THE CLIMBING FRAME

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘Why have we got this room?’ Wicks asked.

  ‘Welfare is in number two committee room, sir,’ Crocker informed him.

  ‘But they’re not such a big committee. And they don’t have so many officers present.’ Wicks was campaigning about the number of officers who attended meetings. No one took any notice of him on this occasion, but in time they would; once he got his teeth into a grievance he was prepared to hold on for a very long time. He waited now until the door opened and another member pushed into the room. The newcomer was a big man with a shock of bristling brown hair and a ruddy complexion; he looked round the room, gave a gusty sigh and shook his head sadly. It was obvious that he intended to convey droll resignation but the performance was not entirely successful. There was a hint of querulousness in the slightly sunken mouth and the small grey eyes were watchful: this was a man quick to recognize any affront to his dignity and by no means prepared to resign himself to it.

  ‘No room for you, Fred!’ Wicks called.

  ‘Oh, not again!’ Fred Bunce was poles apart from Wicks, in politics and background, but he was always willing to share a grievance with anyone.

  ‘It’s one way of getting rid of the opposition!’ Wicks remarked and he and Bunce exchanged looks which were meant to indicate what knowing old warriors they were. This kind of charade, aimed at indicating their political sophistication, meant a great deal to both men, neither of whom derived much satisfaction from his workaday life. Wicks owned and managed a local grocer’s shop and Bunce worked in the offices of the bus company.

  Major Rudderham, who thought that such by-play between the minority and majority party members was unseemly, and the exchange of Christian names deplorable, glared down the table. His protruding eyes fixed on Malcolm Punter who was still talking about his twins.

  ‘Chairs!’ the Major rasped.

  Punter straightened up reluctantly and looked round him, a sullen expression on his smooth, schoolboy face. Crocker was busy distributing agendas to members who had forgotten to bring theirs, or who declared that they had never received one. Punter went out of the room and returned dragging two chairs. Late-comers wedged themselves into the few vacant spaces round the table. The Chief Education Officer raised his aristocratic head and watched this performance over the rim of his glasses; he seemed to reflect on it for a time, and then leant back and said to Punter who was about to sit beside him:

  ‘I think you had better tell the advisory staff to sit at the back. Why are they here anyway?’

  ‘In case there’s a discussion on the syllabus of the comprehensive school, sir.’

  ‘We don’t need them to talk about that. They’d never stop. Ask them if they’d mind sitting at the back.’

  The advisory staff retreated in bad order, looking offended, and the members repositioned themselves. While this was going on Major Rudderham sat drumming his fingers on the table, a more than usually exasperated expression on his face. It was three minutes after seven and he was waiting to start the meeting; it was intolerable that his chief officer should choose this moment to reorganise the seating arrangements. It was Major Rudderham who was largely responsible for the number of officers present, although he would never admit to this; he did not trust his chief officer and he felt vulnerable without other officers present to prompt him when necessary. He had never, in his long life in local government, learnt how to deal with a question to which he did not know the answer. This was one of the reasons why Wicks maintained that old Rudderham was not a real politician.

  ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ Rudderham said. ‘I’m sorry this has to happen at the beginning of every meeting. Perhaps something can be done about the seating in future.’ He looked angrily at Crocker; he never dared to address disparaging remarks direct to his chief officer but always channelled them through a lesser member of staff.

  ‘Would you like me to take up the allocation of rooms with the Clerk?’ the Chief Education Officer inquired blandly. He seldom did battle for himself, but he was not prepared to let his staff be bullied. The Chairman was not prepared to take on the Clerk of the County Council. He muttered, ‘It’s not as if we have many evening meetings, so why do they have to be on the same evening? But it’s no use talking to the Clerk. The whole building needs to be pulled down.’ He picked up his pen and poised it over the minute book. County Councillor Bunce said, ‘On a point of order, Mr. Chairman . . .’

  Rudderham said pepperily. ‘Is this anything to do with the minutes?’

  ‘I see that County Councillor Lamb is here. I hadn’t been advised that anyone had resigned . . .’

  ‘County Alderman Mrs. Ogilvie is unwell and County Councillor Lamb is taking her place because the Eastgate grammar schools may be under discussion,’ the Chief Education Officer reminded the Chairman. ‘County Councillor Lamb is Vice-Chairman of the Governing Body.’

  ‘He won’t be voting?’ Bunce asked.

  ‘Certainly not!’ Rudderham barked.

  ‘Then I won’t say any more. But this unofficial substitution is on the increase lately, and I may find it necessary to raise the matter in another place.’

  He sat back, a benign smile wrinkling his rosy face. The Chairman, rightly reading this remark as a reference to the meeting of the Education Committee at which the press and public would be present, said, ‘If you’re going to raise it, you’d better raise it now.’

  Bunce looked round the table. ‘Well, Mr. Chairman . . .’ He had a slow delivery which he thought suited to a shrewd old countryman full of ancient wisdom, but which other members found intensely irritating. ‘There’s a lot of officers here, but I don’t see anyone from our legal department.’

  The Chief Education Officer addressed the Chairman. ‘If I may make a suggestion, sir. Perhaps this matter could be discussed between you and the Leader of the Minority Party and some arrangement agreed?’

  ‘Is that acceptable to you.’ the Chairman fired at Bunce, who was the Leader of the Minority Party.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Bunce said, ‘I don’t want to make a fuss, you know me well enough for that. I just want to sort a few things out.’

  ‘Then I can sign the minutes as a true record of the last meeting?’ He signed them without waiting to find out whether members thought the record was a true one. ‘Agenda item number 2, staffing report . . .’ The door opened and a small, silver-haired woman squeezed in, twittering apologies. Wicks got to his feet. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Railton. You sit here.’ Before Punter, prompted by his chief, was fully on his feet he had disappeared; he returned some minutes later with a chair which he placed behind a thin, bespectacled man on whose shoulder he leant to get a limited view of the table. ‘Don’t mind, do you?’

  Everyone was on the move again, chair legs caught in table legs, agendas were dropped. The Chairman made strangled noises in his throat and his face went purple as though he was in imminent danger of asphyxiation. He saw this charade as something aimed at his own management of the meeting.

  Wicks said with exaggerated meekness, ‘Sorry, Mr. Chairman.’

  ‘Agenda item number 2. You’ve got the particulars before you. Any comments? No. Number 3, Articles of Government for the new Roman Catholic Secondary School at Hatherham. You’ve got the draft in appendix 1. It’s the usual document prepared by the Department . . .’

  They raced through the next three items, and to Crocker’s relief no one raised any question about allowances for library books. Then came the item on comprehensive education, which was a report on the possibility of amalgamating the Eastgate boys’ and girls’ grammar schools and a mixed secondary modern school, also in Eastgate. Bunce came in smartly for one who prided himself on a slow delivery.

  ‘I’m a bit surprised, Mr. Chairman.’ And then, as though arguing this out with an unseen antagonist, he reiterated irritably, ‘No, really, I am surprised. We’ve had a lot of reports on this and we’ve been talking about it for—how many months?’ He appealed to the assembly, but not for long enough to a
llow anyone else to get a word in. ‘And we’re still back at this kind of thing.’ He picked up the report and read out, ‘Disadvantages. 1. The distance which separates the grammar schools. Now, you know, we really should have settled this by now. Either they are too far apart to form a satisfactory educational unit, or they aren’t.’

  ‘This is merely a summary,’ the Chief Education Officer murmured.

  ‘I don’t care what you call it.’ Bunce adopted a tone of weary reasonableness. ‘Call it a summary, or a list of disadvantages, or anything else that takes your fancy. I’m easy. The fact remains that we have been going over this particular ground for a very long time and I think that by now our officers—I don’t want to seem to be critical, but I must say this—I think that by now our officers should have decided whether these schools are too far apart to combine or not.’

  ‘The final decision on that will rest with the Department of Education and Science, of course,’ the Chief Education Officer said amiably to the Chairman. He had already given his view that the schools were too far apart at a previous meeting and saw no reason to repeat it now. The Chairman was not prepared to take his advice because he favoured the scheme, which would ensure that in the early years at least the grammar school element would be the stronger influence.

  ‘Then why haven’t we asked the Department?’ Bunce laboured on. ‘There’s really no point in our pursuing this at all if it is going to fall down on this issue, now is there?’

  The Chief Education Officer went on talking to the Chairman. ‘I think the Committee decided that it did not want any approach to be made to the Department until a full and detailed report could be submitted.’

  ‘Well, really!’ Bunce disclaimed responsibility and several other members clicked their tongues as though they, too, could not imagine how such a decision had been reached. It was at this point that County Councillor Miss Kane came to life. She raised her elegantly coiffured silver head and regarded Bunce with distaste.

  ‘We did decide that,’ she said in the clear, decisive voice which many a tentative member unsure of his subject had come to dread. ‘You, in particular, County Councillor Bunce, were very vociferous about it. As I recall, you said that you did not want this particular issue to be used as an excuse for jettisoning the scheme before anyone had looked at it properly.’

  Bunce made a whimsical grimace which was meant to indicate that everyone knew what an impossible woman Miss Kane was. That lady, not in the least perturbed, went on briskly, ‘It’s the educational implications with which we should be concerned, surely, Mr. Chairman. After all, we are an education committee.’ Her tone made several people, including the Chairman, wince. Miss Kane, five foot, slim as wire and sharp as a tack, had no difficulty in dominating the meeting. Her fellow members regarded her resentfully as she began to pick her way through the report; she had far more experience of education than most of them and had little compunction in making them well aware of it.

  ‘Now you are going to have an eight form entry comprehensive school here. Is that really large enough? What range of subjects can you hope to offer, considering the very different ability levels with which you will be dealing? At what stage will you be able to introduce Latin, for example?’ Her quick ears picked up a whispered comment. ‘Oh yes, you do need Latin still; even in this Philistine age. But that isn’t the only thing, of course. What sort of options are you going to offer at sixth form level? A school of this size will have a small top. Are you going to be able to afford the staff to give a decent range of “A” level subjects while at the same time you’re trying to cope with the Newsom pupils who are just staying on because we haven’t the sense to allow them to leave?’

  There was general upheaval here. Either for reasons of conscience, or political necessity, most of the members were committed to the policy of the Newsom Report, and particularly those sections dealing with children of limited attainment.

  ‘Well, what are you going to do with them, then?’ she inquired sharply above the uproar.

  ‘I can tell you the answer to that one.’ Bunce struggled triumphantly out of the scrum with the ball held firmly in his hand. ‘Now, I don’t believe that a teacher is there to teach.’ He raised one eyebrow and paused, so that the statement should have its full dramatic effect. He looked wily and portentous, and one or two members, not wishing to seem to overlook some hidden subtlety, gave knowing ‘mms’ and ‘aahs’; a few looked down at their agenda papers, smiling secretly as though some password which only they recognized had been uttered. Miss Kane said, ‘Balderdash!’

  ‘Now don’t misunderstand me.’ Bunce shook his head at her reprovingly. ‘What I’m getting at is, it’s the human development that counts . . . human development . . .’ he repeated the phrase in case it had not sunk in the first time. Miss Kane began to draw faces on her agenda. ‘I don’t mind if a child can’t read or write when he leaves the infant school, as long as he’s a complete human being . . .’

  ‘At seven!’ Miss Kane was more outraged by this than by the dismissal of reading and writing.

  ‘Could we go back to the report, I wonder?’ Wicks said softly. ‘Because, as County Councillor Miss Kane has said, we are most of us concerned with education, even if County Councillor Bunce doesn’t care whether children can read or write.’

  ‘I said in the infant school . . .’

  ‘But that’s where all the trouble starts, isn’t it? And speaking personally, as a father of a child at an infant school, I do care about it quite a lot. In fact, if you ask me, this is where we should be starting instead of messing about with schools that are doing a good job anyway . . .’

  ‘It’s this modern maths, you know.’ Little Miss Railton suddenly began to speak passionately. ‘When they leave the junior school they are simply incapable of understanding mathematical processes and the whole of the first year in the secondary school is lost teaching them things they should have learnt at the junior stage.’

  ‘And not just the first year!’ Wicks murmured. ‘Some of them never catch up.’

  ‘And it doesn’t stop there, it continues in the training colleges,’ boomed one of the co-opted members, herself principal of a training college. ‘Their mathematics is quite hopeless when they come to us, and the training college has such a full syllabus nowadays that it’s impossible to get down to basics. These youngsters simply cannot teach mathematics because they have never been taught themselves.’

  ‘But it’s all right,’ Wicks murmured, ‘as long as they are complete human beings.’

  Punter, who was too immature to have adopted the poker-faced mask necessary for an officer on such occasions as this, permitted himself a quick smirk and was promptly pounced on by Bunce.

  ‘Mr. Chairman, I protest! Are we or are we not here to discuss a matter of vital importance to the children in this County, or are we here to provide entertainment for our officers?’

  The Chairman, mystified because he had not seen Punter’s display, said sharply, ‘It’s eight o’clock and we haven’t got beyond page three.’

  ‘I suggest that we appoint a group of members to go into it and report back,’ Wicks said.

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t support that,’ Bunce protested. ‘We are the Schools Sub-Committee, after all. This is our job.’

  He gained an unexpected ally in Miss Kane, who said, ‘We’re not going to be able to digest it any better in regurgitated form.’

  At eleven o’clock the meeting was adjourned, a special meeting having been fixed for the afternoon of the following Tuesday.

  ‘Well? What do you make of that?’ Major Rudderham asked the Chief Education Officer when they were collecting their papers afterwards.

  ‘It’s a matter that needs to be well-aired. We don’t want to give the appearance of rushing a scheme through.’

  Major Rudderham looked at his chief officer; conservative though Rudderham was, and opposed to change, he was aware that the one thing of which the County Council was unlikely to be accused w
as undue haste. The blighter doesn’t care, he thought, he simply does not care. But then, he supposed, it was useless to expect a sense of immediacy from a man whose greatest concern was Saxon England.

  ‘You can have too much discussion,’ he said sharply. ‘Just gives a chance to windbags like Bunce to make a splash in the local rag. It’s decisions with which I am concerned.’

  He fingered his clipped military moustache in much the same way as a Catholic might cross himself when hoping to avert calamity. Beneath the hectoring manner, Major Rudderham was very unsure of himself. He had created an image which was very far from the reality. An ex-draper trying to play the country squire, a man of very little judgement sitting on the bench each week, a man of limited education who was chairman of an education committee, Rudderham needed the support of a dynamic chief officer and Chatterton was assuredly not this. He was, however, all that Rudderham would like to have been; an Oxford graduate of good family, with a distinguished war record (Rudderham had been in the Home Guard), a man who could mix effortlessly with all conditions of men because he had that innate assurance which only his kind of background can give. Rudderham, looking at the man, found hatred welling up within him. The meeting had been a shambles and his chief officer had done little to warn him of the snares or to extricate him when he became trapped in them. Of course, the man had a reputation, gained largely for work outside the field of education, and Rudderham had in the past enjoyed some reflected glory. But times were changing. Whereas in the old days it had been Chatterton’s world, and he had survived in the shadow of Chatterton, things were not quite the same now. Chatterton’s type was out of fashion; the good manners were dismissed as unpalatably smooth, the wide learning was of no interest to a people concerned only with education, his sexual adventures lacked the brash zeal so essential to the modern puritan—Chatterton was a natural hedonist. There really was not much to be said in the man’s favour, and the new people who were coming into local government were not impressed. People like Wicks, for example. Wicks had an eye on Rudderham’s position. The man was impossible, of course, but he was clever and a damned hard worker. Rudderham suspected that he read committee reports in bed; whereas Rudderham had not, until recently, done much more than skim through them, relying on his morning’s briefing with the Chief Education Officer to see him through. These briefings, he now felt, were totally inadequate. Rudderham cared a great deal about his position as Chairman of the Education Committee; it established his place in the community and he was not going to give it up without a fight. It was all right for Chatterton. He had taken this job because it seemed a suitable one for a man who wanted to pursue historical research in his leisure hours. Members had laughed tolerantly about this in years gone by. It wasn’t a laughing matter any more. Rudderham collected his papers and went out, a very disturbed man.