by MARY HOCKING
‘This is the education of a whole generation we are discussing, Mr. Chairman, and I personally feel that if we sit all night, it would not be too long, provided something of value comes out of it.’ Chatterton, who by this time was in agony, prayed that he might not disgrace himself in front of these people, that the process of disintegration might be halted for an hour.
Bunce and Wicks were like bridge players, hunched over the table, ready to play on until the early hours in the hope of trumping an ace or forcing a weary opponent to revoke.
Rudderham finally managed to bring the meeting to a close just after nine.
‘Almost a record!’ Bunce said.
But Wicks immediately capped this with a story about a Finance Committee meeting which had gone on until eleven o’clock.
Little Miss Railton, an inoffensive mouse, whispered to Maggie, ‘What a terrible evening for you, my dear. I feel so ashamed.’
‘Then why didn’t you say something? You sit there and let County Councillor Wicks say those dreadful things and then you say you’re ashamed!’
‘My dear!’ Miss Railton edged back, looking alarmed as though she had patted an apparently harmless animal in a zoo only to discover that it was one of the dangerous species. ‘County Councillor Wicks is the Deputy Leader of the Party,’ she said, as though explaining his place in the Trinity.
‘But he is cruel and vindictive, doesn’t that matter more?’
‘Maggie!’ Punter had grasped her arm. But she shouted:
‘I hope you’ll be ashamed until the day you die. All of you! But you won’t, will you? You’ll have talked yourselves out of it by the time you get home.’
Punter propelled her towards the door and members stood back on either side as the Red Sea parted for the children of Israel.
‘I only tried to sympathize with her,’ Miss Railton was in tears.
‘My dear, you know who she is, don’t you?’ the pink-hatted woman comforted her.
‘Oh, you mean . . .?’
‘We can’t have that kind of thing going on,’ Rudderham said angrily. ‘I’ll have a word with Chatterton in the morning. That young woman must be told . . .’
‘Oh, I don’t want any more trouble.’ Miss Railton was on the verge of tears again.
‘Nonsense! Behaviour like that can’t be tolerated.’
But in the event, Rudderham did not speak to Chatterton. When Chatterton arrived home that evening his head was aching so badly that he could not even drag himself upstairs to the bedroom. ‘I’ll stay here,’ he told his wife. ‘It will be better soon.’ She went to bed, believing him. He sat on the sofa, waiting for the pain to go, but it got worse. Sometime in the night he realized that he must get help; he got up and tried to reach the stairs but he fell and lay on the floor, clutching his head. He had overturned a standard lamp and his wife was awakened by the noise. When she came down the stairs, the bleeding had started and he was screaming with pain. She sent for the doctor but Chatterton was dead by the time he arrived. It was a merciful end, the doctor said, the haemorrhage was a severe one and the brain had been irreparably damaged.
Chapter Seventeen
There was frantic activity in the Clerk’s Department: Chatterton alive had never caused so much trouble as Chatterton dead. Memos and counter memos were issued to staff.
‘I really would not advise your attending the funeral,’ the Clerk of the County Council said to Rudderham. Feeling was running high against Rudderham, there was no knowing what might happen; someone, the Clerk thought with a shudder, might even shout something melodramatic.
‘I must go,’ Rudderham said testily. ‘Good God, if I’m not there it will look as though I had something against the poor fellow.’
‘I am informed that the widow wants a quiet funeral,’ the Clerk said, clutching straws.
‘Then no one can go. That wouldn’t be so bad. But I can’t absent myself if other people are going. The press would pounce on that.’
A memorandum was sent to the staff informing them that the funeral was to be a private family affair and that it was not, therefore, anticipated that members of staff would attend. So the press got its headline after all. ‘Education office staff ordered to stay away from Chief’s funeral.’
‘Tragic,’ Wicks commented. ‘I could weep.’
And that, as far as the press was concerned, was the end of the matter. The climbing frame affair was forgotten by all except those most intimately concerned with it
Mylor told Jemima that he intended to resign.
‘It’s the wrong time for that sort of gesture,’ she said.
‘I’m not making a gesture. And I’m not standing up to be counted or exercising my right to protest. I’m sick unto death of that sort of cant. I simply want to go and live somewhere else.’
‘But where can you go? It will be the same anywhere else. England is a small place.’ She bit her lip realizing that she had played into his hands.
He said, ‘Exactly. I’m going to New Zealand.’
‘But you’ve always said their teaching methods go back half a century!’
‘Then it will be quite a challenge to bring them up to date. A real bit of pioneering.’
‘Alice Kemp says there’s no culture and they all drink too much.’
‘But there’s room to breathe. I’m sorry, Jemima, I know that sounds trite; but I’m stifled here.’ The sweat glistened on his face; he had the fine drawn look of someone who has been recently ill. Over the last week his world had seemed to get smaller and smaller, he felt it pressing against his temples, crushing his ribs; he would go to pieces if she would not co-operate with him over this. He pleaded desperately, ‘It’s asking a lot of you, I know, Jemima. But I must get away. I’ve come to the end of things here.’
Jemima sat with her head bent, savouring the implications of the last remark. Eventually, she said quietly, ‘Yes, my dear. I’ll come.’ Jemima was aware that victory must be paid for. She also saw, in a rare intuitive moment, that he, too, must be allowed to salvage something from disaster.
Later, on the eve of their departure, she said to him, ‘I’ll try to make a go of it, Mylor. I will try.’ He knew that she would. Now, when there was not much to hope for on either side, their relationship would be an easier one.
Miss Kane was grieved by his resignation. Joe Heggarty thought that she made too much of it; but then she had taken Chatterton’s death very hard and was not in a state to make balanced judgements.
‘We’ve lost an outstanding man as a result of this,’ she said. ‘And we can’t afford to lose outstanding men, the teaching profession doesn’t attract all that many of them. He had a real insight into a child’s mind, not like some teachers who can only see that a child has clean clothes and well-brushed hair, does tidy work and comes from a respectable home. He could really judge the quality of the mind. And that’s a rare gift these days when we aren’t supposed to mention quality. At the rate we’re going, only the mediocre will dare to teach in our schools.’
‘But he did have an affair with that young woman.’
‘Oh, that was a pity, I agree. But he isn’t the first man to make a fool of himself over a pretty face and a nice pair of legs.’
‘All the same, he probably isn’t the right type to be a teacher.’
‘You’ll never convince me of that. But then, I’m no judge of what is needed to meet today’s requirements. I’m standing down, too.’
‘Come, you shouldn’t make hasty decisions.’ He had been expecting this and did not show the real concern for which she had hoped. She had wanted him to say, ‘It is absolutely essential for people like you to remain in public life.’ Instead, he went on, ‘Whatever should we do without you to keep us on our toes?’ She said, her voice hardening as it always did when she tried to subdue her emotions, ‘It’s no use, Joe. My ideas are hopelessly out of fashion. All that matters now is party politics. Sometimes when I listen to Wicks and Bunce exchanging their interminable wisecracks, I am reminded of th
ose intimate reviews at the beginning of the war that became so intimate that in the end they didn’t mean anything to the ordinary member of the audience who was not familiar with backstage feuds. The theatrical people loved them and thought they were vastly amusing and everyone else was bored.’
‘You must do as you think best,’ he said. ‘But I shall miss you.’
But it would be easier to hold the party together without her; she was a very uncompromising person and this, in his view, was the time for compromise and a long patience.
A number of people wrote to her and said how sorry they were that she had resigned and paid tribute to the service that she had rendered. But very soon they forgot about her in the swirl of events.
Maggie Hester left the education office and went to work for a travel agent. But the job did not suit her and for a while she drifted from office to office. She had been very distressed by Chatterton’s death and one evening found herself driven to poetry as a way of exorcising his spirit:
The journey was hard and the rewards were few,
He had come too far;
Sixty years is all right for some, but fifty was nearer his mark.
Spring was sweet, summer blest, autumn had a touch of grace,
But duty dragged him
Into the wilderness of winter where he did not belong,
Holding him prisoner to the demands of others—
Never satisfied—
Groping in the grey twilight of their endless wrongs.
Until at last the mind’s defences gave:
In the dark night
The torrent broke and carried him over the threshold of peace.
After that the habit of writing re-established itself. Eventually she settled down in a job with a relief organization particularly concerned with the homeless. She grew into a gentle, magnanimous woman with a compassionate understanding for the drop-outs who could not slot into any of the twentieth century pigeon-holes, and who formed the subject of some of her best poetry. She never again experienced the happiness she had known with Mylor; but as she was always absorbed by work she was not often aware of this, having little time to spare for self-analysis.
A new head took over at Crossgate School and he soon made it quite clear that he could not keep Peter Cathcart. Pressure was brought to bear on Miss Cathcart and Peter was ascertained as maladjusted and sent to a special school.
There was a strong feeling among members of the Education Committee that Rudderham had handled matters so badly, his statements to the press having brought trouble with the N.A.S., the N.U.T., and N.A.L.G.O., that he should be replaced as Chairman of the Education Committee and he was succeeded by Wicks. In due course, Ellis was appointed as Chief Education Officer. But he did not have an easy passage. In spite of his undoubted managerial skill, he could not command the loyalty of his staff and he failed to establish good relationships with head teachers. Soon comparisons were being made. ‘Not married, you see. I always feel it’s a little unnatural,’ Bunce said. ‘Not the same breadth of experience as a man like Chatterton. Chatterton knew about life.’
Mary Hocking
Born in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.
Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.
The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the `Fairley Family’ trilogy – Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers – books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.
For many years she was an active member of the `Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work, an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1971
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