(2/20) Village Diary Page 4

  I told her about the 'flu and no supply teachers, quite innocently, and was amazed when she offered to come and help.

  I had to ring the education office to get official consent, but as Amy has excellent qualifications, she was welcomed with open arms in this plague-stricken time.

  She arrived in the luscious car, and I heard the children debating who it could belong to.

  'That must be an inspector. Too posh for an ornery teacher. Look at Miss Read's car now!'

  'More like the new head nurse—except there ain't no jars of head-stuffin the back.' (Lucidly Amy was out of earshot.)

  It was very cheering to have her here and we both enjoyed working together. She will stay until the end of the week.

  I was to have gone to tea at the vicarage today, but Mrs Partridge rang up at morning play-time to say that we must postpone our tea-party as poor Mr Lawn (Pawn? Prawn? Line crackling badly as the 'Beetle and Wedge' is having a telephone installed at the moment) has succumbed to prevailing sickness. I expressed sincere sympathy.

  I had a Thurberesque conversation with the mad Miss Pringle after school, about the third child of shame, which is to be christened on Sunday.

  'Mr Partridge's coming over to Springbourne. I told him when he brought the hymn list this morning, I thought of Lance-a-lot Drick, for the baby's name.'

  'Drick?'

  'Like Bogarde. Drick Bogarde. But vicar said Not-Too-Fanciful, but I think it's too much of a mouthful. So I said make it Huge and Call-it-a-Day.'

  Much shaken I said Hugh was a good name, and gave her five shillings for the baby. I have no doubt that it will buy a purple lipstick for its mother.

  It will be a relief to see Mrs Pringle's glum countenance back on Monday.

  I drove to Caxley after school, and met Mrs Martin, our doctor's wife, coming out of Boots', and enquired after his health.

  'He's been run off his feet, poor dear, and now he's gone down with this horrible 'flu himself.'

  I said I was sorry and was he a good patient?

  'A fiend incarnate!' his wife assured me solemnly. 'But he must be in a really bad way.' She looked furtively about her, came very close to me, and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'He's been driven to taking his own cough mixture! That'll show you how bad he's been! He's just sent me in for a bottle from Boots', that doesn't taste quite so evil!'

  On Monday we were all back at our posts. Mrs Annett arrived swathed in rugs and was supported to her room by her attentive husband. She assured me, when he had departed, that she was as fit as a fiddle.

  Mrs Pringle's outraged expression when she saw the state of her beloved stoves, was a real tonic.

  'That Minnie Pringle!' she breathed menacingly. 'Blacklead and elbow-grease don't mean nothing to her!'

  The weather had turned delightfully warm and springlike. The lilac buds in my garden are as fat as green peas, and crocuses, daffodds and tulips are pushing through. Even the grass is beginning to smell hopeful again, as one walks on it.

  Mrs Annett and I celebrated this return of joy by taking the whole school out for a nature walk in the woods, at the foot of the downs. They belong to Mr Roberts, the farmer, who lives next door to the school and is one of its most energetic managers, and he lets us go there whenever we please. This is a great privilege, for, like most country schools, Fairacre has a small playground with a stony, uneven surface, which means that any really riotous games in this confined space lead to skinned knees and hands. We consider ourselves very lucky to be able to use Mr Roberts's woods, and his meadow too, and so enjoy a wider world now and again.

  The frogspawn was rising in the pond near the 'Beetle and Wedge.' The boys were anxious to take off their shoes and socks and wade in to fetch some for the classroom; but knowing the collection of tins, pieces of bedstead and other household junk which litters the bottom, I forbade this project.

  The woods were awe-inspiringly quiet. Even the children hushed their sing-song chatter as they scuffled along in the beech leaves. Signs of spring were everywhere. The honeysuckle is already in small leaf, the primrose plants are sturdy rosettes, and we saw several birds with dry grass or feathers in beak, and a speculative glint in the eye.

  At the edge of the wood is a small field, which is one of my secret joys. It always looks lovely. At this time of year it has a soft dewy greyness, which the line of pewter-coloured willow trees, at its boundary, enhances. Today a wood-pigeon, as soft and opal as a London twilight, winged across, and made the picture unforgettable. I once saw this field at eight o'clock on a fine May morning, when it was gilded with buttercups. A light breeze shivered the young willow leaves, and everything vernal that Geoffrey Chaucer and Will Shakespeare ever wrote was caught alive here.

  We let the children run, while we sat on a dry log and rested. Mrs Annett, with her gaze fixed bemusedly on a cluster of heart-shaped violet leaves between her brogues, told me, in a dreamy tone in keeping with this enchanted place, that she was to have a child in August.

  I said how very pleased I was, and we continued to sit, propped together, on the dry log in comfortable silence, savouring the niceness of this most satisfying affair.

  Joseph Coggs' discovery of a very dead grey squirrel and his request for a lend of my penknife' to cut off the poor creature's tail in order to claim a smiling, brought this idyll to a close. We returned in great good spirits to Fairacre School.

  Although we had had quite a long walk I was amazed to see how fresh and lively the very young children were on our outing. The longer I teach, the more I am convinced that it is wrong for children in their first year at school to have to attend school for the whole day.

  Perhaps, before long, morning school only for the five, and even six year olds, will be the order of the day, and I am sure it would be welcomed by mothers, teachers and children. Most children have a big adjustment to make when they start school. The numbers alone are tiring, and new surroundings, new voices and a new, and perhaps more rigid, discipline all make for strain.

  Before he went to school, the child probably had a rest before or after lunch, when, even if he did not sleep, he had a quiet period, on his own, with his feet up. After his rest, during the afternoon, he had his walk, when all the pleasures and richness of the outdoor world impinged on his young mind.

  In a small country school it is difficult to provide a rest-time after school dinner for these really small people. It is not surprising that they frequently nod off to sleep in the afternoon, and I for one am only too pleased to let them. A refreshing nap will do them far more good than making a batch of plasticine crumpet—enthralling though that may be with the aid of a ready sharp matchstick—and I am only sorry that I can't make them more comfortable, when I sec a tousled head resting on two fat arms on the unsympathetic hard wood of an ancient school desk.

  A new chant to the psalms had us all bogged down, at church today, and I enjoyed watching the different methods of attack. My neighbour in the pew, Mr Lamb from the Post Office, preserved an affronted silence. Mrs Willet gobbled up three-quarters of each phrase on one uniform and neutral note, and then dragged out the last quarter in a nasal whine, somewhere near the printed notes. Mrs Pringle mooed slowly and heavily, a few beats behind the rest, but with an awful ponderous emphasis in the wrong places; while the vicar, with a sublime disregard for the organist's accompaniment, sang an entirely different chant altogether, and did it very well.

  I drove to Caxley to have tea with Amy and James. She talked quite wistfully of her few days' teaching, and, I believe, would jump at the chance of coming again some time. She was perturbed about a rash which has come out on her face. I must confess that I could only see it when my eyes were two inches from her cheek. I suggested that the Caxley water which is villainously hard, might be responsible, and why didn't she use rainwater for a few days?

  'Water?' screamed Amy. (If I had said vitriol, she couldn't have sounded more horrified.) Did I realize that she hadn't touched her face with water for over five years
? Only the very blandest and most expensive complexion milk was dabbed on—with an upward movement—thrice daily, with an occasional application of an astringent lotion which was prepared in Bond Street to her own prescription. Her beauty specialist had forbidden—positively forbidden—the use of water on such a very sensitive skin.

  I could only feel that layers of complexion milk over the years, had probably formed a light cheese over Amy's face, which accounted for the rash; but as I was eating her delicious sponge-cake at that moment, was obliged, in common courtesy, to keep these thoughts to myself.

  I am now the somewhat bewildered possessor of an engaging kitten. It all began with Jimmy Waites asking if he could go home during the dinner hour to fetch two kittens.

  'So as Linda can choose which one she likes,' he said. Mrs Moffat had asked if Linda might keep it at school during the afternoon, and return home, with the pet of her choice, in time for tea.

  This all seemed very agreeable, and the infants were delighted to hear that they would be entertaining two kittens for the afternoon session, and spent most of the morning preparing the doll's cradle for these much more exciting occupants. The doll, a cherished Edwardian beauty, from the vicarage nursery, was propped up on the cupboard, and surveyed her wanton young masters and mistresses with a glassy stare.

  Mrs Annett had the greatest difficulty in persuading the children to drink their morning milk, but finally discovered that they were all hoarding it for the kittens' dissipation later. At length a bottle was put up on the cupboard, beside the slighted beauty, for the guests, and the milk bottles emptied rapidly.

  Excitement ran high when Jimmy Waites entered with his basket. Mrs Waites had prudently tied a blue-checked duster over the top, and when this was removed two pretty kittens peered out from a nest of straw.

  Linda Moffat, as pretty as a kitten herself, took the business of choosing her pet very seriously, and was given much unsolicited advice from her companions.

  'Don't you take that black and white 'un, Lin. See his paws? Alius be filthy, them white paws.'

  'I reckons he looks the best.'

  'He do seem to stand up stronger, don't he? More push, like.'

  'That other's the prettiest,' and so on.

  The infants, who were in my room, milling round with their elders, while this great decision was being made, became querulous, for they were dying to put both to bed in the waiting cradle.

  'Buck up, Linda.'

  'They's both nice, Linda. Don't matter which one!' Linda's troubled eyes met mine.

  'I wish I could have them both. The other's got to be drowned.'

  There was a shocked silence. I looked at Jimmy Waites.

  'That's right, miss,' he said, his underlip quivering.

  'My dad drowns them,' volunteered Joseph Coggs, with some pride. 'He does all the kittens down our end of the village.' He was stroking a fluffy head with a black stubby finger. He looked up into my face. What he saw there must have called forth his sympathy.

  'He uses warm water,' he assured me earnestly.

  '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.'