by R. B. Baxter
Chapter 5 - The Great Man Cometh
Mum made sure we were all up early that morning, her plan being to feed and bathe us and still leave plenty of time for us to make our way to school without hurrying.
The walk to school was a long one which meant there was plenty of time for a kid to get good and filthy before they got to the school gate. This normally didn’t worry Mum too much but on this day we left the house under a promise of terrible retribution should we got dirty or do anything at all in front of the Archbishop today that would embarrass her.
But the Archbishop was the last thing on my mind as I finally approached the school gate. I wasn’t sure if word of my escapades from the night before would have reached the ears of the playground this early but as soon as I saw Nicky standing by the gate waiting for me, my stomach sank. It was obvious by the look on his face that it had and his first words confirmed it.
“What the hell did you get up to last night?”
I couldn’t hold back since I blamed him for the situation I was in. After all, it was his big idea in the first place. I jabbed him hard in the chest with my finger.
“I was putting your stupid bloody plan into action, that’s what I was doing.”
He rubbed the sore spot and glared at me. “Are you retarded or something? Why would you stand in one of the front windows of your house where everyone in the world can see you?”
“Well, I had to cool down after heating myself up, didn’t I?”
Nicky sighed. “Yes, but opening the bathroom window and exposing yourself from only the waist up would have done the job just as well. Any fool knows that.” He suddenly pushed me, hard.
“And don’t poke me again. It hurts.”
“Not as much as this, I’ll bet.” I punched him firmly in the shoulder.
“That’s because regardless of which window I stood in last night, your grand plan didn’t work, did it? I’m as fit as a Mallee bull even after all the bloody guarantees you gave me yesterday.”
Nicky rubbed his shoulder and sulked. We gave each other the silent treatment for the minute or so it took to cross the playground but Nicky was never one for holding grudges. It wasn’t long before he was looking at his watch.
“We still have half-an-hour before school starts,” he said, holding up his marble bag. “Fancy a game?”
As we set everything up I asked him how he’d come to hear about things so quickly.
“Mrs Simpson called Mum early this morning for a chin-wag. She told her and when Mum finally stopped laughing, she told us.”
I groaned. Of course—the phone! It wasn’t the most common of household items in the sixties and since we didn’t have one in our house it was easy to forget there were others in town that did. If Dad or Mum wanted to make a call they simply wandered over to one of the neighbours who did have the phone on, paid their five cents, and made the call from there.
I shook my head. What a boon the telephone was to someone like old Mrs Simpson. I could just imagine it. Early morning would be spent on the telephone contacting the previously unreachable members of her web; the ones who lived in the far-flung corners of the town. When she had exhausted her store of telephonic listeners (eager or otherwise) she would then hit the road, visiting a surprising number of houses over the course of the afternoon.
I knew our house would be the first one she’d hit today since she obviously had something lovely and juicy to report. And I knew just how she’d frame it. Mum is not normally a gossipy sort of person and as a rule won’t put up with Mrs Simpson’s toxic confabulations for very long. But Mrs Simpson, the old cow, knows this. She knows exactly how to open the conversation so that Mum will want to hear more.
“Oh Margaret, that son of yours ...” At this point she would hold her hand over her mouth and laugh as if amused by the antics of an innocent young child. Then she would continue on: “... he’s such an amusing little fellow.”
Now Mum is no different to any other mother. If a child of hers is the topic of conversation she’s going to want to hear more. I also knew exactly how the rest of the conversation would go and that did not bear thinking about. In fact it was so off-putting I couldn’t concentrate and as a consequence lost a few good marbles to Nicky which put him in a cracker of a mood for the rest of the morning.
The day was not starting well but I was thankful at least that everybody else in the playground was busy in some way and had not come running over to taunt and jeer. It would come, I knew that, but the longer it took the better it was for me. School kids are like hungry wolves; once one jumps in for a bite the rest pile in and before you know it, it’s a fully-fledged smorgasbord.
The bell went and we all lined up. It was here in the close-quarters of the morning assembly that I expected the jibes to begin and was surprised when nobody paid any attention to me at all.
This was confusing. If my antics from the night before were all around the school, and I very much suspected they were, then I expected to be on the end of a barb or two. I quietly asked Nicky what he thought was going on.
“I think the nuns have made everyone too nervous about the Archbishop’s visit. Everybody’s too wrapped up in their own thoughts and worries to be wasting time thinking about you and your silly bloody antics.” He snickered quietly. “I should think you’d be happy to delay the ribbing you’re sure to get.”
I held my hands up in mock surrender. “I am. I am. Don’t worry—I was just wondering that’s all.”
The principal, Sister Frances, did not keep us long, just long enough to verbally paint a lurid image of the sort of punishment we could expect if any of us were to bring dishonour upon the school—her school—in any way, shape or form while the Archbishop was present.
“Such a thing will be an embarrassment to me and my fellow sisters and teachers and will not be tolerated.” She followed this statement up with one of her trademark, steely glares which left the whole school in no doubt about how much she meant what she said.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity under that cold, malevolent glower, she dismissed us and we all trooped off to our respective classrooms.
The morning dragged on with everybody in the classroom, Mrs Payne included, repeatedly turning to look up at the large clock on the back wall of the room as our nerves became more and more jangled.
The Archbishop was due to begin prowling the hallways straight after recess and as there was every chance that more than one of us would get filthy in the twenty-minute break, any thought of outside activity on this day was quietly cancelled. Instead, our daily dose of government-issued milk was to be taken in our classrooms. The crates were dragged inside and deposited in the wide hallway so that each class could troop out in turn, grab a bottle and return to their desks to drink it.
Mrs Payne, consumed with the fear that a spill was inevitable, kept a hawk-like vigil over the entire class as we sipped from the wide-mouthed bottles. She was just beginning to relax when Matt Jones cracked a joke which made Ian Richards burst into sudden laughter. Unfortunately Ian was loaded to the gills with banana milk at the time and because of his burst of spontaneous laughter, he spat the lot all over the front of Matt’s jumper.
Silence dropped like a lid on the room as thirty small heads turned in unison to Mrs Payne to see how she would react when faced with such sudden adversity. But Mrs Payne, with more than thirty-five years of teaching experience behind her was more than equal to the task. She grabbed both boys and whipping their jumpers off, put Ian’s on Matt and rolling Matt’s milk-sodden one into a tight ball, lifted the hinged top of his desk and jammed the sodden mass deep into a corner.
This deft, almost balletic passage of movement took place so quickly we hardly saw what happened. The whole thing was rounded off beautifully by Mrs Payne delivering a sharp clip to the back of Ian’s head with her usual unerring accuracy. We’d been back at our desks only a few minutes when we heard a chorus of voices from the room next-door.
“Good morning Your Grace and
may God bless you.”
A blanket of deathly silence descended over the whole class. The Archbishop was just in the next room! That meant we were next! The tension was unbearable and some of the less stalwart among our group were already showing signs of cracking. Brian Ferguson began to whimper while Wendy Jones cut straight to the chase and started to cry.
Mrs Payne’s desk, a large, lift-top affair—really just a larger version of our own—was situated on a raised platform giving her an imposing and imperious overview of the whole classroom. It was strategically placed on the far side of the room from the door meaning that anyone entering the room had to cross the whole floor to get to her desk. They were under her watchful eye every step of the way. She used the desk’s position, height and size to her advantage at every opportunity and this time was no exception. Leaning forward in her chair she hissed at us through clenched teeth:
“If you do not pull yourselves together immediately and sit up straight and be quiet, I will deal with each and every one of you individually after the Archbishop has left the school.” She followed this up with a firmly delivered assurance that we would not be able to sit down for a week afterwards. The implied violence did the trick and we all snapped to attention, clasped our hands together primly on the desk in front of us, and stared silently and fixedly to the front.
Mrs Payne eased herself back in her chair and smiled. “That’s better.”
We stayed that way for about another ten minutes and the longer we waited, the worse I felt. Why won’t they hurry? I asked myself repeatedly, feeling sicker and sicker in the belly as the minutes ticked away. It wasn’t that I was anxious to get started or anything. I just wanted to get the whole sorry thing over and done with. The longer the Archbishop took to get here the more likely it was that I'd vomit from sheer terror.
I groaned aloud and was just beginning to think I really would throw up when the chorus of voices from next-door sounded again.
“Goodbye Your Grace. Thank you and may God bless you.”
Oh-no! He was coming!
The ball of ice in my belly sat even heavier. The atmosphere in the room was so charged you could almost hear it crackling. The sudden thump of footsteps in the wooden corridor between the rooms heralded his arrival. He’d be here in seconds.
I snapped a quick look at Mrs Payne. She was feeling the pressure too. She sat bolt upright, her hands clasped white-knuckled and claw-like on the desk in front of her. A faint glow of anticipation was evident on her cheeks while desperation blazed like a bushfire in her old, grey eyes. She swallowed nervously.
I turned back to the doorway in time to see three figures step into the room. The school principal, Sister Francis; Monsignor James, our parish priest; and a third man, surprisingly young-looking and curiously under-dressed I thought, in dark trousers with a light jumper over a collared shirt with no tie. This had to be the Archbishop.
Mrs Payne played her part well, at least initially. She stood and holding her arms out as though to a long-lost relative, addressed him cheerily.
“Ah, Your Grace. How lovely of you to visit us here today,” and completely forgetting that her desk was on a raised dais, she threw out her left leg like a steeplechaser and launched herself into what she’d obviously intended to be a brisk, no-nonsense march across the floor whereupon she would grasp the Great Man by the hand and welcome him warmly.
Instead, where it had expected some flooring, her foot found only thin air and she pitched into a nosedive that would live forever in the school’s folkloric history; the story being retold in the playground for generations to come.
The crash as she hit the floor was enormous as was the gasp that leapt from every throat in the room. Mrs Payne was not a small woman and she hit hard enough to shake the old wooden floorboards alarmingly. Owing to the angle she had pitched on, she had the added indignity of her dress flying up and covering her head as she lay there dazed. This afforded everyone present a wonderful view of the poor woman’s capacious knickers but with the shock of what had happened no-one seemed to notice.
Sister Francis and Monsignor James froze in horror but the Archbishop was a man of action. Three enormous strides had him across the room and helping a dazed and mortified Mrs Payne to her feet and back into a chair.
The immediate response from the class was varied. Some of the girls began crying and hyperventilating badly. Janet Higgins began to pray fervently and Archie Collins was heard to say “Christ Almighty!” quiet loudly; an exclamation that would have earned him six of the best and a week of Stations of the Cross as penance on any other occasion.
Fatty Parker, the class do-gooder who adored all the teachers, suffered worst of all. The shock of seeing not just one of the teachers, but his teacher come to such grief and at such an important time was too much for him. He sat there stiff and unmoving, his eyes like dinner plates, his mouth opening and closing like an obese goldfish.
My response I’m sad to say, was different.
About two years earlier, through the medium of Saturday afternoon matinees at the local picture theatre, I had discovered a deep appreciation of the slapstick and pratfall comedy of the Three Stooges. To see Larry, Curly and Moe in full flight was a sight to behold and the tripping, punching, pinching, eye-poking, face-slapping sorts of gags that their movies were peppered with had me in stitches. I was a hopeless case; a devotee, a connoisseur of all things Stooge and as such, my humour-response gene had devolved to a point where I had developed a hair-trigger response to anyone else’s misfortune. It was an embarrassing thing and something that had seen me get into trouble before.
I was horrified to realise that this time was no different. I could feel it coming and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I lowered my head to my desk, clamped my hands over my mouth and tried to think of other things, but it was to no avail.
As soon as Mrs Payne went head-over-heels off the edge of her desk and the initial gasp of shock from all present had faded, a paralysing silence enveloped the room. Outside of Janet Higgins’s muttered prayers and Archie Collins’s blasphemous exclamation you could’ve heard a fish fart.
And then a short, stifled, nasally snort of laughter cut the silence. It wasn’t loud but it was unmistakable to anyone who caught it and many didn’t.
But chief among those that did was Sister Francis. Her head snapped around and she fixed me with a viscous, shark-like glare that was dripping with the promise of a hell-on-earth when this was all over and the Archbishop was safely off the premises.
I sat there and tried to look as innocent as I could. I even put a look of disgust on my own face and looked about me to see who the heartless bugger was that had snickered at poor Mrs Payne’s misfortune. But when I turned back to the front again the principal was still glaring, raptor-like at me. She was showing her teeth now in a sort of silent growl and a vein in her left temple was throbbing.
Obviously she was not going to be deflected. I knew that killing me was suddenly the most important thing in her life and I’m sure that had the Archbishop not been there, she would have closed the gap between us in a heartbeat and be wailing the hell out of me already.
I swallowed hard. There was no doubt about it. I was in for it this time.
