Authors: Jack Sheffield
‘Thanks, Vera,’ said Jo Maddison, staring a little nervously at her smart new register. ‘I promise there will be no mistakes this year.’
Jo, a diminutive twenty-three-year-old, was about to begin her second year as teacher of the top infant
class
. She flicked her long black hair from her eyes and scrutinized my new fashion statement.
‘I think it’s an excellent choice, Jack,’ said Jo, with an encouraging smile. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘Beth bought it for me,’ I said.
You could have heard a pin drop.
‘And how are things with you and Beth?’ asked Sally.
Anne and Vera gave Sally a startled look, while Jo immediately found the small print on the front cover of her new register particularly interesting.
‘Not sure, but thanks for asking,’ I replied cautiously.
They all nodded in unison, in the way women nod when they know more than they say they do.
Beth Henderson had visited Ragley School almost a year ago. She was the deputy headmistress of Thirkby Junior School and had been assisting Miss Barrington-Huntley, Chair of the Education Committee, on her first inspection of the school. Beth and I were both single and in our early thirties. For me, it had been an eventful meeting, not least because it felt like love at first sight. A few weeks ago, in the school summer holidays, Beth and I had enjoyed a carefree holiday together but now she was applying for headships in Hampshire, so I guessed the feelings I had were not reciprocated. With a sigh, I put on my jacket, drank the coffee, picked up my new register, and headed for the door.
‘I’ll leave you ladies to it,’ I said. ‘I’ll check on the children in the yard and then I’ll ring the bell.’
The front door of the school creaked on its Victorian hinges as I walked under the archway of Yorkshire
stone
. Above my head, the date 1878 was carved into the rugged lintel and the grey slate roof reflected the bright September sunshine. My flared polyester trousers flapped in the breeze as I walked across the small playground that was alive with skipping feet and the shouts of over eighty red-faced four- to eleven-year-olds.
The mothers of the new starters were gathering in a corner of the playground. Betty Buttle, a local farmer’s wife, hung on to her sturdy, rosy-cheeked twin daughters, Rowena and Katrina, and absent-mindedly picked straw out of their hair. Ominously, both girls were scratching their heads. Sue Phillips, our local nurse, looked relaxed as she watched her four-year-old Dawn wander off to chat with her friends. Sue’s elder daughter, Claire, had been in my class last year and she had seen all this before. Alongside her, Margery Ackroyd, the local gossip, shouted to her son, Tony, to look after his little sisters, Charlotte and Theresa, and then proceeded to tell Sue Phillips about a certain local plumber who had offered to do more than lag her cold-water pipes.
Meanwhile, Mrs Dudley-Palmer, by far the richest woman in the village, slammed the door of her Oxford Blue 1975 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and hurried up the drive with six-year-old Elisabeth Amelia and four-year-old Victoria Alice. When she reached the playground, she dabbed her eyes with a lace handkerchief and clutched Victoria Alice, as if she was about to lose her for ever. Such sentiment was lost on Mrs Brown, who pointed little Damian towards the school entrance, gave him a push, and then turned on her heel and waddled towards
the
school gate. She gave me one final withering look before lighting up a cigarette and heading for the bus stop.
I walked under the magnificent avenue of horse chestnut trees that bordered the front of the schoolyard and looked around me. Instantly, I remembered why I loved working in this beautiful part of the north of England. Ragley was a pretty picture-postcard Yorkshire village. On the far side of the village green, a group of farmers sat on the benches outside the white-fronted public house, The Royal Oak. The High Street was flanked by wide grass verges and terraced cottages with reddish-brown pantile roofs. Villagers were going about their daily lives, shopping, chatting, cleaning windows and watering hanging baskets.
It was an age of innocence. There was no National Curriculum, computers in schools were a far-off dream, and a teacher’s salary was £400 a month. For this was the autumn of 1978. Average house prices had shot up to £17,000, one-third of the population of York, some 30,000 people, had paid to see
Star Wars
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John were riding high in the charts with ‘You’re The One That I Want’. Suits had wide lapels, trousers were flared, and men often had longer hair than women. Also, the skateboard had arrived.
In fact, it was about to make its first appearance at Ragley School. Dominic Brown, elder brother of Damian, was racing towards school on a skateboard at that very moment.
‘Gerrin t’school, Dominic,’ screamed Mrs Brown. ‘Y’neither use nor ornament!’
He ducked as his mother tried to clip him round the ear and promptly fell off. With his skateboard tucked under his arm, he ran through the gate and into the safety of the playground.
I glanced at my watch. It was almost nine o’clock. Down the High Street, the owners of the Post Office, Diane’s Hair Salon, Nora’s Coffee Shop, Pratt’s Hardware Emporium, the Village Pharmacy and Piercy’s Butcher’s Shop were also beginning to look at their watches and unlock their doors. Prudence Golightly’s General Stores had been open for over an hour and she had just switched on her Bush radio in time for the pips preceding the nine o’clock news. I walked across to the school belltower, grabbed the thick, ancient rope, and rang the school bell that had summoned children to their lessons for the last one hundred years.
Back in my classroom, twenty-four ten- and eleven-year-olds sat down in their seats, and looked excitedly at their brand-new exercise books and tins of Lakeland coloured pencils. Their cheerful faces reminded me why teaching was the best job in the world. I took the top off my pen, opened my class register, and began to fill the small rectangular boxes next to each child’s name with black diagonal lines.
‘Tony Ackroyd.’
‘Yes, Mr Sheffield.’
‘Dominic Brown.’
‘Yes, Mr Sheffield, an’ me ’ead’s itching!’
‘Jodie Cuthbertson.’
‘Yes, Mr Sheffield, an’ so’s mine!’
I gave in to the inevitable, scratched my unruly, dark-brown hair and carried on with the register.
Outside the classroom window, a few mothers were waving goodbye to their loved ones, while Mrs Dudley-Palmer wept uncontrollably into her handkerchief. Sue Phillips seemed to take charge. She put her arm around Mrs Dudley-Palmer’s shoulders and guided her out of the school gate, pausing only to pick up a Curlywurly wrapper and put it in the bin.
Soon the children were writing in their English books about their recent summer holiday. Jodie Cuthbertson had just written, ‘On holiday my gran kept getting up in the nite. My mam says she is intercontinental.’ I recalled with a certain irony that, a few minutes earlier, Jodie had approached me with her dictionary and asked how to spell ‘intercontinental’ and I had been impressed.
It was a few minutes before lunchtime when ten-year-old Jodie made her first announcement of the year. Her older sister, Anita, had left last summer and she had clearly inherited her skills for never missing anything that went on outside the classroom window.
‘Fella with a big case coming up t’drive, Mr Sheffield,’ said Jodie, in the style of a British Rail announcer.
A small man with a flat cap and a huge black case was staggering towards the front door. At twelve o’clock, I walked into the school office and noticed that Vera looked harassed. She was counting dinner money.
‘I can’t get used to these new smaller pound notes, Mr Sheffield; they’re like Monopoly money,’ said Vera. ‘The way things are going, they’ll have pound coins next.’ She chuckled to herself at the absurdity of the idea. ‘Oh, and there’s a circular from County Hall, Mr Sheffield.’ She waved a sheet of official-looking notepaper. ‘It says that, following a spate of accidents, skateboards have been banned. So I’ll prepare a note for parents, shall I?’
‘Thanks, Vera,’ I said. With a class to teach, as well as being a headmaster, I appreciated that a secretary like Vera was worth her weight in gold.
‘Also,’ she continued, ‘there’s a book salesman waiting for you in the staff-room.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘I’d better see him now.’
Vera beckoned me over to her desk and whispered, ‘It’s Ernest Crapper from Morton village, Mr Sheffield, and his wife’s our pianist at the Women’s Institute. She’s on tablets for her nerves, poor thing.’
When I walked into the staff-room, I began to understand why.
Mr Crapper had opened the lid of his black case, on which his initials were stamped in gold-blocked letters. He looked like a magician about to begin a performance but, instead of white rabbits, he began to produce a collection of very large books. I felt like applauding.
‘You look like an intelligent man to me, Mr Sheffield,’ said Ernest Crapper, Morton village’s finest encyclopaedia salesman.
A year ago, I would have been flattered by this astute
observation
but now, as a headmaster in my second year, I knew this was delivered with the sincerity of a beauty queen who promised to end poverty and deliver world peace if she won the Miss World Beauty Competition.
‘This is your lucky day,’ gushed the effusive Mr Crapper.
I had heard this line before. At the start of a new school year, the book salesmen of North Yorkshire gathered like vultures. Our precious school capitation was safely in the bank but this little bald-headed man in the dark pin-striped suit was determined to take a large slice of it. He was now in full flow.
‘There’s a free set of Ladybird Books with every gold-blocked, hand-stitched, top-of-the-range, superior volume,’ said Mr Crapper. His large black leather suitcase, like
Doctor Who
’s Tardis, clearly defied all spatial logic as yet another huge encyclopaedia emerged and was added to the teetering pile on the staff-room coffee-table.
‘Perhaps you would like to display your books on the big table in the entrance hall. The rest of the staff can look at them later this afternoon,’ I suggested. ‘Then you can come back at the end of school.’
‘Certainly, Mr Sheffield,’ said the enthusiastic Mr Crapper, as he repacked the sum total of human knowledge into his case.
Back in the school hall, our first school dinner of the year had already begun. Shirley Mapplebeck, the school cook, looked anxious. It was the launch of the cafeteria
system
and the children were lining up with their new plastic trays that had separate partitions for the main course, sweet course and a beaker of water. Because of this new arrangement, Mrs Critchley, our dinner lady, had become Shirley’s assistant. She was serving a rectangle of steak-and-kidney pie, a portion of mashed potato, a spoonful of cabbage, followed by a splash of gravy and, in the hollow alongside, a helping of rice pudding.
I picked up a tray and joined the queue. Mrs Critchley was clearly not a woman you would want to meet in a dark alley. It was rumoured in the Ragley Sports and Social Club that she could crush a snooker ball in her right hand. As if to prove the point, with effortless ease she squeezed the strong spring on the handle of a large aluminium ice-cream scoop to release a hemispherical dollop of mashed potato on to Heathcliffe Earnshaw’s tray.
Heathcliffe was queuing up with his little five-year-old brother, Terry.
‘Ah don’t like greens,’ said Heathcliffe, looking dubiously at the cabbage.
‘There’s children starvin’ in Africa,’ growled Mrs Critchley.
‘They can ’ave my cabbage, Miss,’ said Heathcliffe cheerfully.
Mrs Critchley defiantly slapped a large portion of cabbage on his tray.
‘Gerrit eaten,’ she said.
Mrs Critchley did not take prisoners, as Mr Critchley would no doubt confirm on the very rare occasions she
allowed
him to visit The Royal Oak. With a flick of her other wrist, a slice of meat pie landed on little Terry’s tray.
Terry looked closely at the pie, wiped the snot from his nose on the back of his sleeve and looked up at his big brother for support.
‘’E won’t be able t’chew that, Miss,’ said Heathcliffe, ever protective of his little brother.
‘Why not?’ snapped Mrs Critchley.
‘’E’s no teeth, Miss,’ explained Heathcliffe. ‘Show ’er, Terry.’
Little Terry smiled shyly at the fierce dinner lady. All his front teeth were missing.
‘Well, ’e can suck it, then,’ retorted Mrs Critchley.
It occurred to me that a future in the diplomatic corps for Mrs Critchley was unlikely. Meanwhile, her magnificent biceps rippled once again, as she gave the rice pudding a quick stir.
Anne was sitting with the six new starters, so I lowered myself onto a tiny plastic chair and placed my tray of rapidly cooling food on the octagonal Formica-topped table. Next to me, Damian Brown was putting spoonfuls of gravy onto his rice pudding and stirring it to make a muddy brown paste.
‘Don’t do that, please, Damian,’ said Anne Grainger.
Anne was showing her usual patience, as all the children seemed to be speaking at once.
‘Please may I have a napkin?’ asked Victoria Alice Dudley-Palmer.
‘We don’t use napkins, dear,’ said Anne.
‘My cat was sick this morning, Mrs Grainger,’ said Charlotte Ackroyd.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Charlotte.’
Damian looked up from his rice-gravy compote. ‘That’s nowt: our cat bit ’ead off a mouse las’ night, Missus,’ said Damian, not to be outdone.
The appeal of the steak-and-kidney pie was fast fading.
‘Eat your dinner, please, Damian,’ said Anne.
‘My mummy’s coming to look at our nits,’ said Dawn Phillips cheerfully. ‘She says they come from little white grubs.’
My rice pudding had also lost its appeal.
Opposite me, the Buttle twins were sharing their dinner, while scratching each other’s hair. They were the youngest members of a local farming family and they obviously enjoyed their food. Rowena was eating Katrina’s cabbage and Katrina was eating Rowena’s rice pudding. In seconds both trays were spotless.