(5/20)Over the Gate Page 13

  '2.30—Mrs Pringle'

  '3.30—Miss Parr'—only that would be her maid, Mrs Willet surmised, and

  '4.30—Mrs Jarman'—who would no doubt rush back to her family in time to fry the inevitable chips on which that ebullient household seemed to exist.

  '5.30—Anyone welcome.' This was when the puddings would be lifted out and handed to their lucky owners. Mrs Willet had promised to help with this chore.

  At twenty-five to twelve she lifted the lid, noted with relief that the water was bubbling gently, checked all the switches, wrote a note to the next pudding-minder saying:

  '25 to 12. Everything all right.

  Alice Willet.'

  and made her way back through the village.

  At five-thirty a throng of women crowded the steamy hall collecting their basins and lodging them in shopping baskets, string bags or the baskets on the front of their bicycles.

  'Got the right one?' called Mrs Jarman to Mrs Pringle, as she watched that lady peering under the basins for her name. 'Bet you've got more fruit in yours than the rest of us!'

  Mrs Pringle sniffed and ignored the quip. Depositing her pudding in the black depths of her oilcloth shopping bag, she passed majestically from the hall without deigning to reply.

  The fantastic sequel to the pudding-making session might never have been known to Fairacre but for an unusually generous gesture of Mrs Pringle's.

  As Christmas Day approached she heard that a large party of the Jarmans' friends were proposing to spend the day next door.

  'My heart fair bleeds for poor Jane Morgan,' said Mrs Pringle lugubriously to her son John. 'She'll be crowded out of house and home, as far as I can see. I've a good mind to invite her round here for Christmas dinner.'

  Neither Corporal Pringle nor Private Morgan were to be given Christmas leave. Mrs Pringle's sister and a schoolgirl niece, much the same age as John, were coming from Caxley for the day, and as the sister and Jane Morgan knew each other well it seemed a good idea to ask their neighbour to join the party. Jane Morgan was gratefully surprised, and accepted.

  The pudding simmered all the morning, and most delightful aromas crept about the kitchen, for there was a duck roasting in the oven as well as the 'nutritious war-time' delicacy on top of the hob. Mrs Pringle and her sister had a good gossip, their children played amicably with their new presents, and except for the ear-splitting racket occasioned by the crowd next door, the benevolent spirit of Christmas hung over all. At twelve-thirty Jane Morgan appeared, thankful to be out of her noisy home, and they all sat down to dinner.

  The duck was excellent. The pudding looked wonderful. Mrs Pringle plunged a knife into its gravy-darkened top and cut the first slice.

  'Mum!' squeaked John excitedly. 'There's something shining!'

  'Sh!' said his aunt. 'Don't give the game away! Perhaps it's a sixpence.'

  Mrs Pringle looked puzzled.

  'No sixpences in this pudding!' she said. 'In any case, I don't hold with metal objects in food. I always wraps up anything like that in a morsel of greaseproof.'

  She put the first slice on a plate for Mrs Morgan. There was certainly a suspicious chinking sound as the pudding met the china surface.

  'When I was little,' said Jane Morgan, 'we used to have dear little china dolls in our Christmas pudding. No bigger than an inch, they were! With shiny black heads. We used to put them in the dolls' house, I remember.'

  But Jane Morgan's reminiscences were being ignored, for all eyes were on the pudding. There was no doubt about it, there were a great many shiny foreign objects among the other war-time ingredients. Mrs Pringle's breathing became more stertorous as the slices were cut. She sat down heavily in front of the last plate, her own, and then spoke.

  'Just pick it over before you take a mouthful. I reckons someone's been playing tricks on us.'

  Spoons and forks twitched the glutinous mass back and forth, amidst amazed cries from the assembled company. When they came to count up the foreign objects they found no fewer than two dozen mother o' pearl shirt buttons.

  Mrs Pringle said not a word, but opened a tin of pineapple chunks instead.

  Late that night, when the Jarmans' company had roared away and the children had been chased to bed, Mrs Jarman met her landlady in the communal kitchen. Jane Morgan was in her husband's dressing gown, her wispy hair was in a small pigtail, and her teeth had been left upstairs in a glass of water. She was busy filling a hot water bottle.

  'Had a good time?' asked Mrs Jarman boisterously. 'We have. Never laughed so much since I came here.'

  'That'th nithe!' said Mrs Morgan politely. 'Yeth, I enjoyed it next door, but there wath thomething wrong with the Chrithtmath pudding.'

  Mrs Jarman drew in her breath sharply.

  'What was up with it?' she enquired.

  'It wath absolutely Stuffed with thirt buttonth,' said Mrs Morgan, wide-eyed. 'Mithith Pringle wath dumbfounded."

  'Shirt buttons!' echoed Mrs Jarman. She broke into peals of noisy laughter.

  'Ah well,' she gasped, through her spasms, 'that should please the old trout! She told me once that she saved shirt buttons!'

  Still laughing, she made her way upstairs, followed by her mystified landlady.

  Mrs Willet straightened herself and patted my garden gate.

  'Well, Miss Read, that's the story. Of course, it was all over Fairacre before Boxing Day sunset. Jane Morgan let it out, in all innocence, and the village was fair humming with the news.'

  'Did Mrs Jarman ever admit it?' I asked.

  'Never! Swore she never knew a thing about it, but it was her all right. I should know—I remember the pudding list. '2.30 Mrs Pringle' It wouldn't be her. '3.30 Miss Parr' That was her Annie that popped in then, as law-abiding as they come, and wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. '4.30 Mrs Jarman' And '5.30 All welcome.' Don't need much working out, when you come to think of it.'

  She bent to pick up her basket, and stroked Tibby affectionately.

  'I will say though,' she continued, 'that Mrs Pringle minded her manners a bit more after that, when she and Mrs Jarman got together. Ah, she was real mischieful, was Mrs Jarman. You couldn't help liking her.'

  Mrs Willet gazed, with unseeing eyes, down the Fairacre lane, her mind on times long past.

  'I still miss them, you know, them Londoners. I liked 'em—and always shall. It was good to see them again this afternoon. Took me back to the old days. Say what you like about 'em, Miss Read, Londoners are a larky lot! A real larky lot!'

  9. Outlook Unsettled

  AS so often happens when term begins, the weather became idyllic. Great white clouds sailed indolently across pellucid blue skies, and warm winds from the south replaced the sneaky little easterly one which had harassed us throughout most of the Easter holidays.

  One warm afternoon, in late April, we propped the door of the schoolroom open with an upturned flowerpot and did our best to turn our attention to learning Robert Bridges'poem 'Spring Goeth All in White.' It seemed an admirable choice in the circumstances, for white narcissi spdt their heady fragrance from the window sill, white daisies, gathered by the children, fillled three paste pots on my desk, and an early cabbage white butterfly opened and shut its wings against the south-facing Gothic window.

  Nevertheless, it was uphill work. Languor, born of unaccustomed heat, engulfed my class. Shirt necks were opened, sleeves rolled up, jerseys peeled off and stuffed in desks, and the sing-song country voices stumbled heavily through this most tripping of spring lyrics.

  Sleepiest of all was young Richard, not yet five, who was spending the day with us while his mother paid a necessary visit to the hospital in our county town. It is not easy to get someone to mind a child in a small village, and I often get urgent requests asking me 'if our youngest can come along with his brother for an hour or two." If it is possible—and it usually is—we all enjoy the newcomer's company, and it gives him an insight into school routine before he takes the plunge himself later on.

  Richard lolle
d on the desk beside bis brother Ernest, who nudged him occasionally and whispered severely to him, with no noticeable result. As we battled on, Richard amused himself by blowing large glassy bubbles from lips as red and puckered as a poppy petal. Ernest, scandalised, bent down to remonstrate.

  'Leave him alone, Ernest,' I said mildly. 'He's tired. Perhaps he'll fall asleep.'

  'In school?' cried Ernest, deeply shocked.

  'Why not?'

  Ernest, still looking affronted by my slackness, drew himself up, folded his arms and applied himself sternly to the task before him, ignoring the indolent and shameful child beside him.

  Everywhere in the room were emblems of spring. The weather chart for April showed a number of umbrellas, depicting the rainy weather during the holidays, with arrows pointing fairly consistently to the north-east. But a row of triumphant suns, like yellow daisies, blossomed in the last six or seven squares, and the arrows were now happdy reversed.

  Across the back of the room ran a frieze of spring flowers. Crocuses, daffodds, tulips, and a large number of new species, as yet unknown to Messrs Sutton and Carter, had been cut out of gummed paper and affixed by every hand in the class. Many a fat thumb went home in the afternoon bearing an indented ring round it made by hard-worked school scissors. It was, as the seed catalogues say, 'a riot of bloom' and a very colourful addition to our dull walls.

  A new spring poster to encourage savings, showing a bird and its nest, brightened the door between the two classrooms, and the nature table was laden with wood anemones, primroses, violets, sprays of young honeysuckle leaves, a few early coltsfoot and dandelions, and a splendid pot of horse chestnut twigs thrusting out green hands in all directions.

  Hard by, the glass fish tank glimmered with shiny frog-spawn, for all the world like submerged chain-mad. The tiny dots were already beginning to turn into commas, and before long the children's patience would be rewarded by the sight of a myriad thrashing tadpoles. Nothing could be more suitable, I told myself again, than 'Spring Goeth All In White' for such an afternoon.

  But, there was no doubt about it, those eight exquisite lines were really more than the children could manage in the circumstances. I felt impatient and cross at their laziness, but was loth to spoil the poem for them by bad-tempered bludgeoning. In the midst of this impasse, young Richard raised himself, stretched short arms each side of his rumpled head, and said clearly:

  '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.'