(2/20) Village Diary (6 page)

'Can't you find a home for the other one, Jimmy?' I asked turning aside hastily from all the disturbing implications of Joseph's kindly remark.

'Mrs Bates up by the Post Office was going to have it, but she've got a puppy now, that Bill Bates give her for her birthday. No one else don't want it.'

'Who thinks they could have it?' I canvassed. The whole of Fairacre School instantly raised eager hands.

'Well,' I temporized, you'll have to ask your mothers, of course. Meanwhile, Jimmy, I'd keep the other one, and if someone wants it I will hand it over.'

At this happy outcome the noise was terrific. The infants showed their joy by jumping heavily, fists doubled into their stomachs, on to the resounding floor-boards. The older ones cheered and banged their desk lids, and we were all but deafened. Mr Willet, entering at this moment said: 'Mafeking relieved?' and was so taken with his own shaft of wit that he broke into gusty laughter, and I began to wonder if order would ever be restored.

The kittens, with remarkable composure, sat in the straw and washed their paws elegantly, despising disorder—and death itself—with the same fastidious good breeding that the French aristocrats showed in the shadow of the guillotine.

'Sweets for quiet children!' I roared above the tumult. It worked, as always, like a charm. The infants fled into their own room—being careful to leave the dividing door open so that I could see their exemplary demeanour—my own children melted into their desks, crossed their arms high up on their chests, put their sturdy country boots decorously side by side, and glared ahead at 'The Angelus' behind my desk, with unblinking gaze. Only when the sweet tin was in Patrick's grasp, and the fruit drops were being handed round, did they relax and breathe again.

There are some foolish and narrow-minded theorists who would condemn the use of a sweet tin in schools, dismissing this valuable and pleasant adjunct to discipline with such harsh words as 'bribery' and 'pandering to animal greed.' I stoutly defend the sweet tin. If the good Lord has seen fit to provide sweets and children's tastes to match them, then let us take advantage of the tools that lie at hand.

Linda carried the basket to the other room and introduced the kittens to their new bed.

`I think I'll have the tabby one,' she said, as she returned and closed the dividing door behind her. She brushed a straw from her immaculate grey flannel pinafore frock and resumed her place. The important business of the afternoon now over, we addressed ourselves to 'Poetry,' at the silent, but stern, behest of the time-table on one side and the school clock on the other.

I met Doctor Martin as I was going to the grocer's after school. He said that he had quite recovered from his illness. I wondered if his own, or Boots', cough mixture was responsible for his return to health, but did not say this aloud.

He was just off, he said, to pay six calls on people he supposed he would find in better health than he was himself. He had never known his surgery so besieged. After he had rattled off, in his disreputable old car, I went on my errand, pondering, not for the first time, on the remarkable self-flattery of most doctors. Do they honestly think—always excepting the five per cent of humanity that is incorrigibly neurotic—that some people go to see them for pleasure? Do they seriously imagine that sensible men and women subject themselves to the miseries of doctors' waiting-rooms, of cold medical implements, and of colder medical fingers, with the further possibility of such horrors as injections and enemas to come, for the fun of the thing—or, as one would be led to believe from comments dropped by some doctors, for the express purpose of adding to the burden that already breaks the doctor's back? When one hears such a cheerful and sturdy medical man as our beloved Doctor Martin talking in this fashion, it poses a number of unanswerable questions.

On Saturday, the village was shocked to hear of the death of young Peter Lamb. He was killed in a motorcycle accident on the way home from a football match in Caxley in the afternoon. He was seventeen, and the only child of the Lambs, who keep the Post Office. The motor-cycle was their present to him on his last birthday. He spent hours polishing the gleaming monster on the lawn at the side of their house. I taught him for only a year, as he went on to Mr Annett at Beech Green at eleven, but I remember him as a very happy boy.

Mr Willet told me this ghastly news after morning service. He was pacing among the graves on his melancholy sexton's business of choosing a site for the grave he must dig.

'Terrible business,' he said, blowing out his ragged moustache with a sigh. 'The old slip away, and there's some left to grieve, but often their friends that would have taken it hardest have gone before. But a young fellow like this—well, miss, 'tis not just his own that loses him, 'tis every mortal in the village.'

('Send not to know for whom the bed tolls,' whispered a voice in my head, as Mr Willet echoed John Donne across the centuries.)

'Take the cricket team. Long stop he was. We've got no one like him to fill that place. I suppose, when it comes to it, John Pringle will have to move over from deep field and that lily-livered young Bryant that flinches at mid-on will have what he's always wanted and be put out in the field.' Mr Willet stepped round a tomb-stone. 'Take the bell-ringers. More shifting round to train up a new chap for Peter's place. Hard work for us all, you'll see. Ah! He'll be missed sadly!' ('It tolls for thee!')

Nowhere do John Donne's words, 'No man is an island' more poignantly apply than in a small community like a village. As a pebble in a pond spreads its ripples far about, so has this blow affected us all.

'Peter used to mend my bike for me,' nine-year-old Eric said, emerging from the vestry, where he had been blowing the organ.

'He always took my wireless batteries into Caxley to be re-charged,' said old Mrs Bates, among the knot of villagers at the church gate.

'He was going out steady with that girl at Beech Green. She'll take it hard, I don't doubt,' said another.

As the vicar said later, from the pulpit: 'We are indeed members one of another.'

But there was more to all this sober mourning than grief for one young man. The village was robbed, and we were all—every soul in Fairacre—the poorer for it.

Miss Clare came over to tea and spent the evening. The little cat, still with me—and, I imagine for good now-rolled ecstatically on the hearth-rug in the warmth of the fire. Miss Clare was knitting a green pullover and the ball of wool had to be rescued every now and again.

We had talked, naturally, of poor Peter Lamb and Miss Clare surprised me by saying that the pullover had been intended for him.

'He always dug over my vegetable patch every spring and autumn, and I could never get him to take any money. Sometimes he'd take cigarettes, but this time I thought I'd get on with the pullover for next winter.'

'What will you do with it now?' I asked.

She looked across at me with her wise calm gaze.

'I shall finish it,' she said composedly. 'A lot of work has gone into it, and I shall finish it as well as I can and give it to the cricket club.' She smoothed it lovingly. 'It will make a nice prize for their Whist Drive next winter when they raise money for the club.'

This eminently sensible and realistic approach I could not help but admire. So, surely, should all life's buffets be met—with dignity and good sense, but how many of us have Miss Clare's courage?

'I can't think what to call this kitten,' I said, to lighten our solemnity a little. 'What do you suggest?'

Miss Clare addressed herself to this problem with as much thought as she had to the right disposal of Peter's pullover.

'I have always called mine one after the other, plain "Puss",' she admitted, frowning with concentration, 'but you could think of something more interesting.'

I went on to enlarge on the difficulties of naming a cat. I abhorred the idea of anything—as dear Eric Blore (in 'Top Hat,' I think) said with a divine exhalation of breath—'too
whimsical:
None of your 'La Belle Fifinella' or even 'Miss Bertha Briggs' for my respectable Fairacre cat!

'And because he's black and white I'm not sinking to such obvious nonsense as "Whisky" or "Magpie,"' I went on, now well launched. 'Nor do I like Tom, Dick, Harry, Jane, Peggy, Betty, or anything, for that matter, which sounds as though I'm talking about a lodger, to people who don't know my circumstances.'

'It certainly is difficult,' Miss Clare agreed, and let her knitting needles fall into her lap.

We lapsed into silent thought. By the firelight I could see that Miss Clare was deep in meditation. Her face was so wistful that I imagined that her mind had strayed back to the all—pervading sadness of young Peter's death. Perhaps she too, I thought, is feeling the penetrating truth that Donne summed up for us.

She raised meditative eyes and looked earnestly at me.

'Come to think of it,' she said slowly, 'I did have
one
cat called Tom.'

Oh lovely, lovely life that can toss us from horror to hilarity, without giving us time to take breath! No matter how dark it may be, yet, unfailingly, 'Cheerfulness breaks in.'

MARCH

M
ARCH
has come in like a lion, with a vengeance, this year. The wind has whipped round to the east again, and had—storms have been frequent and heavy. A number of the children were caught in one on the way to school and Joseph Coggs and his two small sisters were in tears with the painful rapping they had taken. Their clothes were quite inadequate—not a thick coat between them, and the two little girls in skimpy cotton frocks and layers of dirty jumpers and cardigans on top. Of course their legs are mauve with cold and they look chilled to the marrow.

It always surprises me to see how many of the mothers fail to clothe children consistently. The little things come to school in the winter with, perhaps, a snug woollen bonnet and scarf, a thick coat, and then there comes a long expanse of cold mottled legs, terminating, more often than not, in minute white cotton socks. Mrs Moffat makes Linda neat tailored leggings, and of course a few of the children go into sensible corduroy dungarees for winter wear, but the common feeling seems to be that if they are muffled up above the waist, their legs can take care of themselves. The number of messages I get in the cold months explaining absences due to 'stummer-cake' or a 'chill inside' does not surprise me.

The battle of the Wellingtons continues to rage through this bad spell. I will not allow the children to wear them all day in school and insist that a pair of slippers, or failing that, a thick pair of old socks, are brought to school to wear indoors.

'But my dad wears his all the time,' they protest. 'My mum says what's good enough for my dad's good enough for me!' One can hardly retort that the anti-social condition of dad's feet is only one of the reasons for insisting on changing one's rubber boots, but gradually, by dint of hygiene lessons and fulsome praise for those good children who do bring slippers as requested, we are slowly getting an improvement in this direction.

Mrs Annett has given in her notice, which means that she leaves Fairacre School at the end of April. We shall all miss her sorely. The vicar has already started drafting an advertisement for insertion in
The Teachers World,
and is almost in despair about finding suitable lodgings for the new teacher in the village.

'I shouldn't cross that bridge yet,' I told him. 'We may not get any applicants for the post.'

'Oh my dear Miss Read! Please, please!' protested the poor man, beating his leopard-skin gloves together and creating a light shower of moth-eaten fur in the classroom. 'I cannot bear to think what the future holds for Fairacre School. Whatever happens it
must
not close! It shall not close!' Here the vicar looked and sounded as militant as Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy when he too faced the extinction of a body much-beloved. 'But, sometimes, I wonder—poor Springbourne, you know. I hate to pass that little empty school, with its dreadful blank windows. And dear Miss Davis, they tell me, is finding that large school in Caxley much too much for her, and is struggling with nearly fifty six-year-olds!'

I said how sorry I was for her. She is an elderly gentle woman, who smoothed the path of her little flock at Springbourne for many years. The bustle of Caxley, as well as a tiresome bus journey must exhaust her considerably.

'And I have heard,' added Mr Partridge, with horror darkening his benevolent countenance, 'that some of those children-young as they are—as Openly Defiant!'

He looked round at our own meek lambs who were busy colouring border patterns in a somnolent way, and his expression softened. I hoped that he would not notice the pronounced bulge in Ernest's cheek, which, I guessed, harboured a disgusting lump of bubble-gum. His eye travelled lovingly over the class, and he sighed happily.

'How fortunate we are here!' he said, 'they are dear, good children, all of them!' And, heavy with bubble-gum guilt, as some of them obviously were, I could not help but agree with him.