Sins Out of School (2 page)

A sea of hands. I pointed to a little blond boy in front. “Please, miss, Mrs. Doyle calls the roll.”

“Good. What's your name?”

“Peter 'Arris, miss.”

“Fine, Peter, come up here and see if you can find Mrs. Doyle's list of pupils.” I didn't know if it was called a class roster or a roll book or what, and I had no intention of calling down further amusement by my ignorance. “And while he's doing that, will you”—I pointed to a girl who looked reasonably bright and responsible—“find some paper and pencils—or markers would be better if you have them—for everyone to make a tag with your first name on it. That will make things much easier for me. Print, please, and nice big letters so I can read them.”

The classroom might be small and shabby and the supplies pitiful, but children everywhere are much the same. Though it had been a number of years since I'd taught, we settled easily into a routine. The small class made it quite pleasant, actually. Fourth-graders—“nines,” they called them here, since most of them were nine years old—have always been my favorites. They're old enough to be really interesting people, with individuality and creativity, and young enough not to be smart alecks yet—well, most of them. There's at least one in every class, and you can spot them at a glance, but the two I was saddled with today were, fortunately, still bemused by my foreign accent and manner and gave me little trouble.

The first subject on the agenda was arithmetic (“maths”). Well, that was no problem. We struggled with long division, which they were just beginning, and I flattered myself that I taught them a trick or two. Geography, after that, was interesting. The children were, of course, far more familiar with the map of England than I was, but I had often visited Salisbury and its famous Plain, and most of them had not. We enjoyed swapping information.

The next item, however, was history. They were studying the Napoleonic wars and there I met, so to speak, my Waterloo. I know virtually nothing about Napoleon except that he crowned himself emperor, and I know that only on the basis of a painting in the Louvre, which may be inaccurate.

My teaching methods have always involved acknowledging my shortcomings and playing to my strengths. “Right,” I said when Terence had told me where they were in history. “I'm afraid I'm a little fuzzy on the details of some of those battles, so suppose I teach you some American history? There's a very important American holiday coming up soon, and I'll bet none of you knows anything about it.”

They relaxed. A lesson about something one doesn't have to know is always more fun. So I told them about the Pilgrims and the Puritans and the Indians. “Indians?” queried Chakra, a puzzled frown on his face.

“Sorry, Native Americans. Red Indians, I think they're sometimes called in England, to distinguish them from real Indians like your people, Chakra. You remember, Columbus thought he'd sailed to India, so he called the people he found Indians, even though they weren't at all. They were very helpful to the first English settlers, though.”

And we went on to turkey (“No, I don't think they come from Turkey. I don't know why they're called that”) and corn (“You call it maize, or sweet corn”) and lima beans and squash, and the first feast of thanksgiving for the harvest, meager though it had been.

“There, now,” I said when we had finished. It was nearing lunchtime, and no one had shown up to relieve me. “You know something the other kids don't. You can tell them all about it at lunch.”

“Please, miss?” Fiona, she of the bright red braids and freckles, one of the potential troublemakers. “Why isn't Mrs. Doyle here? She wasn't ill yesterday.”

“I don't know, dear. Mrs. Woodley didn't tell me.”

“Will she be back tomorrow?”

“I expect. Oops, there's the bell.” I didn't have to ask the procedure for getting them to the lunchroom. They lined up without being told and filed out in an orderly fashion. I heaved a huge sigh of relief and joined the teacher from the next room. “Are we supposed to eat with the children?”

“No, thank God,” she said crisply. “The lunch ladies look after them. Come with me to the staff room and I'll show you the drill.”

The staff room was as shabby as the rest of the school, but it was large and clean. Most of the teachers had brought sandwiches. I saw why after one look at my school meal, brought to me by a “lunch lady.” Consisting of a large piece of breaded mystery meat, SpaghettiOs, Tater Tots, and for dessert a thick, pallid slab of something baked, the meal could most charitably be described as edible. Maybe.

I was both starved and exhausted. I ate what was put before me. When I had absorbed a week's ration of fat and carbohydrates, I gratefully accepted a cup of coffee in someone's mug and looked around for Catherine.

She was chatting with the teachers at the other table, but she met my eye and came to sit in the vacant chair next to me. “I thought you looked as though you should have your meal first. How was the lunch?”

“Awful, but sustaining, I suppose.”

“We do try to make the food more or less decent, you know, but with the budget we're given—”

I waved it aside. “It doesn't matter. I ate it, and I do feel a little better. I can't believe how tired I am after only a morning.
And
my voice is giving out. I'm out of condition.”

Catherine sighed. “Oh, dear. I really hate to tell you, then, but I'm afraid I haven't been able to find anyone at all to take your place this afternoon. I'd step in myself, but I've a meeting with the national curriculum people. Can you stick it out, do you think?”

I sighed myself. “I'll have to, I guess. Actually it's not too bad. The kids are sweet. Well behaved, responsive. Mrs. Doyle must be a good teacher.”

“She is,” said Catherine, chiming in with the woman across from me, the one who had shown me to the staff room. Catherine smiled. “Dorothy, I must go and deal with an irate parent, but let me introduce Ruth Beecham, who teaches the other class of nines. Dorothy Martin, Ruth.”

Catherine hurried from the room; I exchanged nods with Ruth Beecham, who was an attractive brunette with an intense, mobile face. “More coffee?” she asked.

“When do we have to go back to the salt mines?”

She grinned. “Fifteen minutes or so.”

“Then I won't, thanks. I wouldn't have time to drink it
and
go to the bathroom, which I would certainly need to do with that much coffee in me.”

“You can leave your little monsters for that long, you know. You're right, they're a well-behaved lot.”

“You can tell a lot about a teacher, I always think, by the way her students behave with a substitute. From the way these kids act, I wouldn't have guessed Mrs. Doyle would be the sort to go AWOL.”

“She's not!” Mrs. Beecham banged her mug on the table so hard coffee slopped out. “I'm worried sick about her!”

T
HE
room got quiet for a moment, and Mrs. Beecham's face turned red. “Sorry,” she said, mopping at the spilled coffee. “I didn't mean to make a scene, but honestly, I don't think anyone's taking this thing seriously enough.”

“Mrs. Doyle's unexplained absence, you mean? Catherine sounded quite annoyed about it when she called me this morning.”

“That's it, you see. Annoyed, not worried. Oh, I do see her point. One can't have one's staff vanishing, and Catherine's first priority has to be the school and the children. But she seems to think Amanda—Mrs. Doyle—has simply done a bunk, and she wouldn't do that!”

“Conscientious, then?”

“To a fault. She's taught here for five years, and the only time she's ever not turned up was when she had appendicitis. And then she rang up Catherine at home the night before to say she wasn't feeling well and might not be in for a few days. She reminded Catherine that the next day would be the children's turn for the library and computer studies, and never once mentioned the fact that she was in hospital awaiting an emergency appendectomy! So you see …”

“Yes, I do see,” I said slowly. “I suppose Catherine called her when she didn't show up today?”

“No answer. That was when I called the bank where her husband works. They said he'd taken a holiday.”

“Oh, well. They've probably gone someplace together—”

“If you knew him, you wouldn't say that.” Her voice was neutral, but her face was not designed to conceal her feelings.

“You don't like him.”

“I can't imagine that anyone who knows him likes him. Look, Mrs. Martin, Amanda Doyle is my friend. She's a wonderful person. And if I could get my hands on that husband of hers, I'd strangle him!” She sounded as though she meant every word.

Intrigued, I was opening my mouth to pursue the matter when the bell rang. It must have been just outside the staffroom door, because the clamor drowned out everything. I jumped, but the rest of the teachers were used to it; they scraped chairs and rose and headed out to their afternoon's work.

“Why?” I asked, trailing after Mrs. Beecham. “What's he done that's so terrible?”

“Later,” she said in an undertone, nodding in the direction of the children, who were crowding close to us, intent on confiding the important events of lunchtime.

“Later” came in the second class period of the afternoon, right after an English lesson in which I failed to distinguish myself. Even after living for several years in England, I still tend to speak and write American. The two languages differ in subtle but important ways. I began in disgrace by leaving the
u
out of “honor” when I wrote a sentence on the board, and the whole thing deteriorated from there. I was glad when the bell rang and Peter, who had appointed himself my mentor, informed me, with a grimace, that it was time for religious studies and we all had to go to the lunchroom.

The whole school gathered in there, about four hundred children ranging in age from four to eleven, and all the teachers, and Catherine. The children seated themselves on the floor in age groups. Chairs were apparently considered an unnecessary expense; I wondered what they had done at lunchtime and decided I didn't want to know. There weren't any chairs for the teachers, either. We stood near our classes to keep an admonitory eye on them. Supervision was necessary; the children were bored and therefore restless.

“They don't like this part, do they?” I murmured to Mrs. Beecham as they were settling.

“Not much. It's pretty bland, I have to say. One-size-fits-all religion, you know.”

“Oh. I thought it would be Church of England.”

“No, nondenominational. Not even necessarily Christian. A lot of the children are Indian or Pakistani, therefore probably Hindu or Muslim. There's a fair sprinkling of Buddhists, too, amongst the Chinese. And the Japanese—Masako, turn around and pay attention! Mrs. Woodley is about to begin!”

The session seemed harmless enough, even fun. With the Christmas holidays drawing near, the children were learning several carols and sang them lustily, if not particularly tunefully. King's College they weren't, but at least they worked off some of their excess energy.

“I don't see why they don't enjoy this,” I said to Mrs. Beecham. We had drawn a little away from the children, into a niche where we could talk without disturbing the practice.

“Only because it's required, I suspect. And of course most of the time it isn't music, but watered-down platitudes. Pretty useless, really, and the children know it. You can't fool them.”

“I would have thought some genuine comparative religion would be better than vanilla-flavored piety. Or else nothing at all. Of course, as an American, I don't think a public school—sorry, a state school—is the place to teach religion. The home, the church, yes, or else a denominational school.”

“And those can be ghastly, believe me.” Mrs. Beecham spoke with passion. I looked at her with surprise.

She drew a deep breath. “You asked me what was so dreadful about Amanda's husband? Well, aside from being a bully and all-round nasty piece of work, he's a religious fanatic, some frightful nonconformist sect. He makes their daughter go to the school run by these raving loonies, and Amanda has to go to the church. Twice on Sundays, and then there's Wednesday nights, weekend prayer meetings, mission meetings, Bible study meetings—the woman can't call her soul her own!”

“It does sound a bit much,” I said mildly. The singing paused. I glanced at my charges and hurried over to have a word with Fiona, who was about to drop a marble down the neck of the rather dim-looking little boy in front of her.

“Why doesn't she rebel?” I asked when I rejoined Mrs. Beecham. “Surely she could simply refuse to do some of these things. Maybe she enjoys it.”

“She hates it. She tells me that, but she can't tell him. She's a submissive sort of woman, always has been, I'd say, and he's worked on that, beaten her down until she doesn't dare defy him.”