THE CLIMBING FRAME

by MARY HOCKING

  But he need not have worried about the statement, because it was never made. Other events overtook them before it ever got on to the typewriter.

  Chapter Eleven

  The national press, affected by the shortage of hard news, took up the case of the climbing frame woman. The case had, after all, a timeless appeal for the journalist, offering as it did those attractions which age cannot wither nor custom stale of championing the under-privileged at the expense of the faceless ones, and of bringing to light truths that authority would wish hidden. For those not concerned either with crusading or common abuse, it provided an opportunity to range wider, asking questions about the state of local government (generally agreed to be unhealthy if not definitely diseased) and the current attitude to education. Were we too exclusively concerned with the reorganization of secondary schools with the result that the primary school was being dangerously neglected (who really bothered about Plowden?)? Should not the first priority be to reduce numbers in the primary school classes? How serious was the shortage of teachers, had we in fact been given the truth, did we know how many schools managed to exist only on the services of supply and part-time teachers, what effect would it have on a child who throughout his primary school career had been taught by a succession of teachers who came and went, never staying long enough to get to know the children or their abilities? What were the qualifications of supply teachers to take the classes into which they were catapulted without notice?

  On the narrower question of the climbing frame affair, the most magisterial of the dailies warned:

  ‘Let us be fair. If we want to have good public servants we must accord them a measure of respect; they are, after all, stripped of their officialdom, ordinary men and women.’ (Daring! Mylor commented as he read this). ‘Ill-deserved censure and abuse will do more to ensure a corrupt public service than almost anything else. It would be rash to jump to conclusions simply on the basis of one . . .’

  But generally speaking, the official under fire had as forlorn a hope of fair play as the runaway slave in the old South. The majority view was expressed by the well-known radio personality, baying joyously, ‘Here we go again, the same old story from the town hall! How I hate officialdom!’

  ‘The kindest thing that can be said of me apparently,’ Mylor said, ‘is that I am an over-burdened man driven to excess by the intolerable conditions under which I work. While at the worst, I am a little Hitler.’

  ‘If someone doesn’t tell the truth soon, I shall,’ Jemima fumed.

  ‘The truth!’ He was beginning to be rattled himself. ‘The truth would be too strong meat for that bunch of eunuchs.’

  It was in this frame of mind that he started school on the Monday. At lunch time, when some of the children who lived close by went home, there was a man waiting some little distance from the school gates.

  ‘Is one of you Freda Hopgood?’

  ‘That’s Freda Hopgood over there,’ said one little girl, anxious to be helpful.

  ‘Are you Freda’s daddy?’ someone else asked.

  ‘No. I’m not Freda’s daddy. What’s your name?’

  ‘Carole Pitts.’

  He did not want Carole Pitts. They stood around him in an interested group. Who did he want, then? He had a list of five names, but only two of the children, Freda Hopgood and William Banks, were there. These two were eagerly pushed forward. Freda was a bright child, but the boy was distinctly dull and seemed to have some difficulty in confirming that he was, in fact, William Banks.

  ‘You are in Peter Cathcart’s class, aren’t you?’

  Freda said yes, and William pulled up one sock.

  ‘Were you there when Peter went up the climbing frame the other day?’

  They looked at him, puzzled, and held a conference among themselves. The climbing frame was used every day.

  ‘The day that Peter fell off the climbing frame,’ the man tried to help them.

  ‘I remember!’ said a little girl who could always be relied on to remember anything that would win her approbation.

  ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘Primrose Starkey.’

  ‘But you’re not in that class, are you, Primrose?’

  She agreed that she wasn’t, but not to disappoint him, she repeated, ‘I remember, though.’

  ‘You don’t,’ Freda said.

  ‘I do, then!’

  ‘What makes you remember. Primrose?’ the man asked gently.

  ‘ ’Cos he cried and made a fuss,’ she said triumphantly.

  ‘Was he hurt?’

  She paused, and then said, ‘Yes, I think he was.’

  ‘Did you see him?’ He looked at her so seriously through his horn-rimmed glasses that she became nervous and wriggled self¬consciously, finger in her mouth. Freda achieved a come-back.

  ‘It was when we were playing “Fire on the hill”,’ she announced with some authority. ‘I remember now.’ She looked up at the man and asked, ‘are you Peter’s daddy, then?’

  ‘No. I’m not Peter’s daddy. Did you see him fall, Freda?’

  Freda said yes.

  ‘He fell off?’ the man repeated.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded emphatically.

  ‘What did your teacher do. Do you remember?’

  Freda’s face clouded. ‘Told him he was a naughty boy,’ she hazarded.

  ‘Smacked him!’ a little boy at the rear suggested; he smacked the arm of the little girl next to him by way of demonstration. ‘She smacked him, she smacked him, she smacked him . . .’ There ensued a good deal of smacking and squealing, but on the whole the children were more interested in their new acquaintance and some semblance of order was restored.

  ‘Did she go towards him to tell him to get off the climbing frame?’

  William announced suddenly, ‘She said, “you come down!” ’

  ‘And did he?’

  William, quite overcome, rolled his head around and giggled. Freda said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean he just came down quite carefully?’

  ‘No,’ she said impatiently. ‘He fell down, like we told you.’

  ‘Do you remember if the teacher touched him before he fell down, Freda?’

  She screwed her face up. This was a longer solo period of question and answer than she was used to; she said breathlessly, ‘Yes, I think she did.’

  ‘I think you’re making that up,’ he suggested.

  ‘No, I’m not, I’m not!’ she said, seeing herself lose face. ‘She touched him, she touched him, I saw her.’ She nodded her head vigorously and looked wise.

  While this was going on, Miss Freeth had returned to the school from the education office where she had gone to deliver some urgently needed returns. She rushed to the assembly hall where Mylor was supervising the first lunch session.

  ‘There’s a man a little way down the street talking to some of our kids,’ she said.

  He called to his deputy to take over and hurried out. There had been one or two cases recently of children being molested and all heads in the area were on the alert. On his way across the playground he was met by Primrose Starkey, whose one aim in life was to ingratiate herself with authority of whatever kind; having lost the interest of the man in the street, she had run back to the school.

  ‘There’s a man talking to Freda and William,’ she announced. ‘All about Peter Cathcart . . .’ She had to run, he went so fast through the school gates. ‘Freda shouldn’t talk to strange men, should she?’ she panted virtuously.

  The man straightened up as Mylor came towards the group. One or two of the children called out, ‘Hullo, Mr. Drew’, their voices a shade doubtful. He said quietly, ‘Run along, your mothers will be wondering where you are. Carole, don’t forget to see William across the road, will you?’ The group dispersed hastily.

  To Roger Meakin, he said, ‘Come inside.’

  Meakin, correctly interpreting this as a variation of ‘come outside’, stood his ground.

  ‘I have all I want, thank you.’


  ‘From a bunch of seven-year-olds?’

  ‘It’s not my choice I have to speak to children to get at the truth.’ Meakin was sufficiently unhappy about this himself to be belligerent.

  ‘The truth! They won’t know whether they are telling you the truth or not. For one thing, they won’t interpret questions in the same way as you. What did they tell you? That Peter Cathcart fell off the climbing frame? “Fell off” to them means any way of descending rapidly. And quite apart from that, they’d tell you anything they thought you wanted, they’d be so delighted to be important to an adult. If you had to speak to someone at the school, why didn’t you speak to me?’

  ‘So that you could rehearse them?’

  ‘So that I could do what?’

  Mylor’s fists clenched and Meakin, who was afraid of physical violence, took off his glasses. His hands were shaking, but he still stood his ground.

  ‘You may be Head of the school,’ he said quietly, ‘but your authority stops at the gates. You can’t come out here, shouting and threatening . . .’

  ‘That’s just where you are wrong. I would have thought you’d have sorted that one out with all the research you’ve been doing recently. I stand in loco parentis to those children until their parents take over. And I don’t think their parents would wish them to be used in this way.’

  ‘I was not using them. I was very careful . . .’

  ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve dragged one child into the limelight without issuing a lot of statements that won’t stand examination for one moment, but will involve several other children . . .?’

  ‘I am quite satisfied . . .’

  ‘Primrose Starkey, for example, was not at school on the day concerned. Did you know that?’

  ‘If you mean the one with the missing front tooth, I discounted what she had to say. And do you really feel that you are in a position to lecture anyone else about the treatment of children after what happened to Peter Cathcart?’

  ‘You have no idea what happened to that child, you merely have the word of one woman . . .’

  ‘And of the child himself, don’t forget the child . . .’

  ‘I’m not likely to forget the child, I’ve been trying to sort him out for the last three years . . .’

  ‘Are you implying that the child . . .’

  ‘I’m not implying anything about the child. He can’t help his mother.’

  ‘Are you saying . . .?’

  ‘I’m saying that she’s a raving neurotic, and if you haven’t discovered that by now you should be writing for the Girls’ Own Paper!’

  Meakin folded his glasses and put them in his breast pocket. ‘I can see there is nothing to be gained here . . .’

  ‘If you come here again, you will gain more than you bargained for.’

  Meakin turned away; the road was hazy without his glasses and he missed his footing, tripped and fell heavily in the road cutting his lip.

  Jemima met Mylor that evening with the words, ‘I’ve had two men from ITV here; one of them wanted to know whether it was true that you had hit a local reporter.’

  ‘No.’ He looked drawn and weary. ‘I didn’t hit him; but I suppose I might as well have done.’

  Meakin himself scotched that story, but not before an impression of violence had been created which persisted in spite of the denial. Meakin did not report his interview with the children, but Mylor’s comments about Miss Cathcart’s neurosis were faithfully recorded.

  Public opinion, according to the press, was outraged. ‘True it may be, but the truth is a dangerous weapon and should be used sparingly . . .’‘It would have been better unsaid . . .’‘Some of us are less fortunate than others, we must be kind one to another . . .’‘Do not ask for whom the bell tolls . . .’‘Definitely unsuited to be a schoolmaster . . .’

  Miss Cathcart was not available for comment. ‘She has been under considerable strain’ was all that her doctor would say.

  ‘Now I shall be accused of destroying the woman,’ Mylor said to Miss Kane when she came to see him.

  ‘But you never will. The weak are terribly strong.’

  Miss Smith was also under the doctor. There were dark hints that she was not suited to any form of teaching. She confirmed this by an hysterical outburst to a reporter who came to her house late one evening and to whom she screamed, ‘I shall never set foot in a school again, never, never!’

  Rudderham, now convinced that there was a case against Drew, promised a full inquiry.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘I’m sorry, my darling, I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Maggie held him close.

  The magic must work, she thought, it must work. It always has up to now.

  At first she had not been happy about coming to this building, she felt like a thief entering through the window they always left open. But lately she had been glad to come. No one knows where we are at this moment, she had thought; it was as though they had escaped not just from Eastgate but from the world itself, from order and pattern, time and sequence. Most of all from time.

  His voice went on, very fast. ‘A reporter called at my home this morning, and when I got to school there were two more at the gates . . .’

  And that had only been the beginning.

  ‘After all the years I’ve been teaching!’ Mrs. Dobson had been waiting for him in his room, her eyes moist and her puffy cheeks shaking. ‘After all the years I’ve been teaching, to be treated like this . . .’

  ‘Who’s been ill-treating you, Dobbin? I’ll slay them.’ Usually an affectionate joke worked wonders with her.

  ‘Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Willis came to see me.’ She looked at him reproachfully as though this was something he should have foreseen and prevented.

  He said soothingly, ‘Where there’s trouble they’ll not be far behind. We know that.’

  ‘Mr. Drew, it’s all very well for you, you don’t take a class. But I’ve got forty-two children, and the Clark and Willis boys are very difficult. If their mothers are looking for trouble those boys will give them all the ammunition they need.’

  ‘If there’s any trouble, send them to me.’

  ‘I’ve never had to call you in before. I just feel I’m not trusted. I can’t work if I’m not trusted. Goodness knows it’s difficult enough, with forty-three children in a class.’ The number was going up as her agitation increased. ‘I’ve carried on up to now to help you, I haven’t made a fuss about it, but if I’m going to be hectored by parents . . .’

  ‘Of course you mustn’t be hectored by parents!’ He tried to see the time by the clock without looking at it directly; morning assembly must be due to start any minute now. ‘If they come again, send them to me.’

  He did not ask why they had come because that would take up more time, but she told him anyway.

  ‘They wanted an undertaking, an undertaking if you please! that their boys wouldn’t have to do any acrobatics—acrobatics! it’s got to that now—on the apparatus. I told them that they would do acrobatics over my dead body, and Mrs. Clark said, “That’s what you say, but I can read, see!” And she thrust a newspaper at me. I said, “Now, you know you can’t believe everything you read in newspapers . . .” And then they got really abusive and shouted “It’s the only way we find out what’s going on.” And Mrs. Willis said, “It’s not going to happen to our kids. We just come to tell you so that you’d know.” ’

  ‘Dobbin, I’m sorry about this. I know it’s very upsetting, but it’s not the first skirmish we’ve had with those two . . .’

  ‘I didn’t mind before when I thought I had some support, Mr. Drew. I took that class to co-operate with you and I thought I had your support.’

  Authority had let her down, and as he was the highest authority she knew, she held him to blame. Other members of the staff were calmer about it, but he could sense a growing resentment and a feeling that ‘someone’ was not fighting hard enough.

  ‘This school’s got a good reputa
tion because we’ve made it what it is,’ Mr. Jeffreys said to him, as though he was not aware of it. ‘A thing like this could undo all the good we’ve done. Particularly with the parents from the L.C.C. estate.

  The parents from the L.C.C. estate were used to having to battle for their children; they had not liked the move from London and it had taken a long time to win them over. But it was not these parents only who were concerned.

  ‘I’ve had a letter from Mrs. Anderson asking that Colin should be excused apparatus work because of his asthma,’ one of the younger teachers told him. ‘She knows perfectly well how careful we are about Colin.’

  ‘Mrs. Anderson!’ Mylor repeated. ‘She’s usually such a sensible person. I’ll suggest that she has a word with me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be an idea to send a letter to parents?’

  ‘I’d rather not. It will only increase the importance of the wretched business.’ In two weeks’ time there would be a parents’ meeting and he would have preferred to deal with it at that time. But he could tell that many of the staff wanted quick action. Teachers, on the whole, tended to react strongly to correction, being more used to administering it than receiving it: some of the staff wanted a few short sharp blows to be delivered.

  ‘You see how it is, my darling. I’m like a spinning top, every time I slow down someone gives another twirl.’

  ‘Try to lie still.’ She looked to the window beyond which the blue arc of the sky exactly fitted the rim of the sea. ‘Try to lie still for a while.’

  ‘Then there was Ellis; he came to persuade me to put the blame on Miss Smith, he insinuated that she was inexperienced and had failed to tell me all that had happened. As if I could do that to the poor little wretch, she’s had the stuffing knocked out of her as it is. But Ellis seemed to regard her as expendable. He told me that I was in no position to be so unco-operative! I’ve had as much as I can take of people trying to make me co-operate, Rudderham and his circus, Chatterton, and now Ellis. What’s the matter with them? Are they afraid of trying to bring a head down, would it be simpler if it was just a supply teacher? You see, I can’t stop, even now, with you.’