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Village School
Fairacre [1]
Miss Read
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (1976)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: Fiction, Country Life, Fairacre (England : Imaginary Place), Country Life - England, Fairacre (England: Imaginary Place)
Fictionttt Country Lifettt Fairacre (England : Imaginary Place)ttt Country Life - Englandttt Fairacre (England: Imaginary Place)ttt
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Review
"If you've ever enjoyed a visit to Mitford, you'll relish a visit to Fairacre." -- Jan Karon
Product Description
The first novel in the beloved Fairacre series, VILLAGE SCHOOL introduces the remarkable schoolmistress Miss Read and her lovable group of children, who, with a mixture of skinned knees and smiles, are just as likely to lose themselves as their mittens. This is the English village of Fairacre: a handful of thatch-roofed cottages, a church, the school, the promise of fair weather, friendly faces, and good cheer -- at least most of the time. Here everyone knows everyone else's business, and the villagers like each other anyway (even Miss Pringle, the irascible, gloomy cleaner of Fairacre School). With a wise heart and a discerning eye, Miss Read guides us through one crisp, glistening autumn in her village and introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters and a world of drama, romance, and humor, all within a stone's throw of the school. By the time winter comes, you'll be nestled snugly into the warmth and wit of Fairacre and won't want to leave.
Village School
Miss Read
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Illustrated by J. S. Goodall
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HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston New York
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First Houghton Mifflin paperback edition 2001
Copyright © 1955 by Dora Jessie Saint
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 56-7240
ISBN 0-618-12702-X
Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 9 8
PART ONE
Christmas Term
1. Early Morning
THE first day of term has a flavour that is all its own; a whiff of lazy days behind and a foretaste of the busy future. The essential thing, for a village schoolmistress on such a day, is to get up early.
I told myself this on a fine September morning, ten minutes after switching off the alarm clock. The sun streamed into the bedroom, sparking little rainbows from the mirror's edge; and outside the rooks cawed noisily from the tops of the elm trees in the churchyard. From their high look-out the rooks had a view of the whole village of Fairacre clustered below them; the village which had been my home now for five years.
I had enjoyed those five years—the children, the little school, the pleasure of running my own school-house and of taking a part in village life. True, at first, I had had to walk as warily as Agag; many a slip of the tongue caused me, even now, to go hot and cold at the mere memory, but at last, I believed, I was accepted, if not as a proper native, at least as 'Miss Read up the School,' and not as 'that new woman pushing herself forward!'
I wondered if the rooks, whose clamour was increasing with the warmth of the sun, could see as far as Tyler's Row at the end of the village. Here lived Jimmy Waites and Joseph Coggs, two little boys who were to enter school today. Another new child was also coming, and this thought prodded me finally out of bed and down the narrow stairs.
I filled the kettle from the pump at the sink and switched it on. The new school year had begun.
Tyler's Row consists of four thatched cottages and very pretty they look. Visitors always exclaim when they see them, sighing ecstatically and saying how much they would like to live there. As a realist I am always constrained to point out the disadvantages that lurk behind the honeysuckle.
The thatch is in a bad way, and though no rain has yet dripped through into the dark bedrooms below, it most certainly will before long. There is no doubt about a rat or two running along the ridge, as spry as you please, reconnoitring probably for a future home; and the starlings and sparrows find it a perfect resting-place.
'They ought to do something for us,' Mrs Waites told me, but as 'They,' meaning the landlord, is an old soldier living with his sister in the next village on a small pension and the three shillings he gets a week from each cottage (when he is lucky), it is hardly surprising that the roof is as it is.
There is no drainage of any sort and no damp-course. The brick floors sweat and clothes left hanging near a wall produce a splendid crop of prussian blue mildew in no time.
Washing-up water, soap-suds and so on are either emptied into a deep hole by the hedge or flung broadcast over the garden. The plants flourish on this treatment, particularly the rows of Madonna lilies which are the envy of the village. The night-cart, now a tanker-lorry, elects to call in the heat of the day, usually between twelve and one o'clock, once a week. The sewerage is carried through the only living-room and out into the road, for the edification of the schoolchildren who are making their way home to dinner, most probably after a hygiene lesson on the importance of cleanliness.
In the second cottage Jimmy Waites was being washed. He stood on a chair by the shallow stone sink, submitting meekly to his mother's ministrations. She had twisted the corner of the face-flannel into a formidable radish and was turning it remorselessly round and round inside his left ear. He wore new corduroy trousers, dazzling braces and a woollen vest. Hanging on a line which was slung across the front of the mantelpiece, was a bright blue-and-red-checked shirt, American style. His mother intended that her Jimmy should do her credit on his first day at school.
She was a blonde, lively woman married to a farmworker as fair as herself. 'I always had plenty of spirit,' she said once, 'Why, even during the war when I was alone I kept cheerful!' She did, too, from all accounts told by her more puritanical neighbours; and certainly none of us is so silly as to ask questions about Cathy, the only dark child of the six, born during her husband's absence in 1944.
Cathy, while her brother was being scrubbed, was feeding the hens at the end of the garden. She threw out handfuls of mixed wheat and oats which she had helped to glean nearly a year ago. This was a treat for the chickens and they squawked and screeched as they fought for their breakfast.
Their noise brought one of the children who lived next door to a gap in the hedge that divided the gardens. Joseph was about five, of gipsy stock, with eyes as dark and pathetic as a monkey's. Cathy had promised to take him with her and Jimmy on this his first school morning. This was a great concession on the part of Mrs Waites as the raggle-taggle family next door was normally ignored.
'Don't you play with them dirty kids,' she warned her own children, 'or you'll get Nurse coming down the school to look at you special!' And this dark threat was enough.
But today Cathy looked at Joseph with a critical eye and spoke first.
'You ready?'
The child nodded in reply.
'You don't look like it,' responded his guardian roundly. 'You wants to wash the jam off of your mouth. Got a hanky?'
'No,' said Joe, bewildered.
'Well, you best get one. Bit of rag'll do, but Miss Read lets off awful if you forgets your hanky. Where's your mum?'
'Feeding baby.'
'Tell her about the rag,' ordered Cathy, 'and buck up. Me and Jim's nearly ready.' And swinging the empty tin dipper she skipped back into her house.
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Meanwhile, the third new child was being prepared. Linda was eight years old, fat and phlegmatic, and the pride of her fond mother's heart. She was busy buttoning her new red shoes while her mother packed a piece of chocolate for her elevenses at playtime.
The Moffats had only lived in Fairacre for three weeks, but we had watched their bungalow being built for the last six months.
'Bathroom and everything!' I had been told, 'and one of those hatchers to put the dishes through to save your legs. Real lovely!'
The eagle eye of the village was upon the owners whenever they came over from Caxley, our nearest market-town, to see the progress of their house. Mrs Moffat had been seen measuring the windows for the curtains and holding patterns of material against the distempered walls.
'Thinks herself someone, you know!' I was told later. 'Never so much as spoke to me in the road!'
'Perhaps she was shy.'
'Humph!'
'Or deaf, even.'
'None so deaf as those that won't hear,' was the tart rejoinder. Mrs Moffat, alas! was already suspected of that heinous village crime known as 'putting on side.'
One evening, during the holidays, she had brought the child to see me. I was gardening and they both looked askance at my bare legs and dirty hands. It was obvious that she tended to cosset her rather smug daughter and that appearances meant a lot to her, but I liked her and guessed that the child was intelligent and would work well. That her finery would also excite adverse comment among the other children I also surmised. Mrs Moffat's aloofness was really only part of her town upbringing, and once she realized the necessity for exchanging greetings with every living soul in the village, no matter how pressing or distracting one's own business, she would soon be accepted by the other women.
Linda would come into my class. She would be in the youngest group, among those just sent up from the infants' room where they had spent three years under Miss Clare's benign rule. Joseph and Jimmy would naturally go straight into her charge.
At twenty to nine I hung up the tea towel, closed the back door of the school-house and stepped across the playground to the school.
Above me the rooks still chattered. Far below they could see, converging upon the school lane, little knots of children from all quarters of the village. Cathy had Jimmy firmly by the hand: Joseph's grimy paw she disdained to hold, and he trailed behind her, his dark eyes apprehensive.
Linda Moffat, immaculate in starched pink gingham, walked primly beside her mother; while behind and before, running, dawdling, shouting or whistling, ran her future school fellows.
Through the sunny air another sound challenged the rooks' chorus. The school bell began to ring out its morning greeting.
2. Our School
THE school at Fairacre was built in 1880, and as it is a church school it is strongly ecclesiastical in appearance. The walls are made of local stone, a warm grey in colour, reflecting summer light with honeyed mellowness, but appearing dull and dejected when the weather is wet. The roof is high and steeply-pitched and the stubby bell-tower thrusts its little Gothic nose skywards, emulating the soaring spire of St Patrick's, the parish church, which stands next door.
The windows are high and narrow, with pointed tops. Children were not encouraged, in those days, to spend their working time in gazing out at the world, and, sitting stiffly in the well of the room, wearing sailor suits or stout zephyr and serge frocks, their only view was of the sky, the elm trees and St Patrick's spire. Today their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have exactly the same view; just this lofty glimpse of surrounding loveliness.
The building consists of two rooms divided by a partition of glass and wood. One room houses the infants, aged five, six and seven years of age, under Miss Clare's benevolent eye. The other room is my classroom where the older children of junior age stay until they are eleven when they pass on to a secondary school, either at Caxley, six miles away, or in the neighbouring village of Beech Green, where the children stay until they are fifteen.
A long lobby runs behind these two rooms, the length of the building; it is furnished with pegs for coats, a low stone sink for the children to wash in, and a high new one for washing-up the dinner things. An electric copper is a recent acquisition, and very handsome it is; but although we have electricity installed here there is no water laid on to the school.
This is, of course, an appalling problem, for there is no water to drink—and children get horribly thirsty—no water for washing hands, faces, cleansing cuts and grazes, for painting, for mixing paste or watering plants or filling flower vases; and, of course, no water for lavatories.
We overcome this problem in two ways. A large galvanized iron tank on wheels is filled with rainwater collected from the roof, and this, when we have skimmed off the leaves and twigs and rescued the occasional frog, serves most of our needs. The electric copper is filled in the morning from this source and switched on after morning playtime to be ready for washing not only the crockery and cutlery after dinner but also the stone floor of the lobby.
I bring two buckets of drinking water across the playground from the school-house where there is an excellent well, but we must do our own heating, so that a venerable black kettle stands on my stove throughout the winter months, purring in a pleasantly domestic fashion, ready for emergencies. The electric kettle, in my own kitchen, serves us at other times.
The building is solid structurally and kept in repair by the church authorities whose property it is. One defect, however, it seems impossible to overcome. A skylight, strategically placed over the headmistress's desk, lets in not only light, but rain. Generations of local builders have clambered over the roof and sworn and sawn and patched and pulled at our skylight—but in vain. The gods have willed otherwise, and year after year Pluvius drops his pennies into a bucket placed below for the purpose, the clanging muffled by a dishcloth folded to fit the bottom.
The school stands at right angles to the road and faces across the churchyard to the church. A low dry-stone wall runs along by the road dividing it from the churchyard, school playground and the school-house garden. Behind this the country slopes away, falling slightly at first, then rising, in swelling folds, up into the full majesty of the downs which sweep across these southern counties for mile upon mile. The air is always bracing, and in the winter the wind is a bitter foe, and that quality of pure light, which is peculiar to downland country, is here very noticeable.
The children are hardy and though, quite naturally, they take their surroundings for granted, I think that they are aware of the fine views around them. The girls particularly are fond of flowers, birds, insects and all the minutiae of natural life, guarding jealously any rare plant against outsiders' prying eyes, and having a real knowledge of the whereabouts and uses of many plants and herbs.
The boys like to dismiss such things as 'girls' stuff,' but they too can find the first mushrooms, sloes or blackberries for their mothers or for me; and most of the birds' nests are known as soon as they are built. Luckily, stealing eggs and rifling nests seem to be on the wane, though occasional culprits are brought to stern judgment at my desk. They suffer, I think, more from the tongues of the girls in the playground in matters like this, for there is no doubt about it that the girls are more sympathetic to living things and pour scorn and contumely on any young male tyrants.
In one corner of the small, square playground is the inevitable pile of coke for the two slow combustion stoves. These coke piles seem to be a natural feature of all country schools. This is considered by the children, a valuable adjunct to playtime activities. A favourite game is to run scrunchily up the pile and then to slither down in gritty exhilaration. Throwing it at each other, or at a noisy object such as the rainwater tank, is also much enjoyed, hands being wiped perfunctorily down the fronts of jackets or on the seats of trousers before the beginning of writing lessons. All these joys are strictly forbidden, of course, which adds to the fearful delight.
Furthest from the wall by
the road at the other side of the playground, grows a clump of elm trees and their gnarled roots, which add to the hazards of the playground's surface, are a favourite place to play.
The recesses are rooms, larders, cupboards or gardens, and the ivy leaves from the wall are used for plates and provisions, and twigs for knives and forks. Sometimes they play shops among the roots, paying each other leaves and bearing away conkers, acorns and handfuls of gravel as their purchases. I like to hear the change in their voices as they become shopkeepers or customers. They affect a high dictatorial tone of voice when they assume adult status, quite unlike the warm burr of their everyday conversations.
The fields He two or three feet below the level of the playground and a scrubby hedge of hazel and hawthorn marks this boundary. The sloping bank down is scored by dozens of little bare paths, worn by generations of sturdy boots and corduroy breeches.
Altogether our playground is a good one-full of possibilities for resourceful children and big enough to allow shopkeepers, mothers and fathers, cowboys and spacemen to carry on their urgent affairs very happily together.
On this first morning of term Miss Clare had already arrived when I walked over at a quarter to nine. Her bicycle, as upright and as ancient as its owner, was propped just inside the lobby door.
The school had that indefinable first-morning smell compounded of yellow soap, scrubbed floorboards and black-lead. The tortoise stove gleamed like an ebony monster; even the vent-pipe which soared aloft towards the pitch-pine roof was blackened as far as Mrs Pringle, the school-cleaner, could reach. Clean newspaper covered the freshly-hearth-stoned surroundings of the stove—which officially remained unlit until October—and the guard, just as glossy, was neatly placed round the edges of the outspread News of the World.