Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis (22 page)

He left at the end of May, and. Dolly wondered who would be the next occupant of the school house. Fairacre school was very much bigger than Springbourne so that a man would be appointed. For the last few weeks of term Dolly and a woman supply teacher from Caxley coped with the school between them, and in September Mr Benson arrived.

The first tiling that Fairacre noticed about the new headmaster was that he had a car and a wireless set. The car was a Ford T model with a beautiful brass radiator and brass headlamps, and the wireless set was the latest type with a superior gadget to hold the cat's whisker above the crystal.

'Go ahead sort of fellow,' commented Mr Willet to Dolly Clare. Young Mr Willet had been badly wounded during the war, and was making a modest living as caretaker to the school and by growing vegetables and plants for sale in his own flourishing garden. He was clearly impressed by the new man, and so were all the other males from six to sixty, Dolly observed, for such is the power of things mechanical.

He had other interests besides the car and the wireless set. He had served with distinction in the RNAS and had travelled widely. In the few years he was at Fairacre he reminded Dolly of Mr Hope in his younger days, for he had the power to fire his listeners with his own enthusiasm. He was a great supporter of the League of Nations, and tried to explain its world-wide task to the children who only knew the small world of Fairacre.

'There will never be another war,' he promised them, many and many a time. 'This war was the war to end all wars. Now we shall use reason to settle arguments between nations.'

He bought many magazines and papers for the children from his own meagre salary. He found that they read these far more easily than books. Arthur Mee's monthly
My Magazine
was a great favourite, and Dolly remembered the frontispiece to one of the issues very clearly. It showed a little girl, barefoot and in a pink tunic, opening the golden gates to a new world where all was peace. It was typical of the ardent hope of a war-shattered world. 'Never again!' was the cry, uttered in all sincerity.

The new world certainly seemed a happy place in the years that followed. Fairacre did not boast any bright young things of its own, but its inhabitants were pleasurably shocked to read about those who painted the big cities red.
The Caxley Chronicle
reported the dancing of the Charleston at the Civic Ball in the Corn Exchange, and some of the older generation felt that the age of decadence had arrived.

'There was certainly an air of gaiety about which reached even to such leafy retreats as Beech Green and Fairacre. It was a daily wonder to wake to a world at peace, to know that one's menfolk were home again, that the guns thundered no more, and that life could be relished for the good thing it was.

An enterprising firm in Caxley started a bus service during the twenties and this made a world of difference to those living in remote villages. Twice a week, on Thursday and Saturday, it was possible to ride from Fairacre through Beech Green to Caxley by bus, and there to shop or meet one's friends, or even catch another bus to the giddy pleasures of the county town fifteen miles away. The older people, whose cycling and walking days were over, were enraptured by this new wonder, and Mary Clare became a regular passenger on Thursday mornings.

'Proper old gad-about you're getting these days!' teased Francis, but he was glad to see Mary with this new interest. Now she could go to see Ada and the children much more often, and though she sometimes wondered if she were a nuisance to her daughter, the rapturous welcome she received from her two grandchildren consoled her. It was true that Ada looked with mixed feelings upon the small shabby figure, in her old-fashioned button boots and jet-trimmed bonnet, which ambled up the gravel path, always, it seemed, when she had a party of genteel Caxley friends whom she was trying to impress.

Emily and Dolly found the Saturday morning buses very useful too. They frequently met in Caxley to shop and exchange news over coffee. Edgar was never mentioned, but Dolly knew that the marriage was successful and that he had two small children. How Emily felt about it she could only guess. They were both in their thirties now, and often spoke good-humouredly of 'being on the shelf. Chances of marriage were very small, they knew, for their generation, and Dolly counted herself lucky in having Ada's children in the family and all the young fry of Fairacre to work among. Nevertheless, her sense of loss was great, for other people's children are a very poor substitute for one's own, and there were occasions when, at that sad time of day between sunset and twilight, Dolly could not bear to think of the long lonely years ahead.

It was during Mr Benson's period of headship that Mrs Pringle was engaged as school cleaner. This dour individual, who was 'never so happy as when she was miserable', as the villagers said, had lived in Fairacre since her marriage and worked for Mrs Hope at the school house. The shortcomings of Mr Hope and the decline of his wife had furnished Mrs Pringle with ghoulish interest. She had wanted to take over the school cleaning for several years, for the two great black tortoise stoves which warmed the building exercised a strong fascination over her, and she longed to apply blacklead and elbow grease to their neglected surfaces.

'Fair makes my blood boil to see the state that Alice got 'em in,' she grumbled to Dolly on her first day in office. Alice was the poor toothless old crone who had been taken from an orphanage at ten, set to work as kitchen maid for fifty years, first here, then there, until she drifted to a hovel in Fairacre and earned a few shillings by scrubbing the school floors and lighting the stoves. In all the years that Dolly had known her she had only heard her speak about a dozen times. She bobbed and nodded when addressed, a skinny hand fluttering to her mouth.

She had been found dead in her little broken cottage, rolled up in a thin grey blanket before an empty grate, a week or two earlier, and the neighbour who had lifted her said that she was lighter than his own two-year-old.

Mrs Pringle would have made six of her. A squat, square figure clad in a thick skirt and jumper covered with a vivid flowered overall, she stumped morosely about the premises grumbling at the mess made by the children and the amount of coke consumed by the stoves. She was to be part and parcel of the Fairacre scene for many years and Dolly Clare found it best to turn a deaf ear to most of the lady's complaints.

As time passed Dolly sometimes thought that she knew every stick and stone of Fairacre school. The grain of her desk lid, the knots in the wooden partition, the clang of the doorscraper and the sound of the school bell above her were as familiar to her as her own face and voice. Only the children changed, and now she taught many whose parents had once sat in the same desks. Miss Clare was becoming an institution. Would she ever leave, she asked herself?

Mr Benson left after five years, his successor left after seven, but Miss Clare remained at her post.

'She won't never go,' the parents said to each other. 'And a good thing too. Taught us all right, she did, and teaches our kids good manners, as well as sums and reading.'

She was looked upon with affection and with much respect. The years added dignity and authority to Dolly's upright figure. Her fair hair was beginning to grey a little, but her blue eyes were as bright and kindly as ever.

'Pity she never married,' she overheard her headmaster say.'A bit late no w, I suppose,' he added and Dolly echoed the sentiment.

It was not only age, but circumstances that kept Dolly at Fairacre. In the early thirties Francis collapsed one day, while he was digging in the garden. Doctor Martin surveyed him gravely. Mary and Dolly watched the doctor closely from the other side of the bed. He was an old friend, but they rarely needed to call him in professionally. This was an alarming moment.

'I'll call again in the morning,' he said at last, leaving Francis in a heavy sleep.

The next morning he was moved to Caxley hospital, and Mary was inconsolable. Dolly was obliged to have the week away from school to comfort her mother. They went daily to visit Francis, who lay very quiet and still, but smiled at them and occasionally spoke. He seemed very weak, and from Doctor Martin's manner Dolly guessed that this was her father's last illness.

One May evening she went alone, cycling along the scented lane. It had changed little since the first time she had driven along it behind Bella's massive bulk, but sometimes a car passed her now, where there was none before, and the main street of Caxley had more cars and lorries than horse-drawn vehicles these days. Her dislike of Caxley had changed over the years to affection. So much had happened to her there that it now seemed as much a background to her life as Beech Green and Fairacre.

Later, sitting beside her father's bed, holding his hand in hers peacefully, the feeling that she was part of Caxley stole upon her. How many other people had sat as she did now, or lay as her father did, gazing upon the trees outside that sheltered the nearby almshouses? Caxley was the mother town to which all the surrounding villages turned. Here they came to work, or sent their children to school. Here they gathered when war broke out, or a queen died, or peace was celebrated. Here were the offices which dealt with rents and rates and other irksome matters which concerned them. And here was the hospital which took them into its shelter and restored them to health, or eased their going when life ebbed.

When she left her father that evening she made her way down a quiet by-road leading from the back of the hospital to the centre of the town. She felt curiously at peace, still sustained by the feeling of being at home in the town. A motor hearse overtook her and waited to slip into the main road ahead, leading to the market place. Four men, in sober clothes, sat beside the coffin on its way to the town undertakers. There was a decent restraint about their quiet bearing which Dolly admired. A right and proper way, she thought, to make one's last journey through familiar streets, flanked by companions, slipping along unobtrusively with schoolboys on bicycles and vegetable vans, as unremarked as any other part of the moving stream. If that was what fate had in store for Francis then she felt she could face it all the more bravely from having seen the passing of that unknown one who had walked the ways of Caxley as her father had done.

He died that same night and was buried three days later beneath a giant yew tree in Beech Green churchyard not far from little Frank. Mary was braver than Dolly had dared to hope. She went to stay for a few days with Ada, and the children's chatter and affection seemed to comfort her.

When she returned she seemed her old self. She sighed with relief at being back again, lonely though it was without the dear presence of Francis.

'Ada's is lovely,' she said to Dolly. 'Full of fine things, and hot water straight from the tap and that—but it don't seem homely to me. I'm happier here.'

Later that evening she looked across the table at Dolly, who sat sewing a shirt for John Francis.

'When you was born,' she said slowly, 'the old dame that was helping said you'd be a lucky child. She said: "That child be blessed and the day will come when you'll remember what I told you." Those were her very words, Dolly, and they've come true. You've been a real blessing to me—all my days.'

Dolly was deeply moved. Her mother rarely showed emotion, and when, soon after, she kissed her goodnight, she felt that they had never before been quite so close.

Francis left very little. Almost all his money had gone to the
buying of the cottage, but his thatching tools and those of his father were carefully stored in the garden shed. It was Emily who discovered a young man in Springbourne who wanted to take up a thatcher's craft, and to him Dolly and Mary gave the tools. He was a handsome lad, with a look of Frank about him, and it gave both women much happiness to think of Francis's tools being used again, on the same familiar roofs, by one of the next generation.

L
OOKING
back upon those twenty years between the wars Miss Clare realised how great a change had taken place in the lives of her neighbours.

Very few of her mother's generation had been to London, or had seen the sea, although both were within seventy miles of the village. She herself had not seen either until she was in her twenties. But with more and more cars pouring into the roads, and with buses and charabancs increasing their services weekly, there were very few children in Miss Clare's class of babies who had not seen both before they were five or six years of age.

It made life much more wonderful and exciting. When you have been bounded by the limits of your legs, or bicycle wheels, there is something deeply thrilling about boarding a coach which will take you a hundred miles away. Dolly Clare never completely lost her sense of wonder at the miracle of modern speed. Holidays away from home were not possible on her small salary, but occasionally she took her mother on a day's outing to the coast, during the school vacations, and this was a rare joy for them both.

The children's annual outing was equally exciting. When Dolly was at Fairacre school as a pupil, and in her early teaching years, a brake pulled by four horses had taken them all to Sir Edmund Hurley's park just beyond Springbourne, and there, five miles from home, they had felt that they were in a foreign land.

Another new joy was the occasional visit to the theatre at the county town. To be sure, the scenery was sometimes a little shabby and some of the acting mediocre, but to Dolly and her unsophisticated friends it was always an evening of enchantment.

Even more miraculous was the wireless. In its early days, soon after Mr Benson's coming to Fairacre, the children besieged Dolly's desk each morning to tell her what the invisible uncles and aunts in Children's Hour had told them the day before. And when, one unforgettable day, they heard 'Hello, twins!' boomed forth in unison, for a pair who lived at Beech Green, their excitement knew no bounds. Sometimes, Dolly thought wryly, they seemed to learn far more from the wireless than they did from her. Would lessons ever be broadcast to the schools, she wondered?