(1/20) Village School (13 page)

'And all the time,' I told them, 'the world is going round and round, like this!' I twirled the globe vigorously, with one finger on the Russian Steppes. 'Which accounts for the night and the day,' I added. I regretted this remark as soon as I saw the bewildered faces before me, for this meant a further lesson, and one, as I knew from bitter experience, that was always difficult.

'How d'you mean-night and day?' came the inevitable query. I looked at the clock. Ten minutes before the dinner van was due to arrive—I launched into the deep.

'Come and stand over here, John, and be the sun. Don't move at all. Now watch!' I twirled the globe again. 'Here's England, facing John—the sun, that is. It's bright and warm here, shining on England, but as I turn the globe what happens?'

There was a stupefied silence. The older children were thinking hard, but the babies, very sensibly, had ceased to listen to such dull stuff and were sucking thumbs happily, their eyes roving round the unaccustomed pictures of their older brothers' and sisters' room.

'England moves away?' hazarded one groping soul.

'Yes, it moves further and further round, until it is in darkness. It's night-time now for us.'

'Well, who's got the sun now?' asked someone who was really getting the hang of this mystery.

'Australia, New Zealand, all the countries on this side of the globe. Then, as the world turns, they gradually revolve back into darkness and we come round again. And so on!' I twisted the globe merrily, and they watched it spin with silent satisfaction.

'You know,' said John at last, summing up the wonder succinctly, 'someone thought that out pretty good!'

The dinner van was twenty minutes late and I began to feel worried. Throughout the geography lesson the clang and scrape of Mr Willet's spade had been heard as he cleared a path through the playground. I went out now to see if he had any news.

He stumped off to the road for me and I heard voices in the distance. His face was alight with the importance of bad news, when he returned.

'They've just rung Mr Roberts, miss. He's taking his tractor out to Bember's Corner to try and right the van. It come off the road into the ditch, they says!' He puffed his moustache in and out in pleasurable excitement.

'Is Mrs Crossley all right?'

'Couldn't say, I'm sure; but not likely, is it? I mean, bound to be shook up, if there ain't nothing broken, which is only to be expected.' He fairly glowed with the countryman's morbid delight in someone else's misfortune. I thought of my hungry family.

'Mr Willet,' I begged, 'do please go to the shop and get some bread for the children and tins of stew.' I made rapid mental calculations. About six would be able to go home and find their mothers there, but I should have at least twelve to provide for.

'Yes,' I continued, 'two loaves, six tins of stewed steak and two pounds of apples. And half a pound of toffees, please.' It seemed a good mixed diet and I doubted whether the vitamin content would be as well balanced as it should be; but it would be nourishing and quickly prepared. I provided him with money and a basket and returned to send home the children that I could and to break the news to the others.

Dinner was a huge success. Mrs Finch-Edwards and the children had heaved one of the long tables from the infants' room and set it by the stove, while I opened tins of steak and mixed up Oxo cubes and cut bread over in my kitchen, with Cathy Waites and little Jimmy as awed assistants. Jimmy wandered round the kitchen inspecting the equipment.

'And what's this, miss?'

'That's for mashing potatoes.'

'My mum uses a fork. What's this?'

'A tea-strainer. Pass the salt, Cathy.'

'What for?'

'To catch the tea-leaves. And the pepper, dear.'

'What do you want to catch tea-leaves for?'

'Because I don't like them in my teacup. I think we'll start the other loaf now.'

'What do you do with them when you've caught them?'

'Throw them away.'

'Well, why catch them if you throws them out after?'

'Cathy,' I said firmly, 'take the tea-strainer to the sink and show him with water and bits of bread crumb, while I finish this off!'

The demonstration was successful, and when I presented Jimmy with an old strainer, to keep the tea-leaves out of his own cup at home, he was enraptured.

Dinner was eaten amid great good-humour and to the accompaniment of metallic hammerings from next door, where Mr Rogers, complete with 'clobber' was attacking the flue-pipe. It was, as he had foretold, simply corroded soot which had flaked away and fallen across a turn in the pipe, preventing a draught, and he departed in a comfortable glow of self-esteem.

The snow had begun to fall again, and Mrs Pringle, when she arrived to wash-up, was plastered with snow where she had faced the wind. Her expression was martyred and her limp much accentuated.

'If it's no better by half-past two,' I said to Mrs Finch-Edwards, as we watched the snow whirling in eddies across Mr Willet's newly-made path, 'we'll close school and get them home early.'

'I shall have to wheel my bicycle most of the way to Springbourne,' said Mrs Finch-Edwards. 'My hubby was awfully worried about me coming on it this morning. Like a hen with one chick, he is!' She dusted her massive torso down with a gratified smirk. 'I sometimes wonder how he ever got along before he met me—with nothing to worry over, the silly boy!'

I was about to say that, surely, she had told me herself that he used to keep pigs, but thinking that this might be misconstrued, I held my tongue.

At half-past two the weather was even worse, and we buttoned children into coats, turned up collars, crossed woolly scarves over bulging fronts and tied them into fringed bustles behind, sorted out gloves and wellingtons and with final exhortations to keep together, to go
straight
home and (forlorn hope!) to desist from snowballing each other on the way, we sent the little band out into the wind and storm.

For three days and three nights the countryside was swept by snowstorms. Only three children arrived one morning and I rang the local education office for permission to close school. The snow-ploughs came out from Caxley to clear the main roads and a breakdown lorry was able to get to the abandoned dinner van and tow it back to the garage. Mrs Crossley, despite blood-curdling rumours, was luckily unhurt.

At last the snow stopped, and on the fourth day the sun shone from a sky as limpid as a June morning's. The snow glittered like sugar icing, but the temperature remained so low that there was no hope of a thaw. Mr Roberts had his duck-pond swept clear of snow and invited the village to skate. As the pond is a large one, and nowhere deeper than two feet, mothers were only too delighted to send the children who had been milling about their feet for the past week or two, and once school was over—for we opened again when the snowstorms stopped—the children raced joyfully across the road to a superb slide at one edge of the pond.

The older generation dug out skates, and so keen were they that Mr Roberts switched on the headlights of his lorry and evening parties swirled and skimmed like rare winter swallows while the ice held.

Dr Martin and his wife brought Miss Clare, and the vicar, in a dashing red and white ski-ing jacket over his clerical greys and the inevitable leopard-skin gloves encasing his hands, brought his wife. Miss Parr came, with a sister who must have been eighty, and all these elderly people came into their own. They waltzed, they glided, they swerved magnificently in figures-of-eight, while we younger ones tottered tensely round on borrowed skates, or, more ignobly still, pushed old kitchen chairs before us and marvelled at the grace and beauty of those who were our seniors by thirty years or more.

Mrs Roberts, with true farmhouse hospitality, threw open her great kitchen, and sizzling sausages and hard-boiled eggs and hot dripping toast were offered to the hungry skaters, with beer or cocoa to wash down the welcome food. For a week the fun continued; then the church weathercock slewed round, a warm west wind rushed to us across the downs, the roofs began to drip and little rivers trickled and gurgled along the lanes of Fairacre.

The thaw had come; we packed away our skates, and Mr Roberts' ducks went back to their pond again.

13. Sad Affair of the Eggs

J
OSEPH
C
OGGS
sidled round the half-shut door of his cottage. The baby's pram was just inside and wedged the door securely. After the February sunshine the little house was dark, and smelt of babies' washing and burnt potatoes.

Joseph put the cap that he was carrying very carefully on the table.

'Mum!' he shouted hopefully. There was no reply. He went through to the lean-to scullery and saw his mother through the open door feeling baby clothes against her cheek. Around her, on the ragged hedge and on the unkempt gooseberry bushes were innumerable tattered garments, drying as best they could.

'Got something for you!' said Joseph, in his hoarse cracked voice. His eyes gleamed with excitement.

'What? Some old trash from school again?' queried his mother crossly.

'Ah! I got a little house I done a 's' afternoon-but I got something special for you!' He tugged at her arm, and, snatching a few garments from the bushes as she went, his mother submitted to being pulled back to the house.

Proudly Joseph displayed the contents of his cap—five brown eggs, with the bloom of that day's laying still upon them.

'Where d'you get 'em?' inquired his mother suspiciously.

'Mrs Roberts give 'em to me,' said her son, but his fingers drummed uncomfortably on the table edge and his eyes remained downcast. His mother thought quickly. Five eggs would be a godsend with things as they were. Now that Arthur was back regular at 'The Beetle and Wedge,' there was mighty little handed over to her for food.

It was a pity they'd stopped teasing her husband about that night at Willet's, for while that had been going on Arthur had only dared to call in for a quick one and had escaped from their ribald tongues as hastily as he could. She'd noticed the difference in her housekeeping money. She looked again at the tempting eggs. Why, she could make something real nice for the kids with them, and Mrs Roberts wasn't likely to miss them anyway. She spoke kindly to her son.

'That was nice of her—a real lady, Mrs Roberts! I'll put 'em safe in the cupboard.' And she whisked them hastily away. She didn't want awkward questions from Arthur anyway, and somehow, well—out of sight was out of mind, wasn't it? And least said, soonest mended! Sensible sayings, both of 'em!

'And this is what I done today,' Joseph's voice broke in on her thoughts. 'Miss Gray done the door for me, but I cut up the lines myself.' He held up a small paper house, grubby and woefully askew. His face glowed with the pride of creation. 'Ain't it lovely?'

'Pity they don't learn you nothing better than that stuff,' said his mother shortly, still smarting from a guilty conscience. 'Them new teachers don't half fill you up with rubbish. Time you was learnt something useful.' But she suffered him to prop it on the window-sill and there he leant, gazing through the tiny open door, at the window beyond. Tomorrow he'd cut out little men and women from the paper, he told himself happily, and they could all live together in his house, his very own house. He sighed blissfully at the thought of all the joy ahead.

Next door Jimmy and Cathy Waites were at tea. This was what Mrs Waites called 'A scratch meal,' as they would be having high tea soon after six when the rest of the family returned from Caxley.

As the children chattered together and munched bread and shop honey, she studied an advertisement in her favourite women's weekly magazine.

'I've half a mind to,' she murmured to herself, 'only one and three! It's a saving really; that last lot of nail-varnish was never rightly my colour.' She inspected her hands minutely. Despite housework and vegetable peeling they were still pretty.

'Don't want to let myself go,' she told herself peering down at her reflection in the glass-bottomed tray. 'Be as slummocky as the creature next door!' And with one of her sharp nails she began to claw out 'This Week's Amazing Offer To Our Readers.'

Jimmy was intent on the label on the honey jar. He now knew his sounds and was beginning to find that, by piecing them together, real words sometimes evolved. He was agog to read, to be able to sit, as Cathy did, with her head in a book, sometimes looking sad, sometimes laughing, nicking over the magic pages that unrolled a story for her.

'M
AD FROM
—' he began painfully.

'It's got an E on it,' said Cathy exasperatedly. 'You know what Miss Gray said! It says its
name
not its sound! Not '
MAD
,' silly, '
MADE
!'

'M
ADE FROM
' repeated Jimmy meekly, and began maddeningly on 'pure' with all its phonetic pitfalls. Cathy fidgeted restlessly, as he struggled. A thought struck her.

'Mum, I never told you yesterday! I've got to do the next bit of that exam, next week, Miss Read says. If I gets through I can go to Caxley.'

Mrs Waites looked up from the scraps of paper, round-eyed.

'Well, aren't you a one! My, I'm glad, Cath! You do your best, love, and if you gets it we'll let you go somehow.'

Visions of uniforms, hockey sticks, satchels and other paraphernalia flickered before her. It would cost a mint of money. But there, others managed, didn't they? And if the kid was clever enough to get to Caxley High School, or whatever its new-fangled name was, she'd see she was turned out nice. She looked again at her daughter's dark head, close to Jimmy's flaxen one, as she explained the intricacies of 'sugar' to him; and let herself dwell, for an indulgent minute, on the memory of the dark good looks of Cathy's father.

'He was a card, and no mistake,' she thought, blushing slightly. She pulled herself together and rose to clear the table. No good thinking on things past. Some people would say she'd been bad, but she didn't believe anything that could make you so happy could be
all
bad. She stood still, butter-dish in hand, puzzling over the niceties of moral conduct.