhere, having once led somewhere magical—in the minds of the children, at least—but these days it was a dead end, overgrown with nettles and brambles. Now they were older, they were done with braving the stings and scratches involved in exploring the dank alley, instead choosing to spend their time elsewhere, preferably away from the house and garden. For the problem, was Anders.