Wicked! (5 page)

‘And your father?’

‘Dad was a steelworker. He used to take me to Headingly and Old Trafford. Then he left home; he couldn’t cope with Mum being ill.’ Her voice faltered. She wasn’t going to add that her father had been violent and had drunk the family penniless.

She wished she could ring Stew but he’d be taking a staff meeting. Yorkshire was so full of painful memories; she’d be glad to get down south and make a fresh start.

Nothing, however, had prepared her for the anguish of leaving Redfords. Parents and children, who’d thought she’d be with them for ever, seemed equally devastated.

‘Why are you living us?’ wrote one eleven-year-old. ‘I don’t want you to live.’

‘Are your new children better than us?’ wrote another. ‘Please change your mind.’

Almost harder to bear was the despair of the older pupils, including some of the roughest, toughest boys, whom she was abandoning in the middle of their GCSE course.

‘How will we ever understand
Much Ado
without you? We’re going to miss you, miss.’

They all gave her good-luck presents and cards they could ill afford and Janna couldn’t look them in the eye and tell them the truth: ‘I’m leaving because your headmaster broke my heart and now it’s breaking twice.’

Then Stew had done the sweetest thing: he’d had framed a group photograph of the entire school, which every teacher and child had signed. Janna cried every time she looked at it.

Some teachers were very sad she was leaving and wished her well. Others, jealous of her closeness to Stew, expressed their incredulity at her getting the job.

‘You’d better cut your hair, you’ll never have time to wash that mane every morning. And do buy some sensible clothes.’

‘And you’ll have to curb that temper and you won’t be able to swan into meetings twenty minutes late if you’re taking them.’

Waylaid by a sobbing child, Janna would forget about time.

There had also been the hell of seeing Stew interview and appoint her successor: a willowy brunette with large, serious, hazel eyes behind her spectacles – the bloody cow – and everyone getting excited about a Christmas production of
Oliver!
of which Janna would be no part.

Stew had taken her out for a discreet farewell dinner and, because she was moving to the country, given her a little Staffordshire cow as a leaving present.

‘I’m so proud of you, Janny. You’ve probably got eighteen months to try and turn round that school. Don’t lose your rag and antagonize people unnecessarily and go easy on the “boogers”, “bluddies” and “basstards”, they just show off your Yorkshire accent.’ Then, pinching her cheek when she looked sulky: ‘I don’t want anything to wreck your lovely, generous, spontaneous nature.’

‘Yeah, yeah. “The only failure is not to have tried”,’ Janna quoted one of Redfords’s mantras back at him.

After a second bottle they had both cried and Stew had quoted: ‘“So, we’ll go no more a-roving”,’ but when he got to the bit about the sword outwearing its sheath and the heart wearing out the breast, Janna remembered how they’d worn out the carpet in his office.

I’ve given him my Bridget Jones years, she thought bitterly. Sometimes she wondered why she loved him so much: his hair was thinning, his body thickening and, apart from the penetrating dark brown eyes, his square face lacked beauty, but whenever he spoke, everyone listened and his powers of persuasion were infinite.

‘Little Jannie, I cannot believe you’re going to be a headmistress.’ His fingers edged over her breast. ‘We can still meet. Can I come home this evening?’

‘No,’ snapped Janna. ‘I’m a head, but no longer a mistress.’

Janna, however, was never cast down for long. At half-term, she had come south and found herself a minute but adorable eighteenth-century house called Jubilee Cottage. Like a child’s drawing, it had a path spilling over with catmint and lavender leading up to a gabled porch with ‘Jubilate’ engraved above the door and mullioned windows on either side. It was the last house in the small village of Wilmington, which had a pub, a shop and a watercress-choked stream dawdling along the edge of the High Street.

Janna could easily afford the mortgage on her splendid new salary. She couldn’t believe she’d be earning so much.

Wilmington thankfully was three miles from Larkminster Comp. However much you loved kids, it was a mistake to live over your school. When she grew tired of telling her children they were all stars, she could escape home, wander on her own lawn in bare feet and gaze up at her own stars.

All the same, missing Stew, it was terribly easy to go through a bottle of wine of an evening.

‘I shall buy a new car and get a dog,’ vowed Janna.

3

From the middle of August, Janna was in and out of her new school familiarizing herself with everything, palling up with Wally Bristow, the site manager, who like most site managers was the fountain of all wisdom.

Wally had short, slicked-back brown hair and wise grey eyes in a round, smiling face as dependable and reassuring as a digestive biscuit. Living but three minutes from Larks, he was always on call except on Thursday evening, when he and a team of bell-ringers rehearsed for Sunday’s service in St Mary’s Church next door, or on Saturday afternoons when Larkminster Rovers played at home. He was inordinately proud of a good-looking son, Ben, who’d risen to sergeant in the Royal Engineers.

Janna’s heart swelled when she saw Wally had repainted the board outside the school in dark blue gloss and written in gold letters: ‘LARKMINSTER COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL. Head Teacher: Janna Curtis’.

‘Oh Wally, I’ve got to make every child feel they’re the greatest and discover each one’s special talents.’

‘Smokin’, spittin’, swearin’, runnin’ away, fightin’ and urinatin’ in phone boxes,’ intoned Wally. ‘As we can’t fill the places, we get all the dropouts that get sacked or rejected by other schools.’

Wally showed her Smokers’, a steep, grassy bank down which the children vanished so they could smoke, do drugs, drink and even shag unobserved by the staffroom.

‘I don’t want to frighten you, Janna,’ he went on as they lunched on cans of lager and Marks and Spencer’s prawn sandwiches, ‘but the kids are running wild. Most of them only come in to trash the place and play football. The rest are off havin’ babies or appearin’ in court. They’re demoralized by the staff, who are either off sick from “stress”’ – Wally gave a snort of disbelief – ‘old dinosaurs hanging on for retirement, or commies who grumble at everything and threaten strike action if you keep them a minute late.’

Wally also warned her of tricky teachers: Mike Pitts, the deputy head, who taught maths, did the timetable and who was always burning joss sticks and scented candles to disguise the drink fumes; and Cara Sharpe, who’d glared at Janna at her interview.

‘Everyone hates Cara, but humours her. She wanted Mike as head, and her to get deputy head to look good on her CV. She and Mike are thick as thieves. Don’t trust them. Cara’s a bitch to the kids.’

‘Not any more she won’t be. Where are the playing fields?’

‘Don’t have any: they were sold off by the council. The rest of the land is on too much of a slope and you can’t swing a gerbil in the playground.’

The playground was indeed awful: a square of tarmac surrounded by broken rusty railings with no basketball nets and two overhanging sycamores, whose leaves, curling and covered in sinister black spots, provided the only shade.

Everything had deteriorated since Janna’s interview in May. A lower-angled sun revealed damp patches and peeling plaster in every classroom. The once lovely garden and parkland were choked with thistles and nettles. Pale phlox and red-hot pokers were broken or bent double by bindweed which seemed to symbolize the red tape threatening to strangle Janna’s hopes. An in-tray of forms to be filled in nearly hit the ceiling.

The GCSE results out in late August had dropped to four per cent of the pupils gaining A–C grades in five subjects. Only these gave Larks points in the league tables, and only Cara Sharpe and Phil Pierce, the gentle head of science who’d met Janna at the station, had got most of their children through.

‘Phil’s a good bloke,’ said Wally, ‘firm, but very fair. He’s always online to answer pupils’ homework questions. The kids love him.’

‘Why’s he still here?’ asked Janna gloomily.

‘He’s very loyal. Trouble with kids here, they leave at sixteen so they don’t have to come back and face the music of terrible GCSE results.’

‘Where do they go on to?’

‘The dole queue or the nick.’

Janna kicked off by tackling her office, which was full of the presence of Mike Pitts, who’d done her job for the spring and summer terms and who clearly hadn’t wanted people to follow his movements. The door had a security lock and a heavy dark blind pulled down over the big window hiding a view over the playground to houses, the River Fleet and grey-green woods beyond.

Janna insisted a doubtful Wally remove both lock and blind.

‘I want to be accessible to both children and staff.’

Shaking his head, Wally got out his screwdriver.

‘It really ain’t surprising [he sang in a rich baritone],

That we’re rising, rising, rising,

Soon we’ll reach Division One.

Premier, Wembley, here we come.’

‘What’s that song?’ demanded Janna.

‘Larkminster Rovers’s battle hymn. We got to the second division last season. Now we’ve got to stay there.’

‘Larks is going up the league tables too [sang Janna],

Soon we’ll reach Division One.

Premier, Wembley, here we come.’

Wally nearly dropped his screwdriver as her sweet soaring voice rattled the window panes.

Having scraped scented candle wax off the furniture and scrubbed the room from top to toe, Janna and Wally painted her office white, hung cherry-red curtains and laid rush matting on the floor.

‘I need a settee and a couple of armchairs so people can relax when they come in here.’

‘The kids’ll trash them, the settee’ll be an incitement to rape or teachers grumbling and those white walls won’t last a minute,’ sighed Wally.

‘Then we’ll cover them with pictures.’

Up went
Desiderata
and
Hold the Dream
embroidered by Janna’s Auntie Glad, followed by big photographs of Wharfedale, Fountains Abbey and Stew’s photograph of all the children and teachers at Redfords waving goodbye in front of a square grey school building.

On a side table Janna put Stew’s Staffordshire cow and a big bunch of Michaelmas daisies and late roses rescued from Larks’s flower beds.

‘My goodness, you have been working hard,’ mocked Rowan Merton when she looked in a week before term started.

As a working wife and mother with photographs of her husband and two little girls all over her office, on the door of which was printed ‘Assistant to the Head’, Rowan prided herself on juggling. She had wound Mike Pitts round her little finger and clearly didn’t fancy extending herself for a woman – particularly one in a denim mini, with a smudged face and her red curls in a ponytail.

‘Have you flown in to rescue us?’ she mocked. ‘Like Red Adair in a skirt?’

‘No, I’ve come to show you how to save yourselves,’ retorted Janna tartly, then, remembering Stew’s advice about not antagonizing people, added, ‘How are Scarlet and Meagan? They must have loved having you to themselves in the holidays.’

Rowan relented fractionally and said they had, then launched into a list of staff requests for broken chairs, desks, leaking windows and computers to be mended.

‘And Mrs Sharpe wants a blind. The sun casts such a glare, no one can read the whiteboard in the afternoon.’

Cara Sharpe’s own glare, Janna would have thought, would see off any competition.

‘And my anglepoise lamp collapses without the aid of two bulldog clips and the angle being wedged open by the last
Education Year Book
,’ went on Rowan. ‘If Wally could sort all those things out before term begins?’

‘Wally’s flat out,’ snapped Janna.

Rowan glanced round the office. ‘Yes, I can see. Nice settee. We have to watch the budget now S and C hold the purse strings.’

Slowly, Janna familiarized herself with classrooms, halls, gym and labyrinthine adjoining corridors in the main building, which was known as School House. Fifty yards away, the annexe, known as Appletree because it had been built on the site of an old orchard, housed the labs, music, design and technology and food technology departments.

Then she pored over the children’s personal files, counting the asylum-seekers, Indians, Pakistanis and Afro-Caribbeans – far fewer than at Redfords. She had also noticed lots of BNPs and swastikas amongst the graffiti: she would have to watch out for racist bullying. She was now frantically trying to memorize the names before term began.