The Heart of the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  ‘Well, I’m very pleased to hear it, Mrs Kipling,’ I said. ‘To be honest, I would never have guessed, from listening to him, that your chairman of governors was so supportive and positive. He seems somewhat dour to me.’

  ‘He’s a most thoughtful and gentle-natured man, is Mr Featherstone,’ she said, ‘a man of high principles and uncompromising views. He’s also chairman of governors at St Cuthbert’s High School, you know, and last summer was asked by the headmaster to act as Solomon in the case of the cricket nets.’

  ‘That sounds intriguing,’ I said.

  ‘Three girls in the sixth form,’ continued Mrs Kipling, ‘were up before the headmaster for vandalism. They had taken a pair of scissors and had cut holes in the new and expensive cricket nets. The headmaster, a passionate cricketer himself, was not well pleased, as you might imagine, discovering his precious nets wilfully damaged. Mr Featherstone was asked to arbitrate, and he took the side of the students.’

  ‘If you were to ask me, it seems a pretty open and shut case,’ I told Mrs Kipling. ‘There seems to be no excuse for hacking holes in brand new cricket nets.’

  ‘Well, it’s not as simple as that,’ the headteacher told me, a small smile playing on her lips. ‘You see, the girls who were on their way across the school fields and were passing the cricket square came on a squirrel entangled in the nets.’

  ‘A squirrel?’ I mouthed. When, I thought to myself, will I be free from mention of the pesky little tree rats?

  ‘It was trying desperately to extricate itself, poor, exhausted creature, but with no success and the more it tried to untangle itself, the more it became enmeshed. So the girls cut away the netting and freed it.’

  ‘They freed it?’ I repeated.

  ‘Mr Featherstone was very impressed with their actions and reminded us of the hymn “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small” etc. He considered it to be a very noble act.’ Mrs Kipling paused. ‘I mean, Mr Phinn, who would want to see a little squirrel harmed?’

  ‘Who indeed,’ I murmured.

  The Staff Development Centre looked particularly clean and bright when I arrived there later that afternoon to prepare for a course I was to direct the following day. Since I had last been in the Centre, everything – the walls, ceiling, window frames, shelving and cupboards – had been painted a startling white, which gave the building the appearance of a hospital. It had a most unfriendly atmosphere. As I headed for the kitchen area to make my presence known to Connie, I passed a veritable gallery of new and very conspicuous signs, written in large red lettering: STRICTLY NO SMOKING! THIS DOOR MUST NOT BE USED AS AN ENTRANCE OR AN EXIT. DO NOT BLOCK THE FIRE DOORS. RETURN ALL CROCKERY TO THE KITCHEN AFTER USE. NO FOOD TO BE CONSUMED IN THE MEETING ROOMS.

  Calling in at the Gents, I found another selection of strident instructions: NOW WASH YOUR HANDS! DO NOT DEPOSIT FOREIGN BODIES DOWN THE TOILET! TURN OFF TAPS AFTER USE! And on each of the toilet doors the somewhat ambiguous injunction: IN CASE OF FIRE EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY!

  I found Connie, in her regulation pinkoverall, up her stepladder scraping paint off a window with a vicious-looking kitchen knife. Her face, beneath an ocean of copper-coloured curls, was red with exertion. ‘If you want a cup of anything, you’ll have to get it yourself,’ she told me bluntly. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘So I see,’ I said.

  ‘I spent all day Monday on my hands and knees and I’m still not finished. The mess those decorators have left behind!’ she complained, attacking a particularly stubborn bit of paint. ‘More like defecators than decorators. They were worse than Mr Clamp on a bad day, and that’s saying something. Only lads by the look of them, and I reckon the last time they had a paintbrush in their hands they were in the infant school. I had to tell them to do my pelmets again and touch up the skirting boards. There’s paint everywhere. More on the floor than on the walls.’

  ‘Well, the Centre looks a lot better,’ I said.

  Connie stopped scraping, swivelled round and peered down at me. ‘Does it?’ she snapped.

  ‘Well, it’s cleaner and brighter for one thing.’

  ‘Mr Phinn,’ she said looking down from the stepladder and wielding the knife like Lady Macbeth on the battlements of Glamis Castle, ‘what are you incinerating? I’ll have you know, this Centre is always clean and bright. I makes sure of that. You’ll have all on to find so much as a speckof dust, a marked wall or a scuffed floor in the building.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean it was dirty or anything like that. You always keep the Centre pristine.’

  ‘Prissy-what?’

  ‘Spotless, in an excellent state of cleanliness and care.’

  ‘Well, what did you mean then when you said it looked a lot better?’ she asked sharply, in no way mollified.

  ‘I meant it looks…’ I struggled for the right word. ‘It looks… whiter.’

  ‘Whiter?’ she repeated.

  ‘The paint. It makes it look whiter.’

  ‘Well, of course it does,’ she said. ‘It’s white paint they’ve used. I must say for the inspector in charge of English you do say some funny things.’

  I left her at her labours, made myself a cup of coffee and headed for the meeting room to prepare my course. It wasn’t long before Connie joined me.

  ‘How many are coming on your course?’ she asked. ‘It’s just that I have to know the numbers for the refreshments.’

  ‘About twenty,’ I told her.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know how that Mr Clamp does it,’ she told me. ‘They queue up to get on hi s courses. I wouldn’t give them the time of day myself but they’re always full to bursting. Same with Dr Mullarkey. She never has less than thirty coming on hers and they always go away saying how wonderful they are.’

  ‘Thank you, Connie,’ I said. ‘That makes me feel a whole lot better.’

  ‘Anyway, I can’t tell you how glad I was to see the back of the decorators.’

  ‘Yes, I bet you were pleased,’ I said.

  ‘Pleased?’ she cried. ‘Pleased? I was ecstatical. You would never believe the carry-on we had here last week. It was enough to drive a person to drink. Fire alarm going off, fire brigade, ambulance, paramedics, hospitalisation – you name it, we’ve had it.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’ I should never have asked.

  Connie perched on the side of a desk. ‘One of the decorators, a young lad, not started shaving yet by the look of him and with more silver rings through his ears than they have in a jeweller’s shop and a head as bald as a coot, ended up in Casualty.’

  ‘His name wasn’t Kevin, by any chance?’ I asked, thinking of Mrs Kipling’s assertions about names that I had heard earlier that day.

  ‘I thinkit was, as a matter of fact,’ said Connie. ‘Why, do you know him?’

  ‘No, it was just a wild guess.’

  ‘Well, this Kevin ended up in hospital with a broken leg,’ Connie told me.

  ‘Ladders can be dangerous,’ I said. ‘I nearly fell off a ladder last weektrying to mend the guttering on our cottage. I brought the whole lot down and nearly ended up flat on my back. And you want to be careful, Connie, up that stepladder of yours.’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t fall off a ladder,’ said Connie. ‘He was sitting on the toilet.’

  ‘How on earth do you breaka leg sitting on the toilet?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘I’ll tell you, if you let me finish,’ she said. ‘His mate, Shane I think they called him, legarthic individual with more hair than a sheepdog, had just finished painting the toilet doors in the Gents and before he sets off home he goes and puts his brushes in a jar of turpentine substitute to stop them getting hard. Anyway, next morning the silly lad pours the contents of the jar down the toilet bowl but doesn’t think to flush the toilet. Fancy putting inflammatory material down the toilet. Then this Shane goes off to paint the doors in the Ladies. In goes this Kevin into the Gents –
he was another gormless piece of work– and he sits on the toilet and lights up a cigarette.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. I could predict what was to follow.

  ‘I told them when they started it was a no-smoking environment but they just don’t listen, youngsters, these days, do they? Just do as they want. He thought he’d have a surreptitious smoke, didn’t he? Well, he’s learnt his lesson good and proper this time, I can tell you. It’s not the best way of giving up smoking but I bet it will be a while before he has another cigarette after that fandango.’

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked, as if I didn’t know.

  ‘When he’d finished his cigarette, what does he do?’

  ‘Puts it down the toilet bowl?’ I suggested, with a strangled expression.

  ‘Yes,’ said Connie, ‘he puts the lighted tab-end down the toilet and he does it while he’s still sitting there.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Oh yes. There was this great big flash and the next thing you know he’s emerging from the Gents, screaming and shouting, his overalls around his ankles and jumping down the corridor like a kangaroo with rabies. Fortunately for him, I’ve been on a first-aid course and did what I could. I can tell you it was very embarrassing for yours truly, not to mention the lad himself, with me having to put all my clean dishcloths and tea-towels on that particular part of his anatomy.’

  ‘But how did he break his leg?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ said Connie. ‘I called the ambulance and it was here in quicktime and the lad was carted off, moaning and groaning, wriggling and writhing, to the Royal Infirmary. “So how did it happen?” asks one of the ambulance men as they were carrying the injured party down the steps at the front of the Centre. Well, when I told him he began to laugh and this started the other ambulance man off laughing and they laughed so much that they dropped the stretcher and this Kevin broke a leg.’

  ‘You are joking,’ I said.

  ‘As God is my judge. They just creased up and the lad was tipped off of the stretcher, rolled down the steps and he broke a leg.’

  ‘It’s like a Whitehall farce,’ I said. ‘And how is the lad?’

  ‘Oh, he’s getting on all right,’ Connie told me. ‘I phoned the hospital this morning and he’s on the mend.’ Connie stood and brushed the creases out of her overall. ‘Mind you,’ she said, ‘there was one good thing about it all.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘He’d finished painting the Centre before he had the accident.’

  14

  The first school visits of the following week were to the primary school at Foxton in the morning and then to Hawthwaite Infant School in the afternoon. In the first school, I was due to observe the lessons of a young probationary teacher, and in the second a teacher who was only in his second year of teaching. It was one of the inspectors’ responsibilities to assess the competency of those new to the profession by observing their lessons three or four times over the course of their first year, evaluating their teaching, assessing their planning materials and examining the children’s exercise books and test scores. If the inspector felt that a new entrant possessed the necessary ability and knowledge and maintained good classroom control, the teacher would pass the probationary year and be deemed fully qualified to enter the profession.

  It was understandably a nerve-racking time for many a young teacher to have to perform with a school inspector sitting at the back of the classroom with his clipboard on his lap and his pen poised, watching everything going on, and there had been occasions when the lesson had not gone as well as it should have because of the teacher’s nerves or some unexpected occurrence. That morning at Foxton there was indeed a surprise in store for me.

  Foxton School was a sprawling, flat-roofed structure erected in the 1950s to cater for the children who lived on the large council estate surrounding it. As a building, it had little of character; it was a purely utilitarian construction with large classrooms, huge square, metal-framed widows, long narrow corridors and a multi-purpose hall. In summer the school was a hothouse, in winter it was icily cold. The floors consisted of brown reconstituted tiles and the shelving was of the cheap-looking plastic-coated variety. The field to the rear of the building, despite the notices, was used after school and at weekends by dog-walkers to exercise their pets, would-be golfers practising their strokes and adolescents on motorbikes. Break-ins and vandalism were regular occurrences.

  Knowing the area that Foxton School served, with its deserved reputation as being one of the most problematic and socially-deprived parts of the county, I guessed that Miss Bailey would need all the support and encouragement she could get. On my last visit, Mrs Smart, the head teacher, had listed for me a whole catalogue of difficulties faced by those who lived on the estate: petty crime, drug-related problems, absentee fathers, poverty, unemployment and low levels of literacy, all of which had a real impact on the children’s achievement. But she was by nature a steadfastly optimistic and enthusiastic woman, not given to complaint and she was fortunate to lead a team of like-minded colleagues: keen, committed, experienced teachers who had a genuine concern for the children and their parents. Bearing in mind the children’s background, the school was achieving pretty good results.

  ‘Most of the parents are the salt of the earth,’ the head teacher had told me on my last visit. ‘They cause me no trouble and, on the whole, they want the best for their children. They have so little and are so very grateful for anything we do for them. We have a breakfast club so children can start off the day with a meal inside them. There are regular jumble sales, bingo nights and school discos. With the money we raise, we’re able to help the least fortunate families to buy the school uniform. Many of the parents themselves fell through the net in the school system and a surprising number are barely literate so on one evening a weekwe have what we euphemistically call a ‘Brush Up Your English Group’. Basically, it’s to teach them to read and write better so they can help their own children with their schoolwork. Sometimes I have to smile,’ she had continued. ‘One young mother with four children – she can’t have been much older than twenty – had real problems filling in the forms when she registered the children to start school, having just moved into the area. She knew the children’s dates of birth and who the fathers were but when I asked if all the children were natural born British citizens she told me that the youngest child was born by Caesarean. When it got to “length of residence” she said it was about fifty feet although she couldn’t be sure. I once asked a young single-parent mother, whose son had a wonderful head of curly ginger hair, if the boy’s father was redheaded, too. “I don’t know,” she had told me in all seriousness, “he kept his cap on.”’

  As I drove to Foxton that morning I thought about Mrs Smart, of her dedication and all the extra effort she and her staff made to better the lives of the children, and I thought too of the cynical, lazy, nine-to-four teachers at Ugglemattersby Junior School. Closing that particular school, I said to myself, would be the best thing to do.

  I arrived at Foxton just as the bell, shrill and peremptory, sounded for the start of school and, after signing in at the office, I joined the throng of chattering children as they made their way down the long corridor to their various classrooms. Mrs Smart was at her classroom door and greeted me with a broad smile. Unlike many of her head teacher colleagues, she insisted on doing some teaching, rather than spending all her time in her office on administration.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Phinn,’ she said in a hearty, welcoming voice, ‘and how are you this bright Monday morning?’

  ‘All the better for seeing you, Mrs Smart,’ I said.

  ‘Here to see our new member of staff, are you?’

  ‘Yes, but I thought I’d pop in to see you first.’

  ‘Always a pleasure,’ she replied. ‘I think you will find that I have discovered a real gem in Miss Bailey. She’s settled in really well and the children love her.’

  Mrs Smart, a small, tub
by woman with a jolly pinkish face and large blue eyes, reminded me of a brightly-painted Toby jug one sees displayed in old country inns; indeed, one could visualise her pulling the pints with gusto.

  ‘Come into the classroom for a minute,’ she said, ‘while I mark the register. I’m sure the children would like to meet you.’

  The class of eight- to nine-year-olds stared at me inquisitively as they filed into the room and took their seats.

  ‘Sit up smartly, children,’ the head teacher said. ‘Straight backs, arms folded, all eyes this way.’ The children did as they were told. ‘We have a very important visitor. This is Mr Phinn, children.’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Phinn,’ the children chanted.

  ‘Good morning,’ I replied.

  ‘Some of you might remember Mr Phinn when he came into our school last time,’ said Mrs Smart.

  ‘I remember him, miss!’ called out a boy with a thin-boned face, very short hair and large low-set ears.’

  ‘Yes, I thought you might remember him, Justin,’ said the head teacher, glancing in my direction and giving me a knowing look. ‘As I recall, you and Mr Phinn had a very interesting conversation at the school office when you were sent there to cool off.’

  ‘I couldn’t stop winking,’ said the boy, a cheeky grin spreading across his face.

  ‘I do remember,’ I said, trying to suppress a smile.

  ‘I am glad to say, Mr Phinn,’ said the head teacher, ‘that Justin has now got out of the habit of winking at everybody.’

  ‘I am very pleased to hear it,’ I said in a mock-serious tone of voice.