05 Please Sir! (2 page)

I walked out to our tarmac playground surrounded by a waist-high wall of Yorkshire stone, amber in the sunlight and topped with black metal fleur-de-lis railings that cast long shadows. In the distance the church clock struck the half-hour. It was 8.30 a.m. on Thursday, 3 September, the first day of the autumn term, and my fifth year as headteacher of Ragley-on-the Forest Church of England Primary School in North Yorkshire had begun.

For this was 1981. The first computers had arrived in schools and Professor Ernö Rubik had announced that fifty million of his cubes had been sold. However, this went largely unnoticed by the ladies of the Ragley and Morton Women’s Institute when they heard that Sue Barker, the darling of ladies tennis, had to retire from the American championships at Flushing Meadow with a swollen knee. In Liverpool the locals were trying to raise £12,000 for a bronze statue of the late John Lennon, while the new music scene had embraced the New Romantics. Adam and the Ants were riding high in the charts and young men in baggy shirts had begun to wear black eyeliner. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher knew her honeymoon period was over when Glaswegian factory workers welcomed her with a barrage of eggs and, on a distant horizon, there was trouble brewing in a group of islands in the South Atlantic. Closer to home, in the window of the Co-op in York, an incredible new electronic device from Grundig called a video recorder had gone on show and shoppers stopped to stare in wonder. The world was changing fast but, happily, in the quiet Yorkshire village of Ragley-on-the-Forest there was still time to pause a while and smell the flowers.

I walked down the cobbled driveway, through the school gates and breathed in the clean Yorkshire air. Then I stood back to admire our village school. It was a solid Victorian building of reddish-brown bricks, a steeply sloping grey slate roof and a tall incongruous bell tower. On this perfect September day the sun reflected from the high arched window in the gable end. Recent fears of the closure of Ragley School, at least for the time being, were over.

Bordering the front of the school was a row of tall horse-chestnut trees, heavy in leaf and spiky fruit, and I stood under the welcome shade and watched the village coming alive. Off to my right in the centre of a row of pretty terraced cottages with pantile roofs and tall brick chimneys stood The Royal Oak with the autumn fire of Virginia creeper clinging to its whitewashed walls. Opposite me, on the village green, a group of mothers chatted nervously. Their four-year-olds were about to experience a first full day in Anne Grainger’s reception class. The children looked relaxed and made daisy chains while their mothers stood anxiously with handkerchiefs at the ready. As usual, a few tears would be shed when the time came for them to say goodbye to their tiny offspring.

Down the High Street, Big Dave Robinson and his cousin, Little Malcolm Robinson, the council binmen, were collecting rubbish in their wagon from Prudence Golightly’s General Stores & Newsagent, Piercy’s Butcher’s Shop, the Village Pharmacy and Pratt’s Hardware Emporium. They paused outside Nora’s Coffee Shop, where the assistant, Dorothy Humpleby, was leaning in the doorway, humming along to Soft Cell’s recent number one record ‘Tainted Love’ and hoping for a glimpse of her boyfriend, Little Malcolm. Meanwhile, next door, Diane Wigglesworth was putting a large poster of Farrah Fawcett in the window of her hair salon.

The tranquil scene was suddenly shattered by loud, excited voices as a posse of children appeared from the council estate and ran towards the school gates. Red-faced and panting, nine-year-old Jimmy Poole looked concerned.

‘What’s the problem, Jimmy?’ I asked.

His sun-tanned, freckled face looked up at me with black-button eyes from under a fringe of ginger curls. ‘Thorth, Mithter Theffield,’ he lisped.

‘Thoughts, Jimmy? You mean you’re having unhappy thoughts?’ I asked. Jimmy had always been a cheerful boy and it was strange to see him looking so downcast, particularly on the first day of term.

‘No, Mithter Theffield,’ replied Jimmy, shaking his head. ‘Ah’ve forgotten me thorth for boyth gameth.’

‘Ah, I see,’ I said with a smile. ‘Well, don’t worry, we’ll find you a spare pair.’

He looked relieved and ran into the schoolyard to talk to his friend Heathcliffe Earnshaw about the forthcoming conker season. Then he stopped and shouted over his shoulder, ‘Mithter Theffield, don’t worry … ah’m going thopping for thum after thcool with my mam and my thithter.’

I smiled as I watched the eager young faces of the children gathering in small groups on the playground, ready for another academic year. Like the changing seasons, there was a steady rhythm to the life of a village schoolteacher and, for me, it was the job I loved.

Suddenly a large cream and blue mobile library van came into sight from Morton Road. It drove sedately past the village green and slowed up outside the Post Office, where the village postman, Ted Postlethwaite, had just finished his usual cup of Typhoo with the postmistress, Miss Amelia Duff. It pulled up outside the village hall and the driver, a short, portly woman in her mid-forties, got out and surveyed her vehicle with a critical eye. Then she leant in and picked up a Thermos flask in a mighty fist that had stamped countless thousands of library books. It was well known in the village that if you valued your knuckles you didn’t shake hands with Rosie Backhouse.

Since leaving her home in Featherstone, Rosie had spent the past twenty years driving the county council library van round the cluster of villages to the north of York. One morning each week she parked in Ragley village and her regular customers would trundle out to select a new novel. Rosie ruled her empire with a rod of iron, to such a degree that Don Bradshaw, the barman in The Royal Oak, was convinced she had been trained by the Gestapo. Her husband was the timid Cyril, manager of the Cavendish furniture store in York, and he would probably have agreed. Rosie was a very fierce lady and woe betide anyone caught smudging the front cover of a book or, God forbid, turning down the corner of a page. She settled down on the bench outside the village hall, glanced up at the clock and unscrewed the top of her flask. A nice beaker of coffee before her nine o’clock start would be just the job.

On the school playground, Anne Grainger, the deputy headteacher, had come out to talk to the mothers of the new starters and, after a few reassuring words, they soon began to relax. Anne, a slim, attractive forty-nine-year-old, had been a loyal supporter of Ragley School for many years. Her hard work, patience and, not least, a mischievous sense of humour made her a priceless member of staff and it was always a joy to walk into her lively reception class of four- and five-year-olds.

‘Jack, Vera needs a word with you in the office,’ said Anne with a grin. ‘You’ve had a telephone call from Miss High-and-Mighty.’

I hurried into school. A message from Miss Barrington-Huntley, the Chair of the North Yorkshire Education Committee, usually meant something important.

Vera Evans, our tall, slim, elegant fifty-nine-year-old school secretary, looked her usual immaculate self in a new charcoal-grey, pin-striped Marks & Spencer’s business suit. She peered over her pince-nez spectacles at the shorthand message on her spiral-bound pad. ‘Ah, Mr Sheffield,’ said Vera in her usual formal manner, ‘you need to ring Miss Barrington-Huntley at County Hall.’ She saw my concern. ‘Don’t worry,’ she added with a reassuring smile, ‘it sounded routine.’

I relaxed and picked up the receiver. Although I was the headteacher, sometimes it felt as though it was Vera who ran the school. The calm manner with which she dealt with our regular crises and the occasional angry parent, as well as the increasing deluge of paper work that arrived from the local authority, was a wonder to behold.

‘Good morning, Jack,’ said a confident and familiar voice.

‘Ah … good morning, Miss Barrington-Huntley,’ I replied, a little nervously. The last time we had spoken was at my aborted interview for a large school headship at the end of last term.

‘Just to let you know that our newly appointed adviser for computers and libraries, Mr, er …’ there was the sound of ruffled papers, ‘Mr, hmmn, Gilford Eccles, will be calling in to see you at lunchtime today. He’s doing some research on reading policies in North Yorkshire schools prior to the national Reading For All conference next month.’

‘Ah, I see. Thank you for letting me know,’ I replied, with a slightly sinking feeling. Even though I was proud of our reading scheme, I guessed this new initiative was leading towards some form of common curriculum for schools. Also, I didn’t know the first thing about computers.

‘I’ll call in when I can,’ she added cheerily, ‘but, in the meantime, very best wishes for the new academic year, Jack. Goodbye.’ She rang off before I could reply.

I replaced the receiver. ‘Vera, Miss B-H says we’ve got an official visitor at lunchtime today,’ I said, ‘… by the name of Eccles.’

Vera wrote it on her pad. ‘Did you say … Eccles?’ she asked.

A diminutive figure appeared alongside. ‘Oooh, I love Eccles cakes!’ exclaimed Jo Hunter. Jo, an athletic twenty-six-year-old, taught the six- and seven-year-olds in Class 2 and was married to Dan Hunter, our friendly six-feet-four-inch local policeman. She was dressed in a body-hugging tracksuit and fashionable Chris Evert trainers with her long black hair tied back in a pony-tail.

‘He’s something to do with computers, Jo, so perhaps
you
could look after him over the lunch break,’ I said hopefully. ‘And don’t mention cakes.’

‘Fine, Jack, no problem,’ said Jo. She was clutching the instruction booklet for our new school computer which, for the rest of the staff, might as well have been written in Japanese. However, Jo was clearly a sign of things to come and she grasped the new technology with open arms. After collecting her new registers from Vera’s desk, she hurried back to her classroom with the confidence of youth.

‘Computers!’ muttered Vera. ‘My new electric typewriter was hard enough. Where will it all end?’ She took the plastic cover off her wonder of the modern world: namely, an ergonomically designed, golf-ball head, IBM Selectric typewriter, and, not for the first time, she yearned for her old manual Royal Imperial and the familiar
ker-ching
of the carriage return.

Our first computer had arrived during the summer holiday, a large beige-coloured cube with software called Folio and a separate disk drive. Jo had called into school frequently and had begun to use it as a writing aid, whereas the rest of us simply looked on in wonder. We were all due to go on an evening course at the teacher-training college in York.

A smiling freckled face appeared in the doorway. ‘Jack, please could
I
ring the bell this morning? It’s sort of …
symbolic
.’

Sally Pringle, a tall, ginger-haired forty-year-old, had returned from maternity leave to teach the eight- and nine-year-olds in Class 3. Her mother was only too pleased to look after Grace, her seven-month-old baby, and Sally was excited to be back in Ragley School doing the job she loved.

‘Of course, Sally,’ I said.

‘Thanks, Jack. It’s good to be back … and I need the exercise.’ Sally was wearing her usual loud colours, an outfit including an orange tie-dyed waistcoat and a voluminous bright yellow blouse that hung loosely over her green stretch cords. She patted her tummy. ‘I wonder if I’ll ever get my figure back,’ she added with a grin and walked to the foot of the bell tower.

At the sound of the bell all the children hurried into school, while, down the High Street, Rosie Backhouse opened the doors of her library van. It was well known that Rosie’s word was law. The sign
SILENCE IS NEXT TO GODLINESS
taped above the music section meant business. Anything more than a whisper, including coughing and sneezing, resulted in immediate expulsion. Rosie didn’t suffer fools gladly.

As she waited for her first customer, she reflected on her life. Rosie had loved the late fifties and early sixties. She remembered listening to two-way family favourites on the Light Programme while drinking a tumbler of Kia-Ora Suncrush. She had played her latest Buddy Holly 45 on her Dansette record player, watched her television heartthrob Eamonn Andrews on her 14-inch Bush television set and shared a packet of Spangles with her boyfriend, Cyril, in the back row of the cinema. Finally, she had married the innocent and introverted Cyril in 1966, on the day England won the World Cup, and made quite sure it wasn’t just Geoff Hurst who scored a hat-trick that day. Cyril soon became alarmed at Rosie’s demanding nature once the lights went out and began to attend weekend management courses in order to provide much needed recovery time and a good night’s rest. When he became manager of the Cavendish furniture store in York, Rosie bought the best kingsize bed in the shop and made sure their bedroom looked like the top prize from Nicholas Parsons’
Sale of the Century
. In Rosie’s world, men were fine as long as they knew their place.

The ten- and eleven-year-olds in my class soon settled in and, although a few of them appeared to have forgotten how to write, they were soon busy filling in their new reading record cards, labelling mathematics books, putting their names in their
New Oxford Dictionary
and sticking a personalized label on the lid of their tin of Lakeland crayons.

Morning assembly was always a joyous occasion at the start of a new year, with the new starters waving cautiously to their elder brothers and sisters and all the staff weighing up the children they were about to teach. We sang ‘Morning Has Broken’ and ‘Kumbaya’, accompanied by Anne on the piano, and then we all recited our school prayer.