Teacher, Teacher!
A hilarious account of a year in the life of a village school
Jack Sheffield
It’s 1977 and Jack Sheffield is appointed headmaster of a small village primary school in North Yorkshire. So begins Jack’s eventful journey through the school year and his attempts to overcome the many problems that face him as a young and inexperienced headmaster. The many colourful chapters include Ruby the 20 stone caretaker with an acute spelling problem, a secretary who worships Margaret Thatcher, a villager who grows giant carrots, a barmaid/parent who requests sex lessons, and a five-year-old boy whose language is colourful in the extreme. And then there’s also beautiful, bright Beth Henderson, who is irresistibly attractive to the young headmaster…Warm, funny and nostalgic, Teacher, Teacher! is a delightful read that is guaranteed to make you feel better, whatever kind of day you’ve had.
About the Author
J
ack Sheffield was born in 1945 and grew up in the tough environment of Gipton Estate in north-east Leeds. His first job was ‘pitch boy’, carrying buckets of boiling bitumen up a ladder to repair roofs. In the sixties he trained to be a teacher at St John’s College, York, and spent his summer holidays as a Corona Pop Man in West Yorkshire.
In the early seventies, he was a teacher in Keighley in West Yorkshire during which time he earned a reputation as a hard-tackling wing-forward for Wharfedale RUFC.
In the late seventies and eighties, he was a head-teacher of two schools in North Yorkshire before gaining his Masters Degree at York University and becoming Senior Lecturer in Primary Education at Bretton Hall near Wakefield. It was at this time he began to record his many amusing stories of village life.
Jack lives in Yorkshire and Teacher, Teacher! is his first novel. The second book about Ragley School, Mister Teacher, will be published early next year.
Contents
About the Author
Contents
Map
Prologue
1. The F-word
2. The Problem Solver
3. Parents’ Evening
4. The Carrot Champion
5. The Best Dressed Guy Fawkes
6. The Governors’ Meeting
7. Old Boilers, Sex and Being Overpaid
8. The Best Christmas Present in the World
9. Snow White and the Six Dwarfs
10. Genghis Khan and the Keep Fit Club
11. Elvis and the Student Teacher
12. Dance With Your Eyes
13. The Football Match
14. The Boat Girl
15. The Headteachers’ Training Course
16. The School Camp
17. The Cricket Match
18. Sports Day
19. Seaside Gladys and the Summer Fair
20. The Accident
21. The Victorian Day and Albert
22. Teacher, Teacher
Prologue
Headmaster required for Ragley-on-the-Forest C. of E. Primary School, near York, from September, 1977, following the retirement of Mr J. Pruett. Application forms from County Hall, Northallerton. Closing date 21 February 1977.
Extract from The Times Educational Supplement
B
ehind a huge oval table the four horsemen of the apocalypse flanked an imposing lady with purple-rinsed hair and a glare that turned human beings into pillars of salt.
Miss Barrington-Huntley, Chairwoman of the interviewing panel, took off her steel-framed spectacles and polished them slowly and deliberately. As she did so, her eyes passed over my gangling six-feet-one-inch frame like an X-ray scanner, from the top of my unruly brown hair, down past my Buddy Holly spectacles and fashionable flower power tie, to the neat creases in my flared polyester trousers and the toecaps of my polished shoes.
My heart was beating fast. This was the moment I had been waiting for.
“Mr Sheffield,” she said, “after careful consideration we have decided to offer you the very challenging post of headmaster of Ragley School. First, I must ask you formally, do you accept?”
A nearby church clock suddenly began to chime the hour and a pencil-thin, somewhat distracted man in a clerical collar leaned forward and clasped his long, tapering fingers as if he was about to pray.
“For whom the bell tolls,” said the Revd Joseph Evans, the Chairman of Governors, smiling for the first time and enjoying his little joke. Alongside him, Stan Coe, the Vice-Chairman, glowered at me as if I was to blame for the tight collar that throttled his bull-like neck.
“It tolls for thee,” chuckled Richard Gomersall, the Senior Primary Adviser.
Bernard Pickard, the Assistant Chief Education Officer, never flickered from his note-making and Stan Coe looked bemused, as though everyone had started speaking in Japanese.
“Gentlemen, if you please,” said Miss Barrington-Huntley, restoring the sense of decorum.
I knew my life was about to change with my next two words.
I took a deep breath and said simply, “I accept.”
♦
So it was that on a bright sunny morning in the summer of 1977, at the age of thirty-one, I left my tiny, bachelor flat in the village of Bradley, near Skipton, filled up my emerald-green Morris Minor Traveller with petrol and drove on the A59 over Blubberhouses and through Harrogate towards the beautiful, historic city of York. The A19 led me out to the north of the city and soon I began to meander through a cluster of pretty villages that nestled on the vast flatland near the foot of the Hambleton hills.
The retiring headmaster, John Pruett, had invited me to meet him during the summer holidays so that he could show me around and pass on the school keys. It was with a feeling of excitement and expectation that I drove slowly into Ragley village and along the High Street, past the General Stores, Piercy’s Butcher’s Shop, the Village Pharmacy, Pratt’s Hardware Emporium, Nora’s Coffee Shop, Diane’s Hair Salon and a tiny Post Office with a red telephone box outside. Ahead of me was the village green and I stopped the car and surveyed the scene. A large white-fronted public house, The Royal Oak, nestled in the centre of a row of terraced cottages at the far side of the grassy triangle and off to my right, behind an avenue of horse chestnut trees, was Ragley School. In that instant I knew I could be happy here.
The school was an elegant, traditional Victorian building of weathered reddish-brown bricks. It looked tall and solid, with steeply sloping roofs of dark grey tiles and an incongruous bell tower. A waist-high wall of Yorkshire stone, with iron railings mounted on the top, bordered the playground and cobbled driveway and the sun reflected brightly from the high arched window in the gable end.
I walked under the tall Victorian archway on which the date 1878 was chiselled deep into the buff-coloured lintel and into the dark, cramped entrance hall. The only thing that caught my eye in an otherwise featureless corridor was the small brass plate on the dark wood office door. It simply read ‘John T. Pruett, headmaster’.
I tapped on the door and a bespectacled man with a gentle, careworn face opened it.
“Good morning,” I said, “I’m Jack Sheffield.”
He smiled and beckoned me in.
“Hello, Mr Sheffield, welcome to Ragley,” he said. “I’m John Pruett.”
I followed him into a small L-shaped office with two desks, lots of bookshelves and walls that were lined with black-and-white photographs.
When he sat down in his creaking leather chair behind the cluttered desk it was as if the last piece of a three-dimensional jigsaw had been neatly slotted into place. Mr Pruett fitted perfectly into what looked like his own personal antique shop. I moved a dusty box of Cuisinaire counting rods, a Schonell Reading Test card covered in sticky-backed plastic and a pile of dog-eared exercise books from the
visitor’s chair and sat down.
He looked up at me and absent-mindedly flattened a few wisps of thin grey hair across his creased forehead.
“Well, I wish you luck,” he said. “It’s a lovely school and I’ve been very happy here.”
He pushed back his chair and walked over to the white porcelain sink, where he proceeded to fill a battered kettle.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“White, no sugar, thanks,” I replied. It was time to find out more.
“Er, Mr Pruett, how long have you been here?”
He selected two new Silver Jubilee mugs from the set of six on the shelf above the sink and gazed wistfully at the collection of photographs that filled the room.
“Thirty years,” he said quietly. “I came to Yorkshire after the war and took a short training course at the College in York.”
He opened the fridge under the Formica worktop, selected a small, one-third-of-a-pint school milk bottle, shook it to mix in the head of cream and peeled off the foil top.
“There weren’t as many children then,” he continued, “but the village has grown in recent years. New families have bought many of the old farmhouses for renovation and the council estate is bigger. The old villagers call the new folk ‘outsiders’.”
He glanced back at me, his lined face alight with a twinkling mischievous smile.
“It takes a long time to be accepted here.”
He paused for a moment to let this sink in before he passed me the steaming mug of coffee.
“You’ll be needing these,” he said, and pointed to a pile of thick, leather-bound school logbooks. “The whole history of the school is here,” he said, “almost a hundred years. Now it’s your turn. As headmaster, you have to keep an accurate account of everything that happens. Well, just the official stuff, of course. Keep it simple. Whatever you do, don’t say what really happens because no one will believe you.”
♦
On 1 September 1977, I opened the school logbook and began to write. It didn’t tell the whole story. That was kept in my ‘alternative school logbook’. And this is it!
One
The F-word
80 children on roll. Fluorescent lights repaired in hall.
Miss Barrington-Huntley, Chief Education Officer, has informed the HT that she will be visiting school this term to check on progress.
Extract from the Ragley School Logbook: Friday 10 September 1977
“I
’ve got a complaint, Mr Sheffield.”
“Yes?”
“This school is teaching my children to swear!”
Mrs Winifred Brown’s huge bulk filled the doorway of the tiny school office. I sighed and retreated. It was Friday lunchtime and hopes of a school dinner suddenly receded.
“Please come and sit down, Mrs Brown.”
I was nearing the end of my first week as headmaster of Ragley Primary School in North Yorkshire and my education in dealing with angry parents was just beginning.
Mrs Brown manoeuvred heavily into the reception chair and blew her nose like a snorting rhino. A ‘Good Luck in your New Job’ card fluttered prophetically from the top of the grey metal filing cabinet.
“Now, what exactly is the problem, Mrs Brown?”
“Well, it’s like this, Mr Sheffield. My Dominic comes ‘ome last night an’ large as life it just comes out.”
“What comes…er, came out, Mrs Brown?”
“Y’know, the f-word.”
“The f-word!”
“Yes, ‘e just comes out with it. ‘e leaned over to ‘is grandma an’ nice as ninepence ‘e just shouts in ‘er ear, PASS THE EFFIN’ SAUCE PLEASE, GRANDMA, ‘e ‘as to shout ‘cause she’s deaf as a post.”
I bit my bottom lip in a determined attempt to regain my composure.
“Oh dear, and what happened then?”
“Well, ‘is dad clips ‘im with a swift back’ander an’ ‘e asks him what was it ‘e just said. So our Dominic says that ‘e only asked ‘is grandma for the effin’ sauce so ‘e gets another what-for round the ear. But this is the best of it. It turns out ‘e ‘eard some boys practisin’ it in your toilets. Practisin’ it, I ask you. Me an’ Eddie think it’s disgustin’, an’ we want you to do somethin’ about it, ‘cause we don’t want no effin’ in our ‘ouse.”
Mrs Brown was becoming very red in the face so I decided to use the diplomatic approach.
“I’ll do my best, Mrs Brown, and I’ll certainly have a word with the children concerned.”
“I ‘ope you do, Mr Sheffield. I just ‘opes you do.”
With that, she raised her large bulk, somehow freeing herself of the tight-fitting chair. As she turned to go she glared back at me. “An’ I’ll be back for our Dominic at one o’clock, ‘e’s goin’ to a proper dentist, not your school one!”
She stormed out, leaving the door swinging on its hinges and a patterned heel-print on my ‘Good Luck’ card.
I followed in her wake to the front door of the school. I needed fresh air and I stood in the steady drizzle on the old stone steps. The scampering feet of generations of children had worn them down since the school was built almost one hundred years before. Rain was falling on the small playground and the school field beyond. Dark clouds scudded across the vast plain of York towards the Hambleton hills in the far distance. Beyond the high wrought-iron railings, a large flag of St George fluttered proudly on the tall flagpole in the middle of the village green as a reminder of the summer’s Silver Jubilee celebrations.
For this was 1977. Virginia Wade had won Wimbledon and Red Rum had been cheered to a third Grand National victory. In York, people queued outside the cinema to watch Star Wars, whilst children enjoyed the new craze and played on skateboards. Best of all, Geoffrey Boycott had scored his one hundredth hundred in the Test match against Australia on the hallowed turf of Headingley. Yorkshire folk were content and all was well in their world.
The huge bell in the bell tower suddenly boomed out, reminding the whole village it was twelve o’clock and time for school dinner. I brushed the raindrops from my shoulders, took a deep breath and walked briskly back into school. My first headship was proving much tougher than I had expected.
When I arrived in the school hall, grace had been recited and eighty tubular steel chairs were being scraped in unison on the worn wooden floor. We settled round our Formica-topped, octagonal tables, knees locked together in tense expectancy. With boring predictability the shin-crunching kicking of small feet rapped against my legs as the three six-year-olds sitting opposite sought ways to release their pent-up energy. It has never ceased to amaze me how infant children can remain absolutely immobile and demure from the waist up whilst beneath table-top level their lower limbs are a seething frenzy of destructive activity.
I struggled to find some modicum of comfort for my lanky frame on the hard, plastic-topped chair, designed for the average nine-year-old pygmy. With my knees almost on a level with my chin I prepared to serve the food from the scalding metal tureens placed in front of me by Mrs Critchley, the orange-coated dinner lady.
I was a past expert at dividing any shape of container into eight equal portions of food and now only crusty lemon meringue pie and limpet-like toad in the hole remained anything of a challenge. In seconds, the boys and girls around me attacked the first course, each using their knife and fork like a sword and trident. I stared at my child-sized portion. What it lacked in quantity was countered by its appetizing quality and I prepared to enjoy every mouthful.
“Teacher, teacher, will you cut my thingy, please?” asked four-year-old Hazel Smith, trying to trap her elusive fritter with the blunt side of her local-authority knife. This accomplished, I returned my attention to the rapidly cooling fritter on my plate. The first mouthwatering piece was on the end of my fork when ten-year-old Anita Cuthbertson tugged my sleeve, causing the piece of fritter to grease my left ear and stain my lapel on its way back to the plate.
“Mr Sheffield,” shouted Anita, “the toilet�
��s blocked and the floor’s all runny and Mark said it was Sharon.”
I winced at the thought.
“Could you tell one of the dinner ladies please, Anita?” I asked.
Somehow the fritter looked a little less appealing.
Meanwhile, nine-year-old Billy McNeill had already devoured his meal and was now staring longingly at my fritter. However, I was usually able to steel myself against this kind of emotional blackmail. I had forsaken too many sausages and beef burgers that way. Billy’s eyes were only inches from my meal and the two green candles that ran from his nose in parallel unison threatened to drip onto my plate.
Next to Billy, Jimmy Poole’s face was going a pale green colour.
“I fweel thwick in my tummy, Mr Theffield,” said Jimmy.
It was obvious the contents of his stomach were about to be disgorged onto the table top and close neighbours at any moment. I beckoned to Mrs Critchley to escort Jimmy to safety. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite make the private sanctuary of the boys’ toilet and was violently sick in the place traditionally selected by all sickly children, namely right in the doorway of the main corridor leading from the hall. Every child would therefore have to pass this intriguing ‘forbidden zone’ and pass judgement on the sloppy mess that would soon be covered with sawdust prior to its eventual removal by Ruby the Caretaker. The retching sounds continued unabated, as the door could not now be closed to stifle the noise.
I stared unenthusiastically at my stone-cold fritter.
“I’m ever so sorry to bother you, Mr Sheffield.” It was Mrs Mapplebeck the Cook. She looked concerned. “It’s Mr Pickard from the office on the phone and he says it’s important. I’ll warm up your fritter if you like.”
I sighed. “Thanks, Shirley, I’ll come now.”
Mr Pickard, the Very Important Person at the Office, sounded agitated at being kept waiting. “Er, very quickly, Mr Sheffield, Miss Barrington-Huntley, Chair of the Education Committee, will be visiting you some time this term. She always likes to see how our newly appointed headteachers are settling in. Try to make a good impression. Thank you.”
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