‘So, can you help me?’ I asked.
‘That is what I do, Mr Phinn, help people with a pest problem. I’m the County Pest Control Officer, known affectionately as the Verminator. If there’s a pest, Maurice Hinderwell is the man to contact. Now, your squirrel is a rodent like the rat but not quite as elusive and as clever as your average Samuel Whiskers. He’s a wily and very agile little rascal, but have no fear, I’ll tell you how to get him.’
‘I should be very much obliged,’ I said, greatly relieved.
‘It’s not a good idea to try and poison him.’
‘No, I wouldn’t want to do that,’ I said.
‘If you put poisoned nuts out, the birds will eat them and you don’t want a garden full of dead bluetits, now, do you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Do you know anyone who has a gun?’
‘Mr Hinderwell, I really would rather not kill him.’
‘Not kill him!’ exclaimed Mr Hinderwell. ‘It’s no use being sentimental about squirrels, Mr Phinn, leastwise your grey variety. They’re as verminous and destructive as your common or garden rat.’
‘All the same, Mr Hinderwell,’ I said, ‘is there some other way? I just want to catch him.’
‘Well, you could use a trap, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I could drop one off at the Education Office next week. I used it recently in a school where squirrels had chewed through a window frame and caused a great deal of damage. I caught three of them. Told the kiddies they were going to a squirrel refuge since I didn’t want to upset them. Course, when I got hold of them, I –’
‘I’m very grateful, Mr Hinderwell,’ I interrupted, not wishing to know the fate of the little creatures.
‘Just put some peanuts in the trap and place it in a secluded spot in the garden, and you’ll have your squirrel,’ he told me. ‘Then you can do what you want with it – or them.’
I arrived at Tarncliffe at the very end of the lunch hour, having negotiated an empty grey ribbon of a road, which seemed to twist and turn interminably across an immense landscape of dark fields, where sheep and cattle sheltered in the lee of the old limestone walls. There was a squally wind and the noisy rooks circled and flapped high above the blustery trees like scraps of black paper.
The small primary school, which faced the village green, was a typical Dales stone building, with porch and mullioned windows. I noticed that the impressive solid black door sported a highly-polished brass plate bearing the words: ‘WELCOME TO OUR SCHOOL’. This was new from my last visit and I suspected it had been added because, for all the world, the school looked like a private dwelling at first glance. On one side was the village shop, on the other the grey brick Primitive Methodist Chapel.
The headteacher, Miss Drayton, was an optimistic and cheerful person whom nothing and no one seemed to dishearten or discourage, but when I informed her of the reason for my impromptu visit her face fell.
‘Bad language!’ she exclaimed. ‘Mr Hornchurch? That’s ridiculous! There must be some mistake. As you know, the school comprises one large room divided by a partition between the infants and the juniors. I can hear virtually everything that is said next door to me and I would know if he had used any offensive words.’ Then she thought for a moment. ‘Mind you, I’ve had a supply teacher in for the odd day or two over the past few weeks when I have had to attend regional headteachers’ meetings, but she didn’t mention she’d heard anything untoward. No, I’m certain Mr Hornchurch would never use any kind of inappropriate language with his class. He’s very professional, if a little unorthodox, and extremely well liked by the children and the parents. Who made the complaint?’
‘A Mr Gaskell,’ I told her.
‘Oh well, that explains a great deal!’ The headteacher blew out noisily through pursed lips. ‘I hate to say it, but Mr Gaskell is a most disagreeable man. He bought the old manor house next to the church last March, and he thinks he owns the village already. The first thing he did was try and stop the church clock chiming during the night because it disturbed his sleep. Then he tried to get planning permission for the manor’s old orchard, so his building company could erect some un-sightly executive houses there. He’s a man with more money than sense. His daughter only started school last term and already he’s been in complaining about this, that and the other – that we don’t give his Miranda hard enough books to read at home and that we spend too much time on art, poetry and music, which he considers largely a waste of time. And he is always at great pains to tell me how one of the directors of his company is a councillor on the Education Committee and that he agrees with his views.’
‘That would be Councillor Peterson, would it not?’ I asked.
‘It would indeed,’ replied Miss Drayton.
‘It was Councillor Peterson who brought the matter to the attention of the Chief Education Officer.’
‘Was it indeed?’ said Miss Drayton, bristling. ‘And isn’t Councillor Peterson’s wife a teacher?’
‘Yes, she’s the headteacher at Highcopse County Primary School,’ I said.
‘Well, Councillor Peterson ought to know better then, agreeing with this man,’ said Miss Drayton angrily. ‘Mr Gaskell’s daughter, when she started, was a frightened little thing and hardly said a word – and stuttered when she did. Mr Hornchurch brought her out of her shell. He’s amusing, mild-mannered and, as I have said before, highly professional. The very idea of him using bad language is inconceivable. I suspect that Mr Gaskell took against him from the start when he tried to get the parents to agree for Miranda to see a speech therapist about her impediment. Mrs Gaskell had no objection but her husband resolutely resisted, saying that the child would grow out of it. His discussion with Mr Hornchurch, I’m afraid, got a bit heated.’ Miss Drayton paused for breath and sighed again. ‘Anyway, Mr Phinn, I suppose you had better have a word with Mr Hornchurch and sort this out. Since it is Friday, we don’t have an afternoon break but go straight through until three thirty so I suggest I take both the infants and the juniors while you speak to him.’
‘I would prefer it, Miss Drayton,’ I said, ‘if you were present. I really feel you need to be there when this interview takes place.’
‘As a witness to what is said?’ she asked.
‘I think it would be wise. Obviously, I don’t wish to spend the whole of the afternoon in Mr Hornchurch’s class. Perhaps I could join you and the infants for the first part of the afternoon, observe Mr Hornchurch for the remainder and then speak to you both after school.’
‘Very well,’ she agreed. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I were present.’ She looked extremely angry. ‘I should have thought, Mr Phinn, that you have far more important things to do than waste your time looking into some ridiculous allegation.’
‘I am certain it’s a storm in a teacup,’ I reassured her, ‘but I am sure that you understand that I do have to investigate it.’
‘Very well then,’ she said, ‘we will leave it until after school when we will get to the bottom of this. In fact, Mr Gaskell usually collects Miranda on Fridays so we can hear about this complaint straight from the horse’s mouth. I cannot for the life of me understand why he never mentioned the matter to me, going to County Hall instead.’
Miss Drayton was clearly furious and I could just imagine what her reaction would be when she learned from me later that Tarncliffe School might very well be on the front page in the Fettlesham Gazette the following week.
When I entered the infants’ class, my mind was on the forthcoming – and what I guessed would prove to be contentious – meeting that would take place at the end of the school day. While Miss Drayton settled the children down, I wandered around the room looking at the colourful displays on the walls and the range of books in the small bookcase. I could hear Mr Hornchurch quite clearly behind the partition dividing the room, explaining to his class what they were to do that afternoon. The headteacher’s claim that she could hear virtually everything that was said next door was absolutely right.
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p; Miss Drayton approached and gave me a selection of the children’s workbooks to look at while she marked the register.
‘You might care to browse through these, Mr Phinn,’ she said. ‘As you will see, children do very well in this school.’ I could tell she was making a point.
I sat in the corner of the classroom in the small carpeted reading area adjacent to the partition to examine them, but placed them on the nearest chair and strained my ears to eavesdrop on the lesson going on next door. Mr Hornchurch was telling the children about the effects of pollution on the environment in a clear and interesting manner.
I was so engrossed in his account that I didn’t see the girl who had appeared at my side. She tugged at my sleeve.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ I replied.
She was a small child with sparkling intelligent eyes and corkscrew curls, and was dressed in a blue-and-yellow gingham skirt and a white shirt as crisp as a wafer. She stared at me intently. I smiled.
‘You were daydreaming,’ she told me with all the precocious confidence of a six-year-old.
‘I suppose I was,’ I said.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Mr Phinn,’ I answered.
‘I’m Rhiannon.’
‘Are you?’
‘It’s a Welsh name.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Can you speak Welsh?’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘My mummy and daddy can and I know some words.’
‘Really.’
‘Yes, big words. I know a lot of four-letter words.’
‘Do you really?’ I must have sounded very impressed.
‘And some five-letter ones too. Cwtch – that means cuddle,’ explained the child. ‘I have a cwtch every night when I have my story. We’ll be having a story this afternoon, after we’ve finished our poems.’
‘And what are your poems about?’ I asked.
‘We’re writing poems about excuses.’
‘Are you?’ My mind immediately thought of the excuses I might give to Miss de la Mare about my mishandling of the situation at Ugglemattersby and what Mr Hornchurch might proper if, indeed, he had used some inappropriate language.
‘Yes,’ said the child.
‘And what is your poem called?’
‘It’s called, “Excuses, Excuses!”’ she told me. ‘We have to think of lots of reasons for coming late to school.’
‘Like, the dog ate my homework,’ I said.
‘I don’t have a dog,’ she said pertly, ‘and we don’t have homework. We will when we go in the juniors but we don’t have homework in the infants.’
‘I see. And what excuses have you thought of so far?’ I asked.
‘The alarm clock didn’t go off,’ the child told me, ‘the car wouldn’t start, I forgot my PE kit and had to go back home to get it, and Mummy thought it was a Saturday so didn’t bring me to school.’
‘Those are very good excuses,’ I told her.
‘I’ve got another one, too,’ she said. ‘A really good one because it really happened when I came to school late once,’ the child informed me, nodding her little head.
‘And what’s that?’ I asked.
‘Our electric gates wouldn’t open,’ she told me.
With that, she took off, sat at her table, took out her book and pencil from her bag and got on with her poem.
I have had so many conversations like this with young children and have so often been brought out of a black mood by their innocent and intriguing chatter. Small children are a delight. Everything in the world to them is new and exciting. They are fascinated by people, and are wonderfully self-assured and forthcoming in their talk. It’s not like that with older children and adults. With age, one tends to become far more self-conscious and reticent, perhaps more suspicious of others. One only has to travel in a lift with a group of adults: they stare at the ceiling, examine their shoes, lookfixedly over your shoulder, anywhere as long as their eyes don’t meet yours. If a child is in the lift, it is a different matter. He or she will stare intently at you, taking everything in, and then very often make a comment such as: ‘I have my Mickey Mouse knickers on’, or ‘I’m going to the pet department, where’re you going?’
Rhiannon, like all young children, had no problem confronting adults, asking uncompromisingly forthright questions whilst staring them straight in the eye. What is also endearing about small children is that they have no conception of race, background, status, religion and class; smile at a little one and the smile is always returned. They are confident and not afraid of asking questions of adults, or of making blunt observations that sometimes cause their parents to redden with embarrassment: ‘Is that fat lady going to have a baby?’ ‘Grandma, who will fetch the fish and chips when you’re dead?’ ‘My daddy says Granny is well past her sell-by date.’ Such things are said without any malice; they are just the innocent observations of the very young.
I recalled a Dales sheep farmer once telling me about his four-year-old son who went with him to the hospital in Skip-ton to see his new baby sister. In the maternity ward, the child was far more interested in the smiling blackwoman in the next bed than he was in his baby sibling. He had obviously never seen a black person before and was fascinated. The little boy couldn’t take his eyes off her.
‘Stop staring, John,’ his father said in a hushed voice, ‘it’s very rude to stare.’
The child continued to stare, his eyes, as we say in Yorkshire, ‘as wide as chapel hat pegs’.
The woman smiled and wiggled her fingers at him but he continued to stare. Eventually she got out of bed, put on an attractive white dressing gown and snow-white fluffy slippers and left the ward to feed her own baby, who was in the adjoining room. As she headed for the door, the child pointed after her and announced loudly to his father, ‘Suffolk!’ at which his father could not contain his laughter. The Sufflksheep, as he explained to me later, are a very distinctive breed: long white woolly bodies and black wool-free face and legs.
I was brought out of my reverie by Miss Drayton. ‘Mr Phinn?’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘I was wondering if you might like to tell the children a story. We always have storytime at this point in the day and I thought, since you are here, it would be nice to make use of you. Some of the children rarely hear a man telling a story.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I hadn’t expected to take part in the lesson but was happy to acquiesce.
‘I was about to start the traditional tale of The Three Billy Goats Gruff,’ she said, handing me a book open at the start of the story. ‘While you are telling them the story, I’ll take the opportunity of making a phone call.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I think it might be prudent for me to have a word with someone in my professional association and seek some advice on the situation. It may appear to be a storm in a teacup to you, Mr Phinn, but in my experience, these things tend to have a habit of developing into hot potatoes. If accusations are being made, Mr Hornchurch might need to have his union representative present.’
‘I really don’t think, Miss Drayton –’ I began.
‘I am sure you’ll be all right with the class by yourself, won’t you?’ enquired the headteacher, giving me little chance of arguing with her. She clapped her hands loudly to gain the children’s attention. ‘We are very lucky, children,’ she announced, ‘to have Mr Phinn, a very special visitor, with us this afternoon and he has asked if he might tell today’s story. He’s really good at telling stories and I know’ – at this point she stared intently at a small boy with a shock of ginger hair and his two front teeth missing – ‘that we will all be on our very best behaviour, won’t we?’
‘Yes, Miss Drayton,’ chanted the class obediently.
‘And you will be very good, won’t you, Jack?’ warned the headteacher, continuing to give the boy with the ginger hair and the missing teeth a long and knowing look.
‘Yes, Miss Drayton,’ the boy shouted.
> Without any bidding, the children gathered around me on the carpet in the reading area, and sat with crossed legs and folded arms, their faces staring up at me expectantly. Miss Drayton quietly left the room.
Anyone who thinks that handling a group of twenty infant children, all of whom have their own little personalities, is an easy job, should have a go. It demands a great deal of skill, expertise and patience, as I was soon to discover.
‘Good afternoon, children,’ I said cheerfully.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Thin,’ they all chorused. ‘Good afternoon, everybody.’
‘Is that your real name?’ asked ginger-haired Jack. He had a small green candle of mucus appearing from his nose. He sniffed it away noisily but it re-emerged immediately. ‘Because you’re not very thin, are you?’
‘It’s Mr Phinn,’ I said. ‘Like on the back of a shark.’
‘I like sharks,’ said the boy.
‘I don’t,’ said a tiny, elfin-faced child with long black plaits and impressive pink-framed glasses. ‘I’m frightened of sharks.’
‘I’m frightened of spiders,’ said another.
‘I’m frightened of snakes,’ added a third.
‘Well, this story isn’t about sharks, spiders or snakes,’ I told the class, smiling. ‘It’s about three goats.’
‘I don’t like goats,’ said the girl.
‘These are very nice goats,’ I reassured her. ‘They’re called the Billy Goats Gruff.’
‘They don’t sound like nice goats,’ said the girl.
‘Goats have horns,’ volunteered Rhiannon.
‘Yes, that’s correct,’ I said.
‘And they butt,’ she added.
Jack immediately began to butt the girl next to him.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘It’s not very nice to butt other people, is it?’ The boy pulled a face but stopped. ‘So, children,’ I said, continuing, ‘this is a famous story called The Three Billy Goats Gruff .’
‘I’ve heard it before,’ announced Jack, sniffing loudly.
I knew from experience that I would have to keep a close eye on this little character. ‘And what’s your name?’ I asked.
The Heart of the Dales Page 12
