The Complete Pratt (9 page)

That Saturday afternoon, after the snows had stopped, and the sun was shining crisply, there was tobogganing down the lower slopes of Mickle Fell. Uncle Frank asked him if he’d like to use the girls’ old toboggan. He tried to get out of it, on the grounds that it was unfair to sheep to enjoy the snow, but really because he was frightened. But Uncle Frank insisted, and suddenly it was important not to seem a coward in front of Uncle Frank.

The children of Rowth Bridge hurtled down the white slopes with apparent fearlessness on that ice-blue Saturday afternoon in war-time. Some had toboggans, some wooden boards, some tea-trays. The older children set off from quite high up. Some of them were fighter pilots, dive-bombing the vicious Hun.

Henry trudged up the slope somewhat fearfully. Patrick Eckington hurtled past. Surely this was high enough? And then he saw her. Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. Ravishing. High above him.

He couldn’t start from below her, so he trudged on. Between him and Belinda a sturdy young man was carrying a tea-tray.

At last Belinda stopped and turned. The sturdy young man stopped beside her. They stood and waited for him.

He approached them, wheezing breathlessly. The sturdy young man turned out to be Jane Lugg. He wanted to speak to Belinda, but no words would come.

They began their descent. As his wooden toboggan gathered speed, Henry grew terrified. Faster and faster he went. Jane Lugg on her tea-tray was outclassed. Belinda Boyce-Uppingham, streamlined on her superb metal bobsleigh, was narrowly ahead of him.

Their speed increased. The field below was full of tiny figures.

Belinda Boyce-Uppingham was heading for the side of the field, where a slight incline slowed the toboggans and enabled you to stop quite gracefully. But Henry’s toboggan was heading down to the bottom of the field, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Belinda dismounted from her bobsleigh gracefully. Jane Lugg landed underneath her tray in a clumsy, laughing heap. Henry’s toboggan breasted the snows piled against the wall. It soared over the top, hurtled towards the thinner snow of the lower field, and landed with a bruising crunch. It gathered speed again. Wide-eyed and petrified he saw the trees at the edge of the ash wood rushing towards him.

He missed the trees by inches, and shot straight into the icy waters of the infant Mither. It was not the last river that Henry Pratt would fall into, but it was easily the smallest.

After that, things were better at school, and he began to settle in. Not quickly. Not easily. But steadily.

Within a week he had received two overtures of friendship. One he accepted, one he rejected.

The overture that he accepted was from Simon Eckington. Like him, Simon was shy. And Simon’s father was also away at the war. His mother had her hands full running the Post Office and General Store, and his elder brother Patrick bullied him unmercifully. He was glad to find a good friend.

The overture that he didn’t accept was from Pam Yardley. She was an evacuee, from Leeds. She had been taken in by the Wallingtons. Jim Wallington was the bus driver. Pam Yardley made the mistake of appealing for friendship on the grounds that they were both evacuees. Henry denied this angrily. He didn’t add the clincher which prevented any possibility of friendship. Pam Yardley was a girl. Girls were useless, with one glorious exception. That exception was Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. Pam Yardley was not Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. Therefore she was useless.

The great strength of Belinda Boyce-Uppingham was that she was a beautiful and wonderful human being, despite her family.

The great weakness of Belinda Boyce-Uppingham was that she didn’t go to the village school. Henry plucked up courage and, blushing, asked Auntie Kate why this was.

‘The Boyce-Uppinghams send their children to private schools when they are young and then to public schools,’ explained Auntie Kate.

It sounded to Henry as if the Boyce-Uppinghams were somewhat confused people, who had no cause to go around smugly tapping people as if they were barometers.

The school day started with a hymn and a prayer. Then they did painting and drawing. Henry’s paintings were beautiful in his mind, but ghastly messes by the time they reached the paper. The younger children moulded plasticine and the older ones carved wood. Sometimes they would dance and even sing, quietly, so as
not
to disturb Miss Forrest’s class. Sometimes they would dress up and perform little plays. Most of the class liked this part of the day, but Henry was doubtful.

There followed a bad time. This was the break. The playground was divided sexually by a tall wire fence. Miss Candy had argued against this. ‘Put them in cages and they’ll behave like animals,’ she had said. ‘Put them together and they’ll behave like animals,’ her superior had retorted. Henry didn’t like the break because it exposed him to the bullying of
his
superiors. His tobogganing had not transformed him into a hero overnight. It had to be weighed against the puddle. It wasn’t certain yet whether he was to be counted as an evacuee or not. More evidence was needed before judgement was passed on him.

After the break there came the best part of Henry’s day – the lessons. They learnt reading and writing, and the basics of arithmetic, and he proved good at these things.

Dinner came next. The risk of bullying was less great than in the break, because many of the children went home. On the wall of the playground, however, a goal had been marked in chalk, and here football was often played. Henry had nothing against football, except that he couldn’t play and always got hurt. There were also three stumps chalked against the wall, and when the summer came Henry would learn that his lack of talent extended to cricket also. These perils, when added to the lingering threat of brawn, made dinner a dangerous time.

In the afternoon, they applied their arithmetic, and their reading and writing, to various practical ends, like running a shop, or planning the farming year, or holding auctions, or even, as they got older, writing a local children’s newspaper.

We have seen Miss Candy from the outside, a shapeless, greying motor-cyclist with an excess of chins, hair in unfortunate places, and a distant hint of the porcine in her features. Come with me now on a journey into the interior.

Miss Candy had always known that she would be a teacher. She had believed that she would be a good, perhaps even a great teacher. She was steeped in educational theory. She identified with those two alliterative lady educationalists, Maria Montessori and Margaret McMillan.

It was because of the influence of Maria Montessori that there was no rivalry in Miss Candy’s class. Each child went at his or her own pace. There were no rewards. Punishment was reserved for naughtiness and breaches of communal discipline, and was never used as a weapon against the slow-witted. The communal discipline included tidying up the classroom before going home. Miss Candy believed that Maria Montessori, the great Italian, would approve, if only she could ever see Miss Candy’s class of five-to ten-year-olds at Rowth Bridge Village School.

Being herself from Bradford, it was natural that Miss Candy associated herself even more closely with Margaret McMillan, who did much of her best work in that city between 1893 and 1902. Margaret McMillan believed that many schoolchildren went through school life using only a minimum of their powers and expressing only a fraction of their personalities. She believed in the importance of nursery schooling, where children could be given adventure, movement, dancing, music, talking, food and rest within the school environment. Extracts from her writings hung on the wall of Miss Candy’s bedroom. ‘You may ask why we give all this to the children? Because this is nurture, and without it they can never really have education. For education must grow out of nurture and the flower from its root, since nurture is organic.… Much of the money we spend on education is wasted, because we have not laid any real foundation for our educational system….’

Nobody would ever read the educational theories of Miss Florence Candy. Her wise saws would hang on no one’s bedroom wall. No international seminars of educationalists would ever hang breathless on her words. She looked ridiculous. She lived in a world which judges men partially and women almost entirely by appearance. The junior classroom at Rowth Bridge Village School was therefore her pinnacle. Her satisfaction was that she was achieving as much as could possibly be achieved by a woman of her appearance, in a classroom split up into five different groups of children who had not been to nursery schools, in a tiny village school with holes in the ground for lavatories, under a head teacher who disapproved of her, insisted that the children marched into school in lines, and would try to get rid of her as
soon
as the war was over.

It is time to reveal another of Miss Candy’s secrets. She had always believed that one day one of the human seeds that she had helped to nurture would grow into a plant that would make her life worthwhile. One day she would have a pupil through whose reflected glory her work would live on.

She had a hope, just a faint hope, that she had found that pupil at last.

On Sunday mornings, as Henry got ready for church, cleaning shoes, brushing hair, he listened to the repeat of Tommy Handley in ‘It’s That Man Again’ on the kitchen wireless. He didn’t understand it very well but the grown-ups laughed a lot, and he was determined not to be left out.

This Sunday he didn’t laugh. Henry Dinsdale, né Cyril Dinsdale, had not been to school for three days. Ezra Pratt, né Henry Pratt, remembered a prayer made in a utility room. Please, God, kill Henry Dinsdale, so I don’t have to be an Ezra.

He was terrified that God had answered his prayer.

When they all knelt, in the little, squat-towered church beside the Mither, he prayed fervently.

Please, God, he prayed, it’s me again. Tha knows I axed thee to kill Henry Dinsdale. I didn’t really mean it. Bring him back to life, will tha, like tha did thy kid?

He had the utmost difficulty in eating his dinner that day.

After dinner, they listened to the gardening advice given by Roy Hay. Uncle Frank kept up a running commentary. ‘I disagree!…Not up here, tha won’t!…Never wi’ our soil!’

The day dragged endlessly. Henry didn’t sleep that night.

In the morning, Henry Dinsdale still wasn’t at school. God had failed him.

He toyed listlessly with his plasticine.

‘What’s up, Ezra?’ Miss Candy asked.

‘Nowt, miss.’

In the break he longed to ask Miss Candy about Henry Dinsdale but he didn’t dare. Patrick Eckington punched him in the tummy for no reason, and he didn’t care.

His turn came to read out loud. Usually he liked that. Not
today
. The words danced in front of his eyes. ‘The young blind is not only hedgehog born, but deaf.’

He didn’t even bother to scratch Pam Yardley’s hand when she put it on his knee under his desk.

When dinner-time came, Miss Candy asked him to stay behind.

‘What’s wrong, Ezra?’ she said.

‘Nowt, miss.’

‘You must tell me, Ezra.’

‘I prayed to God to kill Henry Dinsdale, cos I didn’t like being called Ezra, and now he’s dead, miss.’

‘Henry Dinsdale has measles, Ezra,’ said Miss Candy.

Henry Pratt’s measles came on the Wednesday. He lay, feverish and aching, in a darkened room, listening to the snow dripping off the roof. Outside, the country sounds were unusually sharp. Sam barking. A cow mooing. Billy the half-wit laughing. Jackie the land-girl sneezing. Henry pretended that Belinda Boyce-Uppingham was in the bed, having measles with him.

As a treat, while he recuperated, they bought him the
Beano
and the
Dandy
. He couldn’t read them very well yet, especially the stories, but he managed to make sense of most of the cartoons. He liked Big Eggo, the ostrich, and Korky the Cat, and Freddy the Fearless Fly, but Keyhole Kate was horrid. He read out the words to himself with difficulty. Pansy Potter, the strong man’s something.

Fiona came to visit, with her dull husband, and she came upstairs to see him. ‘It’s daughter,’ she explained. ‘“Pansy Potter, the strong man’s daughter. Pansy’s teeth are cracked and bent, eating a cake made from cement.”’

‘That’s Jane Lugg,’ said Henry. ‘And Pam Yardley’s Keyhole Kate.’

‘My husband’s Hungry Horace,’ said Fiona.

Henry couldn’t imagine her dull husband eating a lot, but he made no comment.

‘Read me a story,’ he said.

Fiona read a story about Derek, the wild boy of the woods, an outlaw branded as a traitor by Bagshot, Head of the Secret Service. Derek alone knew that Bagshot was a Nazi spy, and he
foiled
Bagshot with the aid of Kuru, his eagle pal. At the end of the story, the real British officer congratulated him. ‘“If it hadn’t been for you,” he grinned,’ read Fiona, ‘“this ‘U’ boat would have got away with the secret plans of our new battleships. We owe everything to you and the wonderful eagle you have trained so well.”’

Henry sighed ecstatically. He would be the wild boy of the woods when he was better.

‘How did he grin all that?’ he asked.

‘“Grinned” means “said with a grin”,’ explained Fiona. ‘In comics you never say “said”. You say “suggested”, “grunted”, “snorted”, “breathed”, but not “said”.’

‘Why?’ queried Henry.