Star Teacher (27 page)

‘Why … who's comin'?' asked Heathcliffe.

Julie shook her head. ‘That's t'problem livin' in this 'ouse,' she said.

‘What is, Mam?' asked the boys in unison.

‘Men,' she said gruffly. ‘An' put y'dirty socks in t'washin' basket.'

Terry grinned. ‘No, Mam, ah tried that an' they keep coming back.'

The two boys collected their coats.

‘There's some cake in t'kitchen y'can 'ave,' shouted Julie.

Heathcliffe and Terry stared at the Victoria sponge.

‘'Alf each,' said Terry.

‘You cut … an' then ah'll choose my 'alf,' said Heathcliffe with the wisdom of Solomon.

So the intrepid duo, each with a fistful of cake, headed for the front door.

‘We're off out, Mam,' shouted Heathcliffe, but at that moment their mother neither heard nor cared.

Beth pulled up in Ragley High Street outside the General Stores, opened the boot and took out her shopping bags and the collapsible pushchair. Before she could erect it John began to yell for attention and food. Sighing, she was unstrapping him from his car seat when suddenly the cavalry arrived in the form of the Earnshaw brothers.

‘Can ah 'elp, Mrs Sheffield?' asked Heathcliffe politely.

‘We could put y'pushchair up,' offered Terry. ‘We 'ad a lot o' practice wi' our Dallas.'

‘Thanks, boys,' said Beth, ‘that's very thoughtful of you.'

‘'Ow's Mr Sheffield?' asked Heathcliffe as he tightened the wheel nuts on the arms of the pushchair.

‘Well, actually he's making a scarecrow with the other teachers,' said Beth with a wry smile and nodded towards the school.

‘We'd like t'mek a scarecrow,' said Heathcliffe with heartfelt pathos, ‘but m'mam said there were no old clothes t'spare.'

‘Ah bet we could've made a good 'un,' said Terry wistfully.

Beth had a thought and rummaged in the back of her car. ‘Well, boys,' she said, ‘perhaps these might help,' and she handed over the black bags.

Heathcliffe looked inside. ‘Cor, thanks a lot, Mrs Sheffield. These are perfec'.'

Beth was in a good mood. Now she could do her shopping at leisure without the need to drive to the charity shop. ‘And here's ten pence each for being so helpful,' she said.

As Beth walked away with John, Heathcliffe made an executive decision. ‘You look after t'clothes an' spend your ten pence on some sweets. Ah'll keep t'other ten pence f'later. Ah'm off t'see Tidy Tim t'get some more stuff for t'scarecrow.'

‘OK, 'Eath',' said Terry and the boys went their separate ways.

When I arrived outside the entrance of Ragley School Anne was stuffing wastepaper into an old pair of her husband's blue overalls and Pat was doing the same with a pair of her partner's discarded hiking socks. Sally was painting a cheerful face on a brown paper bag and had found an old sailor's hat to wedge on its head.

‘Jack, you can tie him on to one of the broken chairs if you like,' said Pat, handing over a ball of baling twine. ‘Then we can sit him outside the school gate.'

Ruby had stacked a pile of old wooden chairs next to the cycle shed for removal by Big Dave and Little Malcolm.

‘And then we're going for a coffee,' said Anne.

‘Vera is working with her Women's Institute friends outside the village hall,' said Sally. ‘Apparently, they're the favourites.'

‘They've got an actual mannequin,' said Pat, ‘so they're taking it very seriously.'

It wasn't long before we had a figure that resembled a drunken sailor sprawled on a chair outside the school gate. It was a token effort, but at least we had tried, and we walked across the road to Nora's Coffee Shop with a sense of achievement.

Terry stared at the row of sweet jars. The choice was considerable. He scanned the familiar labels, including Rhubarb and Custard Pips, Midget Gems, Coconut Mushrooms, Liquorice Comfits, Pontefract Cakes, Pear Drops and Chocolate Bonbons.

‘Perhaps you would like your favourite, Terry,' suggested Prudence.

Terry sighed and smiled in agreement. There was just something special about Sherbet Lemons. ‘OK, Miss Golightly, ten pence worth o' Sherbet Lemons in two bags, please.'

Prudence measured them out with care on her ancient weighing scale and, as always, added one sweet in each bag for good luck and because Terry had remembered to say ‘please'.

Terry passed over his precious coin and Prudence bent down below the counter to the Penny Selection tray. ‘Jeremy says here's a barley sugar stick for being such a polite boy.'

Terry accepted this with the reverence with which the folk of Ragley acknowledged this familiar teddy bear. ‘Thanks, Jeremy,' he said, a little sheepishly.

Prudence glanced up at Jeremy Bear and tenderly made a small adjustment to his smart blue RAF uniform – a labour of love that had taken many evenings of work. ‘He says you're very welcome.'

Meanwhile, in Pratt's Hardware Emporium Timothy was unpacking a cardboard box with great satisfaction. His long-awaited order for various sizes of dome-headed screws had finally arrived and he knew his dear friend Walter, the model-plane enthusiast, would be thrilled, as would the members of the Ragley Shed Society.

The bell rang and he saw Heathcliffe Earnshaw hesitating by the door.

‘Don't forget t'wipe your feet,' said Timothy. ‘Remember, cleanliness is next to godliness.'

Heathcliffe Earnshaw thought if that was the case then Tidy Tim would already be halfway to heaven, because the Emporium was spotless.

Heathcliffe wiped his feet on the cork mat. ‘'Ello, Mr Pratt,' he said. ‘Is there anything ah can do to 'elp?' He gave Timothy his famous fixed smile, the one that his Aunty Maureen told him if he did it too often his face would stay like that. ‘Me an' m'brother can turn our 'ands t'most jobs,' he continued, with glassy-eyed humility.

‘It's not Bob-a-Job week, is it?' asked Timothy.

‘No, it's jus' that we need some bits o' timber an' mebbe chicken wire for our scarecrow,' explained Heathcliffe, ‘an' we thought if we did summat f'you then y'might be able t'give us some.'

The penny dropped and Timothy smiled. It was good to hear of young folk getting involved in the community.

At that moment the doorbell jingled and Mrs Trickle-bank walked in with her daughter Julie.

‘Ah need some batteries, please, Timothy,' said Mrs Tricklebank.

‘Certainly,' said Timothy and he pulled out the drawer labelled ‘Batteries'. As all the drawers were labelled in alphabetical order, this was achieved in seconds. While Mrs Tricklebank rummaged around in the drawer, much to Timothy's disquiet, he leaned over the counter. ‘Ah were sorry to 'ear about your cat, Julie.'

Julie Tricklebank's cat had been knocked down by the milk float.

‘Thank you, Mr Pratt,' she said.

‘Don't worry,' continued Timothy quietly. ‘Your cat is sleeping now.'

Heathcliffe had seen the unfortunate outcome. ‘Sleep-in'?' he said, looking surprised. ‘Ah saw 'im this morning an' 'e looked stone dead t'me.'

Sensitivity isn't what it used to be
, thought Timothy as Mrs Tricklebank gave Heathcliffe a cold stare, paid for her batteries and walked out.

A few minutes later Heathcliffe left with some offcuts of timber plus a roll of chicken wire and a borrowed pair of wire cutters. He joined his brother and they set up a base for scarecrow construction next to Ronnie's bench on the village green.

In Nora's Coffee Shop, Anne, Sally and Pat found a table while I collected a tray of four frothy coffees from Nora.

Teenagers Claire Bradshaw, Anita Cuthbertson and Kenny Kershaw were sitting at a corner table listening to the cast of
Grange Hill
singing ‘Just Say No' on the old juke-box.

‘'Ello, sir, 'ave y'made a scarecrow?' asked Claire cheerfully. She was going through her Madonna phase in a tubular dress, bolero-style jacket and fingerless lace gloves.

‘Yes, thank you, Claire,' I said. ‘And how are you all?'

‘Fine, thanks, sir,' said Anita, whose dress sense was slightly more relaxed. She had ripped a larger neckhole in her grey sweatshirt so it revealed a bare shoulder à la Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance
. A pair of
Footloose
leg warmers over her tight jeans completed the ensemble.

‘We're 'elpin' Mr Piercy wi' 'is 'og roast, Mr Sheffield,' said Kenny, who thought he looked the most fashionable man in Ragley with his new hairstyle, short at the front and sides and long at the back. He was sporting a bright-pink T-shirt, cheap baggy jacket with the sleeves rolled up, jeans and espadrilles, plus a few days of beard growth.

Claire and Anita waved at Anne and Sally. ‘We're lookin' forward to t'maypole dancing,' said Claire.

‘Remember when we did it, Miss?' said Anita. ‘We were brill'.'

Margery Ackroyd and Betty Buttle were standing across the road from the village hall watching Vera and the ladies of the Women's Institute putting the finishing touches to their so-called scarecrow. It looked as though it should have been in Madame Tussauds in London. The elegant mannequin had been carefully dressed in the style of Emmeline Pankhurst, the famous suffragette.

‘Perfect,' said Vera as the ladies secured their masterpiece with stout wire to the cherry tree outside the entrance to the village hall.

‘Bit posh for a scarecrow,' opined Margery. ‘Ah don't know what t'judge'll mek o' it.'

‘That's nowt,' said Betty. ‘Ah 'eard that Deirdre Coe got 'er Stanley to 'ire a proper costume for
'er
scarecrow.'

‘Ah'm not surprised,' said Margery, ‘an' y'know me, Betty, ah never speak ill of nobody … but that Deirdre Coe is crooked as a corkscrew.'

‘Y'reight there,' said Betty.

The choice of judge for the competition was remarkably obvious.

For the past thirty years ‘One Eye' Clarence Drinkwater, an eccentric and bumbling local character, had erected a variety of scarecrows as a labour of love in Twenty Acre Field. He was proud of his creations, and the fact that they seemed to
attract
the local bird population rather than deter them did not dampen his enthusiasm. Stuffed with straw and with happy smiles on their varnished papier-mâché faces, along with colourful scarves and a variety of flat caps and sun hats, they had a distinctive style of their own.

The fact that Clarence dressed in a similar fashion to his scarecrows added a certain
joie de vivre
to his persona. Unfortunately, his habit of tucking his baggy shirts into his equally voluminous underpants, visible at the waistline, tended to take the edge off his appearance.

Back in 1956, on the day that Premium Bonds were introduced, a high wind blew down a scarecrow Clarence was in the process of erecting and it poked him in the eye with a birch-twig finger. However, this did not deter him from his weekday job of repairing shoes and ladies' handbags. As a self-employed, and now one-eyed, cobbler, it left his weekends free to indulge in the love of his life: namely, the pursuit of the perfect scarecrow. Consequently, when he was approached by Elsie Crapper in her role as the Women's Institute social secretary to be the judge of this novel competition, he was in scarecrow heaven.

Elsie chose to ignore the rest of the social committee when it was suggested that Clarence had been promoted beyond his final level of incompetence. After all, Elsie was a Christian soul and always thought kindly of her fellow man, even though Clarence had recently ruined her best pair of leather boots along with her favourite sandals. So when Sunday evening came around, Clarence laid out his brightest shirt and his cleanest pair of Y-fronts before going to bed.

On Monday, 5 May the overnight gentle rain had cleared to leave a new day of bright sunshine. A thrush on the roof of my garden shed trilled a song of spring, while the swallows had returned to their familiar nesting places in the eaves of Bilbo Cottage. Almond trees were in blossom and the first flower stalks on the horse chestnut trees gave promise of the summer days ahead. Grape hyacinths bordered the path and the tight buds on the apple trees were about to burst from their winter cocoons.

It was May Day, and an eventful one was in store.

When Beth and I drove into school we stopped by the gate in surprise.

‘Oh Jack,' said Beth, ‘it's terrific – just like you!'

A gangling scarecrow stuffed with paper and straw and wearing my old clothes had been tied to a chair and propped on the other side of the school gate from the one made by the staff. A cardboard sign pinned to a familiar sports jacket read: ‘MR SHEFFIELD by HEATHCLIFFE & TERRY EARNSHAW'. A huge pair of black cardboard Buddy Holly spectacles added the finishing touch.

However, it was young John who confirmed the
fait accompli
. He peered out of the car window, pointed at the scarecrow and shouted, ‘Daddy!'

Don and Sheila Bradshaw had made a big effort on the forecourt of The Royal Oak. A fat scarecrow wearing one of Don's old wrestling outfits was leaning against one of the picnic tables with an empty tankard attached to its hand.

Under the weeping willow on the village green, Madame Jacqueline Laporte, the French teacher from Easington Comprehensive School, along with her latest boyfriend, had made a superb scarecrow of Napoleon Bonaparte. The attractive Frenchwoman with the Brigitte Bardot looks and figure-hugging, pencil-slim black skirt turned a few heads as she had her photograph taken next to ‘the little corporal' for the local paper.

The
Herald
photographer was busy walking up and down the High Street, snapping the various scarecrows. The ladies of the Women's Institute had gathered round Emmeline Pankhurst for a group photograph, while Stan and Deirdre Coe had arrived with their Henry VIII and had secured him firmly with baling twine to the post that supported the village noticeboard.