Over Hill and Dale

by Gervase Phinn

‘It is good practice,’ I reassured her, smiling still. ‘It encourages the children to speak clearly, confidently and with enthusiasm.’

  ‘Just what I think.’ She nodded and proceeded. ‘Though with some children’ – she glanced in the direction of Oliver – ‘a little more listening and a little less speaking would be preferable.’ The subject of her observation had his elbows on the desk and was propping his chin in his hands. He had a faraway look on his face. Clearly he was not listening. ‘Well, this week, let me see whom I shall ask.’ She scanned the classroom. ‘Portia, would you like to come out to the front and tell us what interesting things you and your family have been doing over the weekend?’

  A large, moon-faced, rather morose-looking girl with hair in enormous bunches and tied by large crimson ribbons, rose slowly from her seat and headed sluggishly for the front. She stared motionless at the class as if caught in amber, a grim expression on her round pale face.

  ‘Come along, then, Portia,’ urged Mrs Peterson.

  ‘Nowt ’appened, miss,’ the girl answered sullenly.

  ‘Something must have happened, Portia. Did you go anywhere?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  ‘Well, what did you do all weekend?’

  ‘Watch telly, miss.’

  Mrs Peterson sighed and turned in my direction. ‘It’s like extracting teeth, getting some of the children to speak, Mr Phinn,’ she confided in a sotto voce voice. ‘Some of them are very economical in their use of words.’ She turned her attention back to the large girl at the front of the classroom, who was staring vacantly out of the window. ‘Now, come along, Portia, there must be something you can tell us all?’

  ‘Miss, we found an ’edge’og on our lawn on Saturday and it were dead,’ the child announced bluntly.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Peterson, pulling a dramatically sympathetic face. ‘I wonder why that was? Do you think something could have killed it?’ She then looked in my direction, an expectant expression playing about her eyes. ‘Possibly a cat, Mr Phinn, do you think?’

  ‘Very possibly,’ I replied.

  ‘My dad said it were probably next door’s dog,’ said Portia. ‘It’s allus killing things that dog. My dad says it wants purrin’ down. It’s a reight vicious thing. It bit ’im when he was fixing t’fence and last week it chased this old woman who were collecting for the RSPCA right down t’path. We could hear t’screaming from our back room.’

  ‘Dear me, it does sound a rather fierce creature, Portia,’ said Mrs Peterson.

  ‘It bit ’er on t’bottom by t’gate. All her little flags were ovver our garden. My dad said she wouldn’t be coming back in an ’urry!’

  Mrs Peterson sighed wearily, gave me a faint smile and picked on another newsgiver: a small, pale boy with large glasses. ‘Come on down to the front, Simon, and tell us all what interesting things you have been up to this weekend.’

  ‘Miss, we’re going to Disneyland again next year,’ said the boy scurrying down to the front. ‘We went into town to book it.’

  ‘Well, that does sound exciting. Simon is a very lucky little boy, Mr Phinn,’ remarked Mrs Peterson, swivelling again in my direction and giving me a look as if to say: ‘His parents have more money than sense.’ ‘He’s just got back from America and he’s off there again next year. My goodness.’

  ‘It’s really good fun, miss. There’s lots to do at Disneyland,’ said Simon enthusiastically.

  ‘Have you been to Disneyland, Mr Phinn?’ asked Mrs Peterson.

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Neither have I. Whitby was as far as I got this summer and it rained for the whole week. Perhaps when teachers get that well-deserved pay rise, Mr Phinn, I’ll be able to go to Disneyland.’ I smiled faintly and nodded.

  ‘Thank you, Simon. Now let me see. Oh, come on then, Oliver. I can see your hand waving in the air like a palm tree in a tornado. Come on down to the front and tell us what interesting things have happened to you during this weekend.’

  Oliver scampered to the front excitedly, drew himself up to his full height and proclaimed in a loud and confident voice: ‘Miss, some white worms came out of my bottom yesterday.’

  Mrs Peterson screwed up her face as if she were sucking a lemon. ‘Oh dear me, Oliver. I don’t think we want to hear about that.’

  ‘My mum’s going to the chemist’s today to get some pink stuff to get rid of the white worms that came –’

  ‘I think we’ve heard quite enough about the white worms, thank you, Oliver. Is there something nice you can tell us about?’

  ‘But, miss, my mum said lots of people get them. When she was a girl she said that all her class –’

  ‘Yes, well, Mr Phinn’s not travelled all the way from Fettlesham to hear about white worms, have you, Mr Phinn?’ I smiled faintly and shook my head. ‘I’m sure the medicine will work wonders tonight.’

  ‘But, miss, when I first saw these white worms they sort of wriggled and –’

  ‘Oliver!’ snapped Mrs Peterson with such a wild gleam in her eye that she looked like a cat ready to pounce. ‘Enough! Back to your place, please.’ Then, turning to Portia she said, ‘Perhaps the hedgehog ate something which didn’t agree with him. What do you think might have happened, Mr Phinn?’

  This was like some double act, with me as the stooge. I was becoming a regular feature in ‘Newstime’, and now I was the resident expert on hedgehogs.

  ‘Well, it could have been that,’ I said. ‘They do scavenge. Quite a lot of people put out bread and milk for hedgehogs which is bad for them. It makes their stomachs swell, so it’s best to let them find their natural food.’

  ‘And does anyone know what the hedgehog’s natural food is?’ asked Mrs Peterson, addressing the children.

  ‘Worms!’ exclaimed Oliver, grinning widely.

  Mrs Peterson smiled thinly with noble resignation.

  Towards the end of the morning I took the opportunity, whilst the children were writing up their news, to look at the exercise books. Portia was writing carefully in large, clear rounded letters as I approached, but on catching sight of me she froze, dropped her pencil and stared up like a terrified rabbit in a trap.

  ‘May I look at your work?’ I asked gently. She slid the book across the desk, all the while staring and blinking nervously. She had written the date at the top of the page in bold writing and then underneath in four large capital letters the word ‘EGOG’.

  ‘What does this mean?’ I asked.

  ‘’Edge’og!’ she replied, looking at me as if I was incredibly stupid.

  Try as I might, I just could not get her to speak to me above the single word so I tried another tack, to re-assure her that I was really quite friendly.

  ‘It’s a lovely name, Portia,’ I said. She eyed me suspiciously. ‘You are named after one of the most famous characters in a wonderful play by William Shakespeare. Portia was a very clever and beautiful woman.’ I was just about to launch into a rendering of ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’ when Mrs Peterson approached, bent low so her lips were nearly in my ear and informed me in slow and deliberate tones that ‘The name is spelled “P-O-R-S-C-H-E” not “P-O-R-T-I-A!”, Mr Phinn. Her father told me, when I asked him about the unusual spelling on Parents’ Evening that he always wanted a Porsche car but couldn’t afford one. She’s the next best thing.’ Mrs Peterson shook her head, shrugged and mouthed: ‘There’s always one!’

  Little Simon, with the large spectacles and the pale, translucent face, had produced a lively little account about his recent trip to Disneyland, which concluded:

  On Saturday we booked again for Disneyland but next year we are not taking my nanna with us. My dad said she wouldn’t stop talking all week and she got on his nerves and was a pain in the neck. He said it was like taking a parrot with us.

  Finally I arrived at Oliver’s desk. The little boy had his head down and was scratching away furiously with a large, fat fountain pen. It appeared to be leaking because there was ink everyw
here. As I peered over the shock of red hair I read, with some difficulty, a simple little account of the white worms and their dramatic appearance on the day before.

  ‘It’s an interesting piece of work, Oliver,’ I commented, ‘but your writing is hard to read.’

  ‘That’s because miss took my pencil away, so I’m having to make do with this.’ He scrutinised the writing implement before observing, ‘And this pen’s got a life of its own.’

  After morning playtime I joined the infant class in a spacious room which was neat and orderly with colourful displays depicting various fairy story characters covering the walls. There were six large, low tables with small, orange melamine chairs at each, a selection of bright picture books on a trolley, a carpeted area, a big plastic tray for sand and another for water, and at the front a square, old-fashioned teacher’s desk and hard wooden chair. The windows looked out on a magnificent view up the dale: a vast expanse of pale golden-green rolling to the grey-purple fells and clear sky beyond.

  The five- and six-year-olds were in the charge of a serious-looking teacher in a grey jumper and dark brown skirt, called appropriately Mrs Dunn. She had iron-grey hair pulled back severely across her scalp and wore a pained expression throughout the hour-long lesson. She had the rather unsettling habit of twitching nervously before glancing in my direction. The children read competently and their writing, though slightly below the standard I would have expected from children of this age, was sound enough. There was a great deal of copied writing, a few simple stories and no poetry.

  At the end of the morning I returned to Mrs Peterson’s class to make my farewells. The teacher beamed effusively as I entered her room.

  ‘Now, children, look who’s back – it’s Mr Phinn.’ The children looked up indifferently.

  ‘I’ve just popped in to say goodbye, Mrs Peterson.’

  ‘It’s been a pleasure, Mr Phinn. We do like to have special visitors, don’t we, children?’ One or two children nodded unenthusiastically. ‘It’s been a real treat for us and I hope it is not too long before you come back and see us again. That would be nice, children, wouldn’t it? My goodness, Mr Phinn, we do have such a lot of fun in this classroom, don’t we, children?’ The class stared impassively. ‘We really do have so much fun, don’t we?’ There were a few nods. I caught sight of Oliver in the Reading Corner. He looked up from his book, Creepy-Crawlies and Minibeasts and shook his head. Mrs Peterson had spotted him too.

  ‘Yes, we do, Oliver! We’re always having fun.’ She fixed him with a rattlesnake look and gave a little laugh. It was not a pleasant little laugh. ‘Too much to say for himself, that young man, Mr Phinn,’ Mrs Peterson confided in me in an undertone. ‘We do have a lot of fun.’

  As I passed Oliver on my way out, I heard him mutter, ‘I must have been away that day.’ I suppressed a smile.

  ‘Oliver,’ continued Mrs Peterson, her face now rather more leering than smiling and her voice with quite a sharpness of tone to it, ‘would you go and ask the school secretary to ring the bell for dinnertime, please, there’s a good boy.’ The last phrase was said with some emphasis. ‘And shall we all now say a nice, warm “Goodbye” to Mr Phinn?’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Phinn,’ the class intoned.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said.

  Oliver and I walked down the corridor together. ‘Can I ask you something, Mr Phinn?’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How do you become one of these suspecters, then?’

  ‘Inspectors, Oliver.’

  ‘How do you become one?’

  ‘Well, you have to work hard at school, read a lot of books and when you go up to the big school you have to pass your exams and go on to college. You then take more exams and that takes a long, long time.’

  ‘How old do you have to be?’ he asked.

  ‘You have to be twenty-one to be a teacher and even older to be a school inspector, so you have a long way to go.’

  ‘And then you can sit at the back of classrooms and watch people?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And hear children read?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And look at their writing?’

  ‘And look at their writing,’ I repeated.

  The little boy looked up and then scratched at the shock of red hair. ‘And you get paid for it?’

  ‘And get paid for it,’ I intoned. He still looked very thoughtful, so I said, ‘Would you like to ask me anything else?’

  ‘No, not really, but…’ He paused.

  ‘Go on, Oliver. Have you got something to tell me?’

  ‘Well, Mr Phinn, I was just thinking, that when I’m twenty-one, you’ll probably be dead!’

  3

  ‘You’ve had a telephone call,’ announced David, when I arrived at the office one damp, depressing, early October afternoon. He gave a wry smile before adding, ‘You have been summoned to an audience with the Ice Queen herself.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Savage.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I moaned. ‘Whatever does she want now?’

  Sidney looked up from his papers, shook his head, adopted a pitiful expression and sighed dramatically.

  ‘She left a message that you are to go up and see her,’ continued David. ‘She was quite insistent.’

  ‘Sounds like Mae West,’ said Sidney suddenly. He mimicked the slow American drawl of the star of the silver screen. ‘Come up and see me sometime, honey.’

  ‘Anyone less like Mae West, I could not imagine,’ I told him caustically.

  ‘My goodness,’ said David, taking off his reading glasses and folding them on the desk in front of him, ‘someone is in a rather fraught condition this afternoon.’

  ‘I can’t seem to escape from the woman,’ I said, banging my briefcase down on a chair. ‘She was on the phone to me the very first day of term and since then I keep on getting messages and memos every other day.’

  ‘She’s perhaps taken a shine to you,’ said David, finding the whole situation highly amusing. ‘You want to watch out.’

  ‘Huh!’ I grunted.

  ‘Or a certain young, attractive headteacher might start getting a trifle jealous.’

  ‘David, I’ve already had the third degree from Julie about my love life. Could we leave Christine out of it, do you think? I wonder what Mrs Savage is after now?’

  ‘Did you know,’ said Sidney, pushing aside his papers and leaning back expansively in his chair, ‘that she once tried to lure a bishop up to her room?’

  ‘Who? Mrs Savage?’ exclaimed David.

  ‘No, no! Mae West. She met this bishop at some fancy function or other and said to him, “Come up and see me sometime,” and this bishop replied, with a very serious face, “I’m sorry, Miss West, but that is quite impossible. It’s Lent.” Mae West was reputed to have quipped back, “Well, bishop, when you get it back from the person you lent it to, come up and see me.” ’

  ‘I’m sure you make all these stories up, Sidney,’ said David sniggering, and returning to his work.

  ‘Did she say what she wanted?’ I asked.

  ‘Who? Mae West?’ asked Sidney.

  ‘Sidney, will you be serious! Mrs Savage. Did she say what she wanted to see me about?’

  ‘No, no,’ said David. ‘Just for you to go up and see her in the Annexe and that it was a matter of some urgency.’

  ‘When is it not?’ I asked in an exasperated voice.

  ‘Now don’t start getting comfortable, Gervase,’ continued David, as I began taking a bundle of papers from my briefcase, ‘putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. She won’t just disappear, much as we would like her to, you know. My old Welsh grandmother used to say that it is always best to meet adversity head on. “Grasp the nettle, David,” she used to say. “Take the bull by the horns and face the music. Doing nothing, solves nothing.” She’s working late tonight and wants you to go up and see her at about six o’clock. She will be waiting.’

  ‘Your old Welsh g
randmother?’ asked Sidney, facetiously.

  ‘You are becoming very tiresome, Sidney,’ replied David, putting his glasses back on and looking at him over the top of them. ‘I am endeavouring to convey an important message and then complete this report. It is nearly six o’clock and I do have a home to go to.’

  ‘Go and see her now, Gervase,’ advised Sidney. ‘David’s quite right, it’s best to get such a deeply unpleasant and potentially hazardous experience over and done with – like having an ulcerated tooth pulled or a giant boil lanced.’

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ I said wearily, stuffing the papers back into my briefcase. ‘I’d better see what she wants.’

  ‘And if I were you, Gervase,’ said David, looking up from his papers, ‘I should enter her labyrinth with a great degree of caution. She becomes even more of a Gorgon after six o’clock.’

  ‘No, no!’ exclaimed Sidney. ‘It was Theseus who entered the labyrinth to face the Minotaur. You’re thinking of Medusa, one of the Gorgons, who had great sharp shoulders, barbed claws, enormous teeth and who could turn you to stone with an icy stare. Come to think of it, sounds rather like Mrs Savage.’

  ‘Thank you for the potted history of Greek mythology,’ said David, removing his glasses again. ‘I am well aware of the difference between the Minotaur and a Gorgon. We were taught the classics at my Welsh grammar school. One can’t say anything around here without receiving a lecture from you, Sidney, or some clever comment or other. All I was attempting to say was that Gervase ought to be on his guard, to proceed with extreme caution. She’s obviously taken a liking to him –’

  ‘No, she has not!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘And may have an ulterior motive for these late meetings. You are a very vulnerable young man. The woman has been through husbands like a killer shark through a shoal of sprats, and before you start to tell me, Sidney, that killer sharks don’t eat sprats –’

  I left them both in hearty discussion and departed, thinking to myself, if only David knew.

  I had never divulged to my colleagues the entirely unexpected and dreadfully embarrassing confrontation which had taken place in Mrs Savage’s office a few months into my new job. We had worked closely together on a number of projects and Mrs Savage had been uncharacteristically good-humoured and co-operative. When I had been given one of Dr Gore’s ‘little jobs’ to organise – the visit of the Minister of Education – Mrs Savage had been enormously helpful and highly efficient. The visit had gone really well and she and I were on-first-name terms by the end. Then I had visited Mrs Savage’s office late one March afternoon. She had looked like the star of an American soap opera, dressed in a scarlet and black suit with huge shoulder pads and great silver buttons and with what, I imagined, she considered an alluring look on her face. She had tilted her head, moved near and confided in me that she had been so lonely following the death of her last husband. When she had moved closer, breathing heavily and fluttering her eyelashes, I had made hurried apologies and departed at high speed. Since then I had kept my distance and, on the few occasions our paths had crossed, Mrs Savage had remained coldly formal. I had sensed, however, that beneath the icy exterior there was something still simmering.