Over Hill and Dale

by Gervase Phinn

  ‘I’d better leave it until tomorrow then, Connie,’ I said. ‘I’ll be here early to set things up, if that’s all right.’

  ‘I’m opening up at seven, as per usual,’ she replied as I started to go. ‘Don’t you want a cup of tea then?’

  ‘No, I’ll get off.’ I was thinking that I might give Christine a ring and see if she would like to go out for a drink.

  Connie followed me out of the main door, as if to see some undesirable off the premises. It was then that I noticed the flower. Outside the entrance to the Centre, in a large wooden tub full of pale spiky grass and the withered remains of summer blooms, was a splash of red. It was a large flower with crimson leaves.

  ‘What do you make of that, Connie?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s an alopecia.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I noticed it this evening when Mr Clamp was unloading his stuffed animals for his artery course. I mentioned it to him. I said I had never seen a flower like that growing in December, except winter pansies. He said it was a hardy winter variety of alopecia that flourishes in the frost.’

  ‘I don’t know much about flowers, but it looks like a geranium to me.’

  ‘It’s a scarlet alopecia,’ said Connie. ‘Mr Clamp says that they only flower every ten years and that they like the cold. They’re quite rare actually. He suggested I write to that gardening programme. What do you think?’

  ‘I think Mr Clamp’s got a vivid imagination, Connie, that’s what I think.’

  ‘So you don’t think it’s an alopecia then?’

  ‘As I said, it looks like a geranium to me, but I’ve never seen one bloom in the winter, not outdoors, at any rate.’ I poked the earth surrounding the flower and it was as hard as iron. ‘It’s very strange, I have to admit.’

  To the strains of some very loud twanging country and western song, the shrieks of excited little girls and the picture of Connie in my rear view mirror staring at the flower, I drove home. I hoped I could persuade Christine to come out for that drink. I needed to have my mind taken off the course the next day. As it turned out, I need not have worried so much – but Christine did provide the perfect diversion.

  The next morning I arrived at the Centre bright and very early. I checked the equipment, arranged the tables and chairs, set up the exhibition in the large room where the course was to take place and waited nervously for the first teachers to arrive. Even though I had run courses before, I could not help being rather on edge. David’s words kept coming back to me. Would my speakers turn up? If they did, would they be well received? What would I do if I got a group of difficult teachers? Was the programme relevant? Suppose the heating went off? To occupy myself, and take my mind off things which might go wrong, I began to write a short poem, taking as a theme the flower which had bloomed miraculously in the cold weather. Very soon I had written a couple of verses which I entitled ‘Red Bloom of Winter’. I compared the flower to ‘a splash of blood on the dark earth’, describing it as ‘a crimson cluster hidden in the grass, straight stemmed, defiant’; it was ‘a bright life in the midst of death’. I was deep into creating vivid imagery when the door opened and Connie made an entrance, holding a brush like a weapon.

  ‘There’s a woman in reception wanting to see you. I thought at first it was one of the geriatric line dancers come back to collect her zimmer but she said you were expecting her. Sounded like “Fella Beware”.’

  ‘Miss de la Mare,’ I whispered to myself. ‘She’s the HMI I told you about, Connie,’ I said, jumping to my feet and hurrying to the door.

  ‘Well, I hope she’s not blocked my entrance,’ grumbled Connie, following me down the corridor.

  Miss de la Mare was not as I expected her to be. I imagined a solid, ample woman with savagely cropped grey hair, small severe mouth and hard glittery eyes, the kind that make you think that at any moment you are about to be pounced on. I expected her to be dressed, as George Lapping had described her, in thick brown tweeds, heavy brogues and in a hat the shape of a flowerpot. The woman waiting for me in the entrance was very different. She was a plump, cheerful-looking woman with a round face freckled like a good egg, and neatly bobbed silver hair. She was dressed in a coat as bright and as red as a letter box with a long multicoloured scarf draped around her neck.

  ‘Mr Phinn,’ she proclaimed, shaking my hand vigorously. ‘Winifred de la Mare. Good of you to let me come. Really looking forward to joining you. Now, I know that you will have lots to do, so don’t mind me. You just crack on with what you have to do. I’ll just tootle off and mingle with the teachers when they begin to arrive. Oh, by the way, I noticed in the course booklet that there’s an art course going on at the same time. Do you think your colleague would mind if I popped in this afternoon?’

  ‘He would be delighted, I’m sure,’ I replied gleefully.

  ‘Good show!’ She peered around her before adding, ‘I don’t suppose there’s a chance of a cup of tea? I’ve travelled a fair distance this morning.’

  ‘Ofcourse,’ I replied turning to Connie, who was loitering in the background. ‘I wonder if Miss de la Mare could –’

  Before I could complete my request, Connie set off in the direction of the kitchen, announcing that if my visitor would care to follow her, she would put the kettle on. As they strolled off, I caught a snatch of their conversation.

  ‘You keep this Centre very neat and tidy.’

  ‘I try my best and you can’t do any more than that.’

  I had an idea, from that moment on, that the course would be a success.

  To my great relief, my opening lecture and the morning workshops were well received. The teachers were good-humoured and genuinely interested and took part in all the assignments with great enthusiasm. Miss de la Mare, despite her rather overbearing manner and her frequent interruptions, proved to be most amicable and involved herself fully in all the activities, joining the discussions and even tackling the writing tasks.

  At lunch-time I introduced the HMI to Sidney. He was holding forth to several young women teachers who had gathered around him in the dining area. They were staring up at him as wide-eyed as infants.

  ‘Miss de la Mare,’ I said when Sidney looked up and gave me a surreptitious wink, ‘may I introduce my colleague who is the Creative and Visual Arts Inspector?’

  ‘Winifred de la Mare!’ she barked.

  Sidney’s smile stretched from ear to ear and could have been seen a few hundred yards away. ‘I am delighted to meet you, Miss de la Mare,’ he said. ‘I hope you are enjoying the poetry course.’

  ‘Very much,’ she said briskly.

  ‘Miss de la Mare is wondering if she might join you for the remainder of the day,’ I said with such a wonderfully smug feeling.

  The fixed smile waned a little on Sidney’s face. ‘Join me?’ he said. ‘You would like to join me?’

  ‘If you have no objection,’ said Miss de la Mare.

  I recalled my earlier conversation with Sidney. He really had no choice in the matter. The question was merely rhetorical.

  ‘I should be delighted,’ he said, with little conviction in his voice.

  By the time Sunday afternoon had arrived, I had seen relatively little of Miss de la Mare. She seemed to have been so captivated with the work Sidney was undertaking that she had remained with him for all of Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. For the last session of the poetry course, however, she re-appeared. The teachers were discussing a selection of verse by known and unknown poets and some of the course members had agreed to read out poems they had written themselves. I decided to chance my arm and read my poem, ‘Red Bloom of Winter’. I conveniently failed to mention that it was my own work. When I had finished declaiming to the group there was a rapt silence.

  Then one rather pensive-looking woman spoke. ‘Beautiful,’ she sighed. ‘Beautiful. It’s such a very tender poem. I just loved the delicate sound formation and the strong sense of the mystic.’

  ‘Did you really?’ I cooed.
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br />   ‘I think the poet captures the sense of desolation really well,’ added another. ‘She’s obviously immensely depressed, perhaps on the very brink of taking her own life?’

  ‘Who is?’ I ventured.

  ‘The woman in the poem. All the words and images stress her rejection and feeling of emptiness and futility. The mood is one of coldness and frigidity. The relationship has turned sour. It’s so very sad.’

  ‘What relationship?’ I ventured again.

  ‘Why, the woman’s relationship with her partner. She is represented by the red flower,’ explained the teacher. ‘That is the central symbol of the verse. The man is the hard, cold earth which is freezing the very life out of her. She is the woman of warmth and life, the Earth mother.’

  Another teacher entered the discussion. ‘Perhaps the flower is more a symbol of the hatred and deep-seated jealousy of the woman who has been betrayed.’

  ‘Betrayed?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a great deal of violent imagery in the poem, references to “blood” and “death” and the “frozen stem as rigid as a corpse”.’

  ‘It could be more to do with her death,’ said the pensive-looking teacher.

  ‘But there isn’t a woman in the poem,’ I said.

  ‘The poet has obviously suffered,’ she continued. ‘I think she’s quite disturbed.’

  ‘Is the poem about saving the planet?’ asked a small man with large glasses. ‘Doesn’t the dying flower represent the destruction of the environment? All that is bright and beautiful is being choked to death.’

  ‘Or is the poem about life itself?’ sighed the woman who had spoken first.

  ‘Or could it just be about a flower?’ I hazarded.

  ‘But who would want to write a poem about a flower?’ asked the rather intense-looking woman.

  Later in the staff room, after all the teachers had made their farewells and thanked me for a stimulating course, I sat with Miss de la Mare. Sidney bobbed in to say goodbye. He looked like the cat which had got the cream. He had whispered to me earlier in the hall that he had got on well with Miss de la Mare who had been highly complimentary about what she had observed.

  ‘He’s quite a character, Mr Clamp,’ said the HMI. ‘An immensely creative man and very innovative and, like many introverts, a man of few words.’

  ‘A man of few words!’ I gasped. ‘An introvert?’

  ‘Oh yes, I found him a most unassuming and quietly spoken man but very talented. I did so enjoy my time with him and the art teachers and I have a mind to ask him to contribute to a national course on “The Arts in School”, which I am directing next summer in Oxford. He might of course be a little shy about speaking to a large group. Do you think he would be interested?’

  ‘I’m sure he would,’ I replied. Sidney had made another conquest.

  ‘You may care to come along too,’ continued Miss de la Mare. ‘I found those parts of the poetry course I attended most interesting. I thought your choice of that final poem quite inspired.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied.

  ‘You obviously chose the poem about the flower to get the discussion going about the very nature of poetry writing.’

  Did I? I thought to myself.

  ‘And it certainly got them to think and to argue,’ continued Miss de la Mare, ‘but you can see what a lot of work you have to do.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Why, yes. It really wasn’t as good as all the teachers thought, was it? In fact, the poem was rather overwritten, rather clichéd, don’t you think? So many people imagine that a poem must have some hidden meaning, some symbolism, something profound to say. It is quite possible for someone to write a simple little poem, however trite it might be, about a flower. I have always been of the opinion that poems can be about anything and that anything you wish it to be can become a poem. You see, the reader brings so much of herself to the poem, very often seeing something in the verse that the poet never intended. I feel sure the poet here never imagined that her poem about a flower would be regarded as a description of life itself.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ I said, feeling somewhat deflated.

  ‘Did one of the sixth-formers you have come across write it?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘No, it’s by a modern poet.’

  ‘I once visited a large primary school in the middle of a dreadfully depressing inner city area,’ Miss de la Mare told me, smiling at the memory. ‘The work of the children consisted largely of arid exercises on the noun, the verb and the adjective but when questioned the children had not the first idea what the parts of speech were. Page after page was filled with dreary exercise after dreary exercise. There was the occasional story, the odd comprehension but not a sign of a poem. And then I found this nervous little boy in the corner of the classroom. When I asked if I could examine his book he looked at me with such large sad eyes and he said very quietly, “No.” I tried to coax him but he was adamant, saying that his work was not worth looking at. He couldn’t spell, his writing was untidy and he never got good marks for his work. I eventually persuaded him to let me see his writing. The book was indeed very poor and, like all the rest, crammed with unmarked exercises. There was the occasional comment from his teacher in bright red ink for him to re-write or to take greater care.

  ‘Then, at the very back of the book I came upon a piece of writing in small crabbed print. I asked him ifhe had written it. He nodded. I asked him if he had received any help with it. He shook his head. Well, it was quite a small masterpiece. He had written, and I remember the words so well:

  Yesterday yesterday yesterday

  Sorrow sorrow sorrow

  Today today today

  Hope hope hope

  Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow

  Love love love

  ‘ “What a wonderful little poem,” I told him.

  ‘He thought for a while, stared up at me with those large, sad eyes and announced: “They’re mi spelling corrections, miss.” ’

  Connie collared me on my way out later that afternoon. ‘It’s dead!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘My flaming alopecia, that’s what! It wilted and then died. I knew I shouldn’t have watered it.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think it made much difference, Connie,’ I reassured her.

  ‘I’ve never had a flaming alopecia before,’ she said sadly.

  I learnt from Sidney the next day that he, as I had suspected, had been behind the ruse. He had arrived at the Staff Development Centre on the Friday night to set up for his course. Backwards and forwards, under Connie’s eagle eye, he had emptied his car of materials and artefacts for his ‘Art for Christmas’ weekend. Branches of yew, fronds of holly, ropes of ivy, bunches of mistletoe, stuffed robins and last of all two large poinsettia plants had been carried into the Centre. As he had tried to negotiate the vicar’s motor bike, which had been parked precariously near the entrance, Sidney had snapped off the stem of one of the plants. Rather than leave the cluster of red leaves on the floor for Connie to complain about, he had stuck them into the tub and thought no more of it. When later Connie had drawn attention to it, he had informed her that it was a rare flaming alopecia plant.

  ‘I think it was very unkind of you,’ I remarked, ‘and I’ve a good mind to tell Connie.’

  ‘Don’t do that, old chap,’ he replied, leaning back in his chair and placing his hands behind his head. ‘Connie is so wonderfully naive, so splendidly gullible, so amazingly ingenuous, that it would be cruel to enlighten her. I do not approve of anything, you know, Gervase, which tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic flower, touch it, and the bloom is gone for ever.’

  ‘I’ve read Oscar Wilde as well, Sidney,’ I said. ‘And it wasn’t a delicate exotic flower, it was fruit. “Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit,” says Lady Bracknell. It’s in The Importance of Being Earnest.’

  ‘Well, I said it first!’ exclaimed Sidney with mock surprise. ‘This Lady Brac
knell must have heard me say it on one of my courses. Anyway, “flower” is far more appropriate, in the circumstances, don’t you think?’

  ‘And what will happen,’ I asked him, ‘when Connie discovers that alopecia is a scalp condition and not a variety of rare winter-flowering plant?’

  ‘She will probably not speak to me for a long, long time,’ smiled Sidney, stretching back even more expansively in his chair. ‘Which suits me fine because it will keep her out of my hair. I say, that’s rather clever, isn’t it? Alopecia? Hair?’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re incorrigible, Sidney.’

  9

  ‘I’m really going to make an effort with Christmas this year,’ announced Julie, a week before the schools closed for the holidays.

  ‘And why is that?’ asked David, looking up from his papers and peering over his gold-rimmed, half-moon spectacles.

  ‘Because last year,’ replied Julie, taking the opportunity to have a break from distributing the early morning mail, ‘was so indescribably awful that I’m really going to try not to let it get to me this year. I’m going to go with the flow, just let it all wash over me. Do you know that last year I was glad to get back to work. I spent ages and ages looking for presents which in the end didn’t suit. I wrote hundreds of cards to people I haven’t seen for ages and am not likely to ever see again and then, at the very last minute, somebody sent me a card who I hadn’t sent one to and I had to rush to catch the last post to send them one. Well, this year I’m not sending any cards and I’m giving all my nephews and nieces money and I’ve asked everybody else what they want. It’s a much better idea, I think.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I don’t agree at all with that. Part of the excitement of Christmas is sending cards and getting surprise presents.’

  ‘Well, I can do without surprise presents, thank you very much,’ replied Julie, flicking half-heartedly through the mail. She looked up. ‘You know what surprise present I got from Paul last year?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said, ‘but I guess you are about to tell us.’