by Mike Ripley
‘The one with the round ball?’ Perdita asked impishly and, when Rupert nodded, said smugly, ‘See, I do take an interest.’
‘So Mr Browne was an ex-military man?’ Rupert persevered.
‘I got the impression Brigham likes to recruit teachers from the services. Probably thinks it’s good for discipline in the classroom.’
‘That’s another reason I’ll be a disappointment – I didn’t even get to do National Service.’ Rupert frowned but kept his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead. ‘I’m not sure I fancy trying to impose discipline in a classroom.’
‘You won’t have to, will you? You can shout at them across a muddy field or blow your little whistle or something. It’s me who has to drum the Romantic poets into reluctant young brains and then try and get them to remember their Marlowe. This is hell, nor am I out of it.’
‘Faustus?’
‘Yes, but I was thinking of Yorkshire.’
‘We’re not there yet,’ grinned Rupert. ‘We could turn back and say the car broke down.’
‘Oh, we couldn’t do that, I’ve promised,’ said Perdita sweetly. ‘A goddaughter’s word is her bond and all that.’
They pulled into a lay-by near Norman Cross and got out of the tiny car to stretch their legs, eat sandwiches and drink tea from the plastic cups which topped Perdita’s flask as northward-bound lorries thundered by them, close enough to make the Mini rock on its chassis.
It was an early luncheon or a very late breakfast, but Perdita was determined to get to Denby Ash before it got dark, and so naturally she insisted on driving the rest of the way. Rupert did not object as he knew her to be an excellent driver, and stoically folded his legs into the well of the passenger seat amongst the bags, books and roadmaps whilst Perdita adjusted the rear-view mirror – automatically checking her hair and make-up as she did so – turned the key in the ignition and set off in a racing start.
Perdita talked constantly as she drove – something Rupert knew she only did when she was worried. Would she be able to control classrooms full of bumptious Yorkshire boys? Would they laugh at her accent? Would she laugh at theirs? Would she even understand them? It was an all-boys’ school: had they ever seen a woman before? Of course they had; she was being stupid. They all had mothers, didn’t they? And hadn’t Brigham Armitage told her that as well as his wife, Celia, who was school secretary and school nurse, it seemed, there was at least one other female on the teaching staff? But they were probably qualified as teachers, whereas Perdita was only qualified to act; surely they would know she wasn’t a real teacher?
‘Not if you act the role as well as I know you can, my love,’ Rupert had soothed, his eyes flicking nervously to the speedometer. ‘Think of it as a part in Rep., a part you’ve been doing for weeks and the critics love you for it.’
‘Regional theatre critics are not usually spotty, sniggering, twelve-year-old schoolboys. Well, not all of them.’
‘Probably more than you’d think, in my experience,’ Rupert agreed with a wry smile. ‘But don’t worry about it – you’ll be fine. The little oiks will all fall in love with you at first sight. It’s me they’re going to be pelting with mud and scragging in the scrum, not to mention what might happen in the showers.’
‘I don’t think I want to hear any more on that subject,’ said Perdita, tight-lipped. ‘It’s nothing you need to go to a psychiatrist for, is it?’
‘No, no. Nothing like that,’ said Rupert hurriedly. ‘It’s just that a favourite trick when I was a boy …’
‘When I was a lad,’ teased his wife, trying out her stock Yorkshire accent, ‘nobbut a whippersnapper.’
‘Yes, back then in those innocent days before I was entrapped by gorgeous, sexy actresses. When I was at school …’
‘Excuse me?’
‘What?’
‘Use of the plural; you said sexy actresses.’
‘I may have been chased by several but I only let one catch me.’
‘Don’t get above yourself, darling – you could always find yourself thrown back into the ocean. Anyway, you were about to confess something unspeakable which happened to you in the showers at school.’
‘It wasn’t really unspeakable,’ said Rupert, looking out of the side window to avert his discomfort. ‘Not on the scale of man’s inhumanity to man, or even boys’ inhumanity to other boys, come to think of it, but it was rather intimidating at the time. If the sports master felt that you hadn’t played a game to your full potential, he would throw your towel into the shower with you, or sometimes you would find it waiting for you, on the floor, already wringing wet. It was supposed to be an incentive to improve your performance for the next game.’
‘That’s bullying, plain and simple,’ Perdita said firmly.
‘My father called it psychological warfare.’
‘You told your parents? Good for you.’
‘I mentioned it to Pa,’ Rupert said casually. ‘In passing, as it were, not complaining, just fishing to see if he’d gone through the same rotten treatment when he was a pupil.’
‘And had he?’
‘Just the once. He said he ignored it completely and the following week, after the game, he went into the showers wearing his towel, came out dripping wet, got dressed without making any attempt to dry himself and went off to Latin Prep as if absolutely nothing untoward had happened.’
‘Which showed the bullies they couldn’t win. Good for him.’
‘That much was true, though he claims he caught double pneumonia as a result of two hours of translating Juvenal whilst wearing damp clothes. I never had the nerve to follow his example; I just smuggled an extra towel into the changing room.’
‘Well, that showed initiative,’ Perdita said kindly, reaching out her left hand to pat her husband’s knee without taking her eyes off the road, ‘and it won’t be a practice you’ll permit at Ash Grange, will it?’
‘Absolutely not. My motto shall be Cave salacones! – which I think means “Bullies watch out” but I’d better check that with the Latin master. The school does have a Latin master, I presume?’
‘Oh, yes. Godfather Brigham insists on Latin being taught, otherwise his brighter boys won’t get into Cambridge.’
‘But it’s not a requirement any longer.’
‘I know that; you know that. Brigham is delightfully behind the times,’ said Perdita then paused as the thought struck her. ‘Of course, he can’t be too far behind the times. He has no qualms about employing women as teachers and not just cooks and skivvies, and he’s also asked your mother to preside at Speech Day to show how a woman can succeed in a man’s world.’
‘Plus,’ said Rupert, wagging a finger to emphasize his point, ‘he’s forward-thinking enough to allow a musical version of Marlowe’s most famous play and it’s not a logical choice for the end of term before Christmas, so that’s doubly radical.’
‘Mmm,’ murmured Perdita thoughtfully, ‘my jury’s still out on that one. But talking of forward-thinking: what the devil is that thing?’
The thing which had caught her eye, looming out of the dull morning to the left of the road, was indeed unmissable. It was a structure of sweeping upward curves of concrete which at first glance could have been mistaken for a giant sculpture of some form of alien butterfly landing on planet Earth for the first time. On closer examination, the thing was clearly man-made and served as the flamboyant saddle-shaped roof of a rather mundane petrol station, which seemed, to Perdita, to be a rather ostentatious way of keeping the rain out. To Rupert, however, it was a landmark, and he greeted it like a homeward-bound sailor.
‘We’re at Markham Moor in Nottinghamshire,’ he enthused, ‘and that famous garage there marks the beginning of the north for most people.’
‘It’s bizarre,’ said Perdita huffily. ‘What on earth is it supposed to be?’
‘I’m not sure it’s supposed to be anything except a modern piece of architectural design. All garages, perhaps even houses, will look like that in twenty yea
rs’ time.’
‘I very much doubt that,’ said Perdita. ‘It’s a ridiculous piece of design; there can’t be two of them in the world.’
‘Actually,’ said Rupert in what he felt was his best school-masterly voice (so convincing, he thought, that he should be wearing a gown), ‘the same design – which technically is called a hyperbolic paraboloid – was used for the TWA Flight Centre at Idlewild airport in New York, the one they’ve renamed after President Kennedy.’
‘Your mother told you that, didn’t she?’ Perdita flashed her husband a sideways glance.
‘Yes,’ said Rupert, slightly deflated. ‘The first time I saw it I thought it was a spaceship landing and folding up its wings, like something out of Dan Dare.’
‘Were you in the back seat with a bag of sherbet lemons and a copy of The Eagle?’ Perdita said with a sly grin.
‘If you must know, it was the year before I met you and Mother was giving me a lift to an audition in Sheffield at The Playhouse. I didn’t get the part and I can’t even remember what I read for it, but I certainly remember that garage. For me, it’s always marked the start of the north, although I suppose technically that’s probably the Yorkshire border.’
‘Oooh!’ Perdita’s left hand left the steering wheel and shot to her shocked, open mouth. ‘I’ve just had a terrible thought,’ she said mischievously.
‘What?’
‘I think I forgot to pack the passports.’
FOUR
‘No extras, no vacations, and diet unparalleled.’
When she first caught sight of Ash Grange, Perdita was reminded of her father-in-law’s assertion that a fair amount of ‘wuthering’ took place in Yorkshire and yet was immediately reassured that the house was clearly sturdy enough to withstand the slings and arrows of the most atrocious weather. In fact, she was quite prepared to believe the house would be impermeable to light artillery.
Local antiquarians would cheerfully claim that Ash Grange could trace its origins back to a fifteenth-century farmhouse which was expanded and possibly fortified as a sturdy manor house during the seventeenth century. Mysteriously, no traces of either incarnation had ever been reliably identified and so local pride had to be content with a mere one hundred years of documented history. There were many among the mining community of Denby Ash who took delight in pointing out that the village’s brass band pre-dated the Big House and its rather privileged (if not downright stuck-up) occupants by a good thirty years.
Such a claim to historical precedence was beyond dispute as the earliest Minute Books of the Denby Ash Colliers Brass Band dated from 1838 whereas all architectural guides to the county placed the construction of Ash Grange as part of the neo-Gothic revival much favoured by industrially wealthy Victorians in the 1860s, and most dated the house from 1868, its construction coming immediately after that of the church of St James the Great at the opposite end of the village which straddled the road from Huddersfield to Wakefield.
Described, confusingly, as ‘part Georgian, part neo-Gothic or perhaps Jigsaw Gothic’ in style, Ash Grange was solidly built of dark Yorkshire sandstone blocks with grey-black stone roofing tiles, its powerful vertical lines drawing the eye of the awestruck beholder up to the pointed arches of its first-floor oriel windows and then on to the crenellated battlements under the roof and beyond to the twin towers of clustered chimneys. The only softening of the Grange’s severe, rather militaristic façade was an ornate ten-segment rose window. This circular aperture, which would be called a Catherine Window in a Catholic church, was – or so the architectural journals agreed – an inferior copy of the White Rose window designed by church architect John Loughborough Pearson for Christ Church at Appleton-le-Moors in distant North Yorkshire. The window perched above a stone porch in which nestled a solid oak door and, between the porch and window, a coat of arms which now designated the Grange as a place of learning. In a painted stone relief were four white roses (were there any other kind in Yorkshire?) at the corners of an open book whose pages displayed the two words of the motto of Ash Grange School for Boys: Turpe Nescire, which can be translated as ‘It is a disgrace to be ignorant’ although one retiring science teacher had suggested it be expanded to read ‘It is no disgrace to be quiet and ignorant.’ His suggestion had met with stern disapproval on school grounds except in the senior staff room where his last few days in post were greeted with constant winks and nods of harmonious agreement.
The actual house – the Big House – formed only a small part – perhaps a sixth – of the area of Ash Grange School. To the rear of the original mansion, where once a kitchen garden and a large brick coalhouse had taken pride of place (the house had been built with the profits from coal so domestic supplies of the noble fuel were suitably protected), there now extended large blocks of concrete and glass rectangular buildings which served as classrooms and offices, their windows giving panoramic views to the east, over the tarmac tennis courts, a cricket pitch, two rugby fields, a pavilion and a brick changing room block before what had once clearly been a manicured parkland gave way to the rising ground and mixed foliage of Denby Wood. It was Denby Wood which had over the years effectively camouflaged from the view of the Grange two of the three sources of the wealth which had built it: the collieries known as Shuttle Eye and Caphouse.
The Victorian builders of the Grange had deliberately sited the house so that the winding towers and slag heaps of the pits which paid their bills were effectively hidden from polite society, or at least the society which congregated around the Grange. The third colliery, Grange Ash, which formed the apex of the industrial ‘black triangle’ of Denby Ash, was more problematic for the delicate sensibilities of the inhabitants of the new house as it lay to the south of the site chosen, across the Huddersfield road and even in the 1860s its pyramidal spoil heap was rising to heights which would have impressed a pharaoh. To disrupt, if not completely mask, this unsightly sightline, Victorian landscapers planted a phalanx of yew trees to guard the twisted driveway by which the Grange was approached. For almost forty years this man-made extension to Denby Wood protected the owners and staff of Ash Grange from the dirty and noisy reminders that their luxury was provided by the sweat of men, often naked, working in cramped, dark and dangerous conditions underground, and of women and children pushing and pulling tubs of black gold at the pit head. Yet with the introduction of motor lorries to transport that solid harvest around the turn of the century, Grange Ash colliery and the very coal which was being ripped from it began to take revenge on the Big House. Not even the thick, disciplined ranks of yew trees could cushion the incessant rumble of heavily-laden coal trucks bound for the mills and railway sidings in Huddersfield or the dusty rattle of their return journey to the pit. Gradually the yew trees became discoloured from the constant powdering of coal dust as fine as icing sugar, which reached as far as the Grange itself, darkening the windows. Moreover, the procession of trucks on the Huddersfield road produced a seismic disruption producing potholes and cracks not only in the main artery through the village but along the length of the mazey driveway, resulting in many a twisted ankle and broken carriage wheel, especially in winter. More than one skittish and superstitious scullery maid would maintain that such disturbance in the very fabric of their surroundings was divine retribution for greedy pit owners digging too deep.
Now the pit owners were gone; politically thanks to nationalization in 1947 and in reality thanks to generous compensation payments by the government to the owning family, which, in the words of their accountant, had made them ‘terminally well-off’ and prompted a move to the island of Guernsey.
A well-founded fear of punitive death duties and a fifty-two per cent rate of surtax, and the less accurate predictions of a lifetime of socialist election victories ensured that the sale of Ash Grange went through smoothly and the energetic and idealistic Brigham Armitage, assisted by his wife, Celia, quickly began to convert the house into a school.
Having left the motorway, the young Campions had
approached Denby Ash from the direction of Barnsley which necessitated driving the length of the village to reach Ash Grange. Perdita slowed to within the regulation thirty mph limit in order to familiarize herself with the local geography, and the first landmark they encountered after passing the official white metal sign which confirmed they were entering Denby Ash was, to Rupert’s delight, a pub.
A large wooden sign in red lettering across its side wall announced proudly that it sold Barnsley Bitter; a smaller, traditional inn sign hanging from a corner iron bracket identified it as the Green Dragon. It was a big, detached brick building strategically placed in the ‘v’ of a fork where, according to a modest fingerpost sign, the Barnsley road met the Wakefield road. A large white plastic banner hung across the frontage of the pub, proclaiming without modesty in large red print that the establishment was ‘Famous For Basket Meals’.
‘That looks like the local restaurant,’ chirped Rupert, ‘though I’m not sure I can remember how I liked my baskets cooked.’
‘Don’t be a clot,’ said Perdita, indicating left and waiting for a coal lorry to thunder by before she turned, ‘or a snob, and if we should go there don’t you dare ask for soup-in-a-basket. I’m used to your sense of humour but there’s no need to impose it on the natives.’
From the fork guarded by the Green Dragon, which sat like a stopper on the bottle that was Denby Ash, the road rose westward into a fading afternoon sun in a long hill running along the side of a valley. As was almost traditional in English villages, the nearest building to the pub was a church, set on a slight rise away from the road, a free-standing wooden signboard displayed the name of the church and details of its services. Rupert decided to show he was paying attention.
‘I spy, with my little eye … the church of St James the Great, and next to it there’s the school!’
