(5/20)Over the Gate (18 page)

'Let's go out!'

There was a shocked silence. The sound of a bee droning up and down the open door could be heard distinctly as the children waited to see what my reaction would be. Sometimes a remark like this will make me fly clean off the handle, and they shivered with apprehension. Ernest's face was scarlet at the effrontery of his young brother.

I looked at the expectant children.

'What about it? Shall we?' I asked.

There was a rapturous roar of agreement, and a general stampede to the lobby.

The air outside was wonderful, heady and honeyed with hundreds of unseen flowers. The elm trees at the corner of the playground were rosy with buds, and noisy with rooks at their building.

We straggled down the village street between the beds of velvety polyanthus and the neat kitchen gardens striped with vegetable seedlings. Birds flashed across our path, dogs panted on cottage doorsteps and a cuckoo's call see-sawed across the afternoon.

All this, of course, was what had held my class in thrall—the compelling imperious spell of spring. Of what use were the frieze, the crayoned sun, the poster, the laden nature table and the captive frogs' spawn? They were but substitutes for the real thing that exploded all around them. It was the babe among us, young Richard, still in touch with the vital stuff of living, who had led us unerringly to reality.

We made our way slowly up the sunny slopes of the downs before throwing ourselves down on to the dry springy turf in order to revel to the full in the glory of a warm spring day.

Below us spread the village like some pictorial map. The trees were misted with young leaves, and here and there a flurry of white blossom lit up a garden. I thought of our poem left neglected, but felt no regret. Let us savour this now, and then come to Robert Bridges' poem, 'recollecting it in tranquillity,' was mv feeling.

A row or two of flapping washing caught the eye, and a herd of black and white Friesians, belonging to Mr Roberts, looked like toys as they grazed peacefully in the field next to the school. I gazed at it all with particular interest this afternoon, for I had a problem on my mind. Would it, I wondered, be a good thing to leave Fairacre?

I suppose that most people feel unsettled in the early spring. There must be something in the rising of the sap and the general urgency of the season that makes us long for change and movement. I read the 'Appointments Vacant' at the end of
The Times Educational Supplement
with unusual fervour during March and April, and usually find that this pastime calms the fever in my blood. What about this job in Sicily, I ask myself? Would I ready be able to '
TEACH ENGLISH
by Direct Method'? Come to think of it, are
any
of my teaching methods direct? Is the teaching of'Spring Goeth All In White' direct, when one abandons the task to scramble up the springy turf of the downs, for instance?

There is a wonderful post offered in Barbados and another in New Zealand, and several in Dar-Es-Salaam (I only consider those in a warm climate, you notice), but, alas, I am not a communicant member of the Presbyterian Church, nor am I qualified to teach practical brickwork or plumbing. I browse among these delights over my cup of tea, when the children of Fairacre have run home and only the voice of Mrs Pringle, at her after-school cleaning, is heard in the land. After half an hour or so of this mental dallying, I rouse myself, take stock of my nice little school house, the fun I have in Fairacre, and decide I am better off where I am. In any case, the thought of filling up forms and asking people to give references for me, if need be, is enough to dissuade me from any serious application, as a rule. By the end of April my spring fever has usually abated. Fairacre looks more seductive than ever. I find, surprisingly, that I am in love with all the children, and even look upon Mrs Pringle with an indulgent eye. Such is the power of warm weather.

But this year my feelings were stronger. If I really wanted promotion, as headmistress of a larger school, then it was time I stirred myself before I became too decrepit to be considered at all. As Amy, my old college friend, frequently tells me, and reiterated with considerable force the other evening when I mentioned a particular post I had seen advertised, I have been in Fairacre long enough. It might be better for the school, as well as for me, to have a change.

The job which had caught my eye was the headship of a junior and infants' school in south Devon. I knew the little town fairly well from visiting it at holiday times, and because I had friends in the neighbourhood. It was a market town, rather smaller than Caxley, about five miles from the coast, and situated away from the main roads which were so busy in summer time.

I remembered the school particularly. It was a pleasant old budding, with a new wing recently added, and an attractive school house adjoining it. A peach tree spread its branches fan-wise over its front wall, which faced south, and at the back there was a sheltered walled garden with some fine fruit trees and lawns. One could be very happy indeed there, I had no doubt, and when my friends wrote to tell me of the vacancy and to urge me to apply for it, I fell to thinking seriously of die matter.

The biggest attraction to me was the climate. Fairacre can be bitterly cold in the winter, and the number of gnarled rheumaticky old people in our midst constitutes an awful warning to those with a tendency to rheumatism and its allied diseases. Apart from an occasional bout of influenza I ailed nothing, but the last winter or two I had been having twinges of rheumatism which I did not like to think of as simply old age. Fairacre School, too, was renowned for its draughts and the inefficiency of its heating system, and latterly I had come to dread the winter months with their fierce blast of bitter air from the sky-light above my desk, concentrated on the nape of my neck, and the particularly spiteful draught that hit one round the ankles and came from the icy wastes of the outside lobby.

It would be good to work in a snug budding tucked into the side of a hill, and with most of its windows facing south. The very thought of that soft mild air made me feel hopeful. I read my friend's advice. I read the advertisement a dozen times. I looked out of my school house window-it was a blustery April evening with a spatter of hail now and again—and I bravely sent for the application forms.

That had been a week ago. The forms awaited my attention still, propped behind the coffee-pot on the dresser, my usual filing place. I must get them off this week if I ready intended to apply. I looked again at Fairacrc, spread below me, and sighed at the difficulties of making up one's mind.

'You got the belly-ache?' asked Joseph Coggs solicitously, sitting down beside me.

'No, no,' I assured him. 'I was just thinking how pretty the village looked from here.'

A few more children left their pursuits to join us.

'It's the prettiest place in England,' declared Ernest stoutly.

'Sright!' echoed young Richard loyally.

'My auntie,' said John, 'lives at Winchelsea and she says
that's
the prettiest place.'

'Maybe she don't know Fairacre,' suggested someone reasonably. 'What's it like anyway—this ol' Winklesea?'

'Winchelseal'
replied John, nettled. 'Well, it's a funny place, because it used to be right by the seaside and now there's a whole lot of flat fields between the town and the sea.'

'Below the down the stranded town
What may betide forlornly waits,
'

I quoted, with what I thought was rather a beautiful inflection. John looked startled.

'I dunno about that, but that's what my auntie told me. She said the sea was right up to the town once.'

'Likely, ain't it?' said Joseph Coggs scornfully. I rose to my feet. I was glad to have some interruption to my thoughts, and it was time we were getting back.

'I'll get the map out when we arc in school,' I promised them, 'and you shall see for yourselves. First one to reach the lane has a sweet! Off you go!'

Shrieking and squeaking, they tumbled down the steep slope of the grassy lull leaving me to descend more circumspectly behind them.

In the lane, where the rough track ends and the tarmac begins, Dr Martin's car waited outside Laburnum Villas. As I approached the vociferous mob awaiting me—each claiming that he had arrived first—the doctor came out of one of the ugly pair of houses and watched, with some amusement, as I quelled the not.

'Playing truant?' he asked. I said we were.

'Very sensible too. We none of us get enough fresh air these days. When I first came to Fairacre it was lack of decent food which gave me most of my patients. Now it's too much food, and not enough air and exercise.'

He climbed into Ins car with a grunt of exertion, then leant from the window and laughed.

'I need more myself,' he said. 'How's my old friend Mrs Pringle? Still suffering with her leg?'

'When it suits her,' I replied. There are no secrets to hide from Doctor Martin. He has known us all in Fairacre much too long to be hoodwinked. Forty or fifty years, I thought suddenly, Doctor Martin has lived and worked in Fairacre! I had a sudden desire to ask him if he had ever felt like moving, but restrained myself.

'Are you feeling quite fit?' he asked, an observant eye cocked quizzically upon me.

'Yes, thank you,' I said hastily. 'Just thinking about something, that's all.'

'You look a trifle pale to me,' said the doctor, twinkling. 'Is it love?'

'No, indeed!' I said, with spirit. 'I'm too old for such capers. More likely to be advancing senility. I'm beginning to suspect that rheumatism's trying to infiltrate my old bones.'

'You aren't the only one in Fairacre,' said the doctor, starting his car. 'Let me know if it gets any worse, that's all. We get such plaguey cold winters here, that's the trouble.'

He waved cheerfully and drove off, hooting to shoo my children to the side of the narrow lane.

The memory of that south-facing Devon school returned to me with overwhelming intensity, as I made my way back to Fairacre School amongst my clamorous puplis.

'Can I get it out now?' asked John as we clanged across the door-scraper.

'Get what out?' I asked bemused.

'Why, the map! You said as you was going to show us Winchelsea, and all that!' He sounded aggrieved. I pulled myself together, and approached the map cupboard.

It is called the map cupboard, and does indeed house the maps, but that is not all. Somehow, everything that has no proper home gets thrown in the map cupboard. There are cricket stumps, old tennis shoes, a pile of china paint palettes which have not been used for years, some dilapidated
Rainbow Annuals
adored by the children during wet dinner hours, part of a train set, a large tin full of assorted pieces of Meccano, and a rusty hurricane lamp which, we tell each other, 'might come in hanky.'

The maps jostle together in one corner, and ever since I came to Fairacre I have meant to label them properly and hang them in some sort of order. In practice, I go through
Muscles of the Human Body, The Disposition of the Tribes of Israel, The Resuscitation of those Suffering from Electrocution,
the tonic sol-fa modulator and a number of maps, ranging from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand, until I find the one I am searching for.

This afternoon was no exception. At length, however, the map of the British Isles was hung over the blackboard and I began my lesson on coastal erosion. Refreshed by their outing the children gave me quite flattering attention.

John bustled out to the map, full of importance, and pointed to Romney Marsh with his yellow ruler, and I did my best to explain the cause of the sea's retreat here. There are times when I wish fervently that I had more geographical knowledge. This was one of them. Mercifully, the children seemed to understand my halting explanations, and I was fired to go further.

'Sometimes,' I said, 'the opposite thing happens. The sea encroaches on the land, and then die bottom of the cliffs gets washed away.' I remembered childhood holidays at Walton-on-Naze, and gave a dramatic account of a garden, and then, finally, the house belonging to it, sliding down the cliffs into the hungry sea. Perhaps I overdid the drama. There was an awed silence when I finished.

John raised his ruler and put it shakily across the Wash.

'It's eaten in there all right,' he commented.

Patrick and Ernest now walked out, unbidden, to take a closer look at the map.

'Look how it's busted its way up here!' exclaimed Patrick, his eyes on the Bristol Channel.

'And here!' echoed Ernest, peering closely at the Thames estuary. 'Looks as though they could meet, real easy, and chop us in half.'

'How quick,' asked Joseph Coggs nervously, 'do the water come?'

'You remember at Barrisford!' queried John. It came in as quick as lightning, and terrible strong it was. Fair sucked us off our feet when we was paddlin' and I got my best trousers absolutely soppin'.'

I did my best to calm their fears. If I weren't careful I could see that I should have some very cross parents coming to see me on the morrow, complaining that their children had been having nightmares.

'Good heavens,' I said robustly, 'it only manages a few mches in a year, at the most. You've nothing to fear here, living in Fairacre. Why, we're safely in the middle,' I assured them, appropriating John's ruler, and pointing out
Caxley
printed in unflatteringly small letters.

These downland children see very little water, and the sea but rarely. There is a very healthy respect for it when they visit the coast, and their apprehension about inundation was understandable. Even today, some of their grandparents have never seen the sea.

St Patrick's chimes began to ring out through the warm limpid afternoon.

'Time to go home,' I said. 'Don't forget, there are miles of dry land between you and the sea, here in Fairacre. Stand for grace!'

Within five minutes the classroom was empty. I returned the map to the shameful cupboard and made my way across the hot playground. To my surprise, Joseph Coggs was swinging on the school gate. His face was thoughtful, his dark eyes fixed upon the horizon.