01 Teacher, Teacher!

by Jack Sheffield

  “Very well, Mr Pickard,” I replied. “I’ll look forward to meeting – ”

  But the line was already dead.

  I imagined him strolling down to the County Hall dining room or eating out in some elegant pub, relaxing over his asparagus soup, with a swirl of cream emphasizing its richness. I could see him breaking open a fresh, crusty roll, enjoying soft music and sipping a glass of Beaujolais. The serrated edge of his knife would slice cleanly through his roast beef and he would choose fresh broccoli in preference to cauliflower. Fleetingly, I envisaged him enjoying a delicate, lemon cheesecake, drinking fresh ground coffee and nibbling a chocolate-coated mint. I stared for a few moments at the empty receiver, uncertain whether to swear or smile.

  At that moment, Anne Grainger, the deputy headmistress, popped her head round the door.

  “Jack, if it stops raining, I thought I’d send the children out to play for a few minutes. Is that OK with you?”

  Anne, a slim, attractive brunette in her mid-forties, could always be relied upon to make the right decisions. She possessed two of the greatest attributes of an effective deputy: realism and a sense of humour. I nodded in agreement.

  “Good idea, Anne, they need some fresh air. In the meantime, I must ring Ruby to get her to clean up the unmentionable mess in the hall.”

  She grinned and headed outside to check on the rain-soaked playground.

  Before I could dial, a tapping on the open door attracted my attention. There stood Jimmy Poole, now completely recovered from his violent sickness. His bright, black-button eyes peered from under a mop of ginger curls.

  “Hello, Mithter Theffield,” he said.

  Jimmy would obviously go far. He just needed to lose some of his childlike innocence but as he was only five and a half years old this could take some time. He was a survivor and sought out friends in unlikely places. Jimmy had quickly decided that he could make his mark as an informer and had no qualms about dropping his closest allies in at the deep end. It was just that he went about it with such charming naivety.

  “Hello, Jimmy, are you better now?”

  He stared at me, presumably trying to gauge my mood.

  “Do you want a fruit gum, Mithter Theffield?”

  The little squashed pastille he pulled from the pocket of his scruffy shorts could conceivably have once been a green fruit gum but occasional sucking and miscellaneous dust had left it looking like a furry owl pellet.

  “Thank you, Jimmy, I’ll save it for later.”

  I placed it with reverent care alongside the brass paperweight on my desk.

  The opening gambit now dispensed with, Jimmy plunged in bravely.

  “Thum boyth an’ girlth were naughty in thchool dinner today, Mithter Theffield.”

  “Oh yes, what were they doing?” I asked.

  “Well…you know when Mithith Grainger thaid handth together eyeth clothed?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Mithter Theffield, thum of them kept their eyeth open.”

  “And how did you know, Jimmy?”

  “I thaw them, Mithter Theffield.”

  I ruffled his tousled hair and returned Jimmy the Informer to the entrance hall where Mrs Critchley was talking to a surly-looking workman. His blue overalls sported the faded words ‘Craven Electrical’. He thrust a pink maintenance sheet under my nose.

  “Electrics. Fluorescent lights. Where are they?”

  I shrugged off his abrupt impolite manner, for this was an important repair job. While I pointed out where to find a suitable ladder, a nagging thought kept recurring that there was something I had forgotten to do.

  Mrs Mapplebeck suddenly reappeared, looking anxious.

  “Can you spare a couple of minutes, Mr Sheffield? We have a problem in the kitchen.”

  My shoulders sank a little lower. It was obviously one of those days. In the kitchen everything appeared normal, apart from the kitchen ladies who were smiling as if they shared some common secret.

  “Well, what’s the problem, Shirley?” I asked.

  “You are, Mr Sheffield.”

  “Me!”

  The ladies giggled.

  “Yes, Mr Sheffield, you’re the problem. I make nice meals and you don’t sit still long enough to eat them. Come here and sit yourself down for a minute. I’m afraid you’ve missed your fritters but you’re not going to miss your pudding.”

  Suddenly a large bowl of gooseberry crumble and custard appeared on the chromium hotplate along with a large mug of tea just the way I like it, black with a slice of lemon.

  “Thanks, Shirley, this is marvellous.”

  The hot crumble almost scalded my tongue but I enjoyed every mouthful and the tea was delicious. I had just finished when Blue Overalls reappeared.

  “You’ve got to sign my job sheet.”

  It was a command rather than a request. He winked at the kitchen ladies and nodded towards me.

  “S’all right f’some,” he grumbled. “Can’t be bad, can it?”

  I signed quickly and he snatched the grubby piece of paper from under my nose.

  “Not only ‘ave y’got a nice cushy job but y’get a free dinner f’nowt but looking after a buncher little kids.”

  He turned quickly and was gone. In fact, too quickly, for when he reached the doorway from the hall to the corridor I remembered what it was I had forgotten. I should have rung Ruby the Caretaker to ask her to clean up a certain something. Suddenly there was a crash, a yell and a stream of curses. It was Blue Overalls on his backside.

  “Aw no! What the ‘ell’s this? I’m all covered in sticky stuff an’ sawdust!”

  His curses echoed down the corridor as I quickly sought the sanctuary of my office. I sat down to ring Ruby. Meanwhile, out of the window a throng of children were playing happily, all except one. Bristle-haired Dominic Brown, his clothes splattered in mud, had frozen in mid-stride. He was standing in a muddy puddle and staring in terror at something outside my line of vision.

  Inquisitively, I opened the window a couple of notches. Floating clearly on the September breeze from the direction of the car park was Mrs Brown’s foghorn voice.

  “Come ‘ere, y’little sod, an’ get off that bloody grass!”

  As I eased the window shut Anne came into the office shaking her head in disbelief.

  “What a woman and what language! We’ve got an electrician swearing in the corridor and a parent swearing in the playground. It’s a madhouse!”

  “It could have been worse, Anne,” I replied.

  She looked at me, puzzled, as I dialled Ruby’s number once again.

  “Jack, what do you mean it could have been worse?” asked Anne.

  I placed my hand over the mouthpiece and whispered conspiratorially, “Be thankful for small mercies, Anne. At least they didn’t use the f-word!”

  “That would never ever happen at Ragley School,” said Anne proudly and walked off to ring the bell for the afternoon session.

  On my way back to my classroom I stopped for a moment in Anne’s class. Two small boys were sitting opposite each other at a table covered in plastic building bricks. During my first week I had taken every opportunity to learn the names of children who were not in my class.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the boy who was putting tiny play people inside the rectangular construction of plastic bricks.

  “eathcliffe,” came the blunt reply.

  “Heathcliffe?” I repeated in surprise.

  “Yeah, ‘eathcliffe,” he said and glared at me.

  “And what’s your name?” I asked his little friend who frowned at me and shook his head.

  “This is mi bruvver, Terry,” said Heathcliffe by way of explanation, “e dunt say nowt.”

  “And what are you making?” I asked, trying to stimulate conversation.

  “ouse,” said Heathcliffe.

  I looked at the four red plastic walls with the group of small dolls imprisoned inside and pointed to the pile of unused plastic windows and doors scattered on t
he table top.

  “If you put windows in, they will be able to see out, won’t they?” I said with an encouraging smile.

  Heathcliffe shrugged his shoulders and grunted while little Terry shook his head sadly. This was clearly rocket science to him.

  Suddenly the bell rang and I said goodbye to the house builders.

  It was when I reached the classroom door I distinctly heard Heathcliffe whisper to his little brother, “Ah told yuh we should’ve put some fuckin’ winders in!”

  Two

  The Problem Solver

  Roy Davidson, EWO, visited school and checked all attendance registers. He praised Miss Evans’ work as School Secretary.

  Extract from the Ragley School Logbook: Monday 16 September 1977

  “£12,000 for a small detached cottage?” I exclaimed.

  “It’s a bargain,” said Vera, the secretary.

  “But I’d need a huge mortgage, my flat in Skipton only fetched £7,000,” I said in despair.

  “I’ll take you to see it at lunchtime,” said Vera confidently. “You won’t regret it.”

  Anne collected her dinner register from Vera’s desk and whispered in my ear, “I should listen to Vera if I were you, Jack, she’s got a gift for solving problems.”

  It was the last week of September and I was living in rented accommodation in York. Since my appointment as headmaster, it had taken me four months to sell my flat and now I was looking for a new home. A local development at Thorpe Willoughby was advertised in the Yorkshire Evening Press and included two-bedroom bungalows at £8,450 and I intended to spend the next weekend looking at the site.

  It was clear that Vera had other ideas. Her old and very dear friend, Mrs Merryweather, had decided to sell her cottage on the outskirts of Kirkby Steepleton and move to Bridlington to live with her daughter.

  “OK, you win, Vera, I’ll take a look,” I said.

  “It’s only three miles away,” she said in a determined manner. “We’ll go at twelve o’clock.”

  Vera had proved invaluable in my first few weeks as a headmaster. She knew how to deal with the avalanche of circulars from County Hall, check registers, collect dinner money, keep accounts and answer awkward telephone calls. According to her official job description, Vera was a part-time ‘Clerical Assistant’ but no one would have dared to call her anything other than ‘School Secretary’.

  In her mid-fifties, Vera Evans was a tall, slim, elegant woman with neatly permed, silver-grey hair. She was very proud of her job and extremely protective of her own space in the office we shared. Her desk was always tidy and she insisted that Ruby never came near it. When Ruby knocked gently on the door and asked if she could collect the wastepaper from the bin, Vera would leap to the defence of her little empire. She would stand with arms folded in the office doorway, refusing admittance, like a slim ear of corn bravely defying a huge, red, combine harvester. In the school office Vera reigned supreme.

  Her appearance was always immaculate. She would arrive at school wearing a conservative blue suit or office-grey two-piece from Marks & Spencer, her favourite shop. Vera was a spinster and lived in the vicarage on the Morton Road with her brother, Joseph, who was both vicar of the parish and Chairman of the School Governors. He, like his sister, had never married and Vera looked after him in a maternal way, making his meals and tidying his library of dusty books.

  Vera worked tirelessly each week filling the church with flowers. Whilst this was a labour of love, the real love of her life was her three cats, Treacle, Jess and Maggie. She called them her ‘little darlings’ and stroked them with her long fingers whenever they demanded her attention. Her favourite was Maggie, a black cat with distinctive white paws, named after Margaret Thatcher, whom Vera regarded as the rising star of the Conservative Party.

  “She will be our first woman Prime Minister, just you wait and see,” she used to tell a disbelieving audience in the staff-room.

  I soon learned on my arrival at Ragley School that Vera’s large, metal filing cabinet was organized upon a completely foolproof system. Once a document disappeared into one of the hundreds of manila folders, only Vera could ever recover it. Fortunately, her memory was remarkable.

  I had been baffled by Vera’s filing system on my second day at Ragley. Vera was in the staff-room boiling a pan of milk prior to making cups of milky coffee for the teachers. In the post that morning I had received details of an Environmental Studies course at a local teachers’ centre. The information was contained on two pieces of paper, one pink and one yellow, and I had searched in vain behind the letter ‘E’ in the filing cabinet. I looked round the staff-room door as Vera was handing out the coffee.

  “Excuse me, Vera,” I asked, “where’s the information that arrived this morning about the Environmental Studies course?”

  Vera looked surprised. “It’s filed, Mr Sheffield,” she replied curtly.

  “Yes, but where?” I asked.

  There was a pause. Anne Grainger looked up and winked.

  “Under T,” said Vera sternly, as if she was speaking to someone who was suffering from severe memory lapses.

  I took a deep breath and, with trepidation, plunged in.

  “But why under T, Vera?” I asked uncomprehendingly.

  “For ‘Trips’, of course,” she explained patiently.

  Jo and Sally giggled.

  Jo Maddison and Sally Pringle were the other two teachers at Ragley School. Jo, fresh from college and in her first, probationary year of teaching, taught the older infant children, the six- and seven-year-olds. She was a diminutive, lively and vivacious twenty-two-year-old with long black hair. Sally, a tall red-haired, freckle-faced thirty-something in a flower power waistcoat and bright tie-dyed skirt, taught the younger junior children, aged eight and nine.

  I returned moments later with the pink sheet in my hand.

  “I’ve found this under ‘Trips’, Vera, but where on earth is the yellow sheet?” I pleaded.

  “It’s under D, Mr Sheffield,” replied Vera stonily, beginning to sound weary of my ineptitude.

  Anne Grainger spluttered over her coffee, clearly enjoying the entertainment.

  “The letter D, did you say?” I asked in astonishment.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “D – for ‘Days Out’!”

  Anne had an apoplectic fit. There was a clatter of crockery. The bell rang and we trundled back to class with me shaking my head in wonderment. Whilst I would need to be a mind reader to understand Vera’s filing system, I soon came to appreciate her other skills. For Vera was a problem-solver of another kind and her next case was Ruby the Caretaker.

  In complete contrast, Ruby Smith was larger than life. At twenty stones she was big in both size and personality. Shaped like a huge beach ball, she described herself cheerfully as ‘well built in all the right places and most of the wrong ones as well’. Ruby’s round face was always red and flushed and her bright orange caretaker overall was a massive Extra-Large Double X, the largest size in the school equipment catalogue. Even so, the overall had to be adjusted to provide extra vents under the armpits to allow ease of movement.

  Ragley village had been Ruby’s home for all of her forty-four years. She regularly boasted that she had never set foot out of Yorkshire. Apart from the annual family bus trip to the seaside, Ruby had never left the village. “London is full of scarlet women,” she declared, “and southerners can’t make proper fish and chips.”

  The thought of going abroad had never crossed her mind.

  Ruby always did her shopping at the General Stores in the village High Street and if she ever needed anything from York, her eldest daughter collected it for her. Ruby’s six children comprised two sons and four daughters. The eldest, Andy, was twenty-six and in the Army. Racquel was twenty-four and living ‘over the brush’, as Ruby would say, with a warehouse man in York. The other four children, Duggie, Sharon, Natasha and Hazel, lived with Ruby and her unemployed husband, Ronnie, in their three-bedroom council house at
number seven, School View. The youngest, Hazel, was four years old and had just started full-time education in the Reception class.

  Each day Ruby would clatter noisily into school carrying a mop and bucket and an assortment of brushes and set about her work. As she swept, scrubbed and dusted she would sing songs from her favourite musicals. Her special favourite was The Sound of Music, which she had seen seven times, including once with a reluctant Ronnie, five times on her own and once with the whole family as a birthday treat. After listening to Ruby singing each afternoon as I did my paperwork after school, I was almost as word-perfect as Julie Andrews. Until, one day in the middle of September, the singing had suddenly stopped and Ruby starting writing letters!

  I scanned her latest epistle, written in her childlike, shaky printing.

  Dear Mr Sheffield, pleese excus our Hazel from school, she hasn’t come cos she cudent go and when she’s gone she’ll come.

  As usual, she had apologized when she had delivered her note that morning before school. “I was good at baking, sewing an’ the ‘oop race,” said Ruby, “but sums an’ spellin’ was allus ‘ard.”

  Hazel had started school happily but suddenly she appeared to be having half-days off school for the most unusual reasons. Ruby’s previous two letters almost defied belief.

  Dear Mr Sheffield, pleese excus our Hazel from school as she has Tonso Lighthouse.

  Apparently Ruby had looked up ‘lighthouse’ in the dictionary and was proud of this effort. This was followed by:

  Dear Mr Sheffield, pleese excus our Hazel from school as she has dia rear threw a hole in her Wellington.

  Ruby was beginning to stretch the boundaries of medical science by the time I realized there was a real problem. Hazel seemed to be the picture of health, just like all of Ruby’s children, and her absences didn’t make sense. I decided to confront Ruby as she locked up the school at six o’clock.