(2/20) Village Diary Page 9

  'I think we'd have table practice first,' was the kind, but firm, answer; and Joseph trailed back to his desk, with a pouting underlip.

  'Do use all the apparatus that is here,' I said, waving to the desk-load of sugar cartons, cocoa tins and the like, that constitute 'the shop' at the side of the room, 'and don't worry about the noise—my children don't take any notice of a little hum next door.' But my gentle hints were of no avail. I could see from Miss Clare's quizzical glance that she knew exactly what was going on inside my head, and knew too that she was too old a dog to learn new tricks—even if she felt that they were the right ones, which, in this case, she doubts.

  In a week or two the children will have become accustomed to a slower and steadier regime, and will respond to Miss Clare's methods as wed as earlier generations of Fairacre children have done. Meanwhile, I have offered to take her class, as well as my own, for the games and physical training lessons, for not only is this too much of a strain on her elderly and delicate heart, but the small children revel in scampering and jumping and using the wealth of individual apparatus—balls, hoops, skipping ropes and the like—which they miss sorely in the formal four lines for head, arm, leg and trunk exercises which are used for the major part of Miss Clare's lessons.

  It has not been easy to persuade Miss Clare to part with any of her duties, for she is the most conscientious woman alive; but after some demurring she acquiesced, not only in this matter but also in my suggestion that she rested for twenty minutes on my sofa during the dinner hour. It took some lurid word-painting on my behalf, of my own predicament if she should have an attack in school time, to make her agree to this measure, but a lucky thought of mine that she should make a pot of tea for us both, at the end of the twenty minutes, which would also be the end of my midday playground duty, just turned the balance, and the daily rest means that she returns to her afternoon session much refreshed.

  My class this term has been enriched by the addition of an eight-year-old American boy. His parents return to the United States in, what he calls, "the fall." On first hearing this expression, Patrick, more scripturally-minded than most, began asking complicated questions about the Garden of Eden, which he was obviously confusing with Erie's native land, and was considerably surprised, and slightly disappointed, on being told that it was only another name for autumn.

  The Fairacre children have taken Erie very much under their wing. He is a most attractive little boy, with a crew-cut, a cheerful grin and no trace of shyness. He appeared on the second morning with two pistols slung on a formidable, studded holster, round his checked jeans. I broke it to him, as gently as I could, that I did not allow guns, knives, bows and arrows or any other weapons, on school premises, though, of course, he could do as he liked at home. I was conscious of the exchange of disgusted glances among my class, for this old sore still rankles, but Erie parted with his holster, with a grin that crinkled his eyes engagingly. He put it with a resounding clanking of pistolry on the old desk at the side of the room, among the paper bags containing elevenses, and the other, less lethal, toys, that had been brought for play-time.

  There was an amusing sequel to this incident. At play-time I sat alone in the classroom, marking history test papers, when I became conscious of voices in the adjoining lobby.

  'Never you mind, Erie,' said Eric earnestly, 'us'll play cowboys with you tonight down the rec. That ol' Miss Read—' he spoke witheringly, 'she treats us awful. Don't let us do nothin'. A proper ol' spod-sport!'

  'Aw well!' came Erie's good-natured drawl, 'I guess teachers is teachers everywhere!' He spoke as one who has suffered in the past, and is resigned—fairly cheerfully—to suffering in the future.

  'Don't you bring them no more, though,' warned Eric. 'The ol' girl locks em up in the cupboard till the end of term, and kicks up horrid.' His voice, dark with foreboding, suddenly took on a more jubilant note.

  'Tell you what—come and play Indians up the coke-pile!' And with joyous whoopings, this enlightening conversation came to an end.

  Mr Arnold, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors, spent most of the day with us. This is his second visit to Fairacre School. His first one was brought to an abrupt close by a violent thunderstorm last summer, when we had to get the children home as best we could by various means. The vicar, I remember, stuffed a record number into his car that afternoon, and the old golfing umbrella, that lives in the corner cupboard with the maps, had bobbed its way through the downpour with the Tyler's Row contingent.

  He remembered Mrs Annett—Miss Gray, as she had been when he last visited the infants' room—and said that she app/eared to have done an excellent job with the younger children; but didn't I feel that the reading was being pushed a little too hard? He put this point with the utmost delicacy, suggesting that perhaps Miss Clare was the person who was taking this subject a trifle too seriously, but I told him at once that this fault—if it were indeed a fault—was of my making.

  This led us to a most agreeable and stimulating argument about children's reading. Mr Arnold sat inelegantly on the front desk, with his back to the class. Poor Patrick meekly wrote up his nature notes on the six square inches of desk lid which were not occupied by Mr Arnold's well-cut lovat tweed trousers. I sat at my desk and we argued over the massive brass and oak inkstand.

  He maintained that children are not ready to read before the age of six, or even seven; and that all sorts of nervous tensions and eyestrain can be set up by too much emphasis on early reading.

  I maintain that each child should go at its own rate, and that the modern tendency is to go at the rate of the slowest member of a reading group, and that this is wrong. There are, to my mind, far more bright children being bored and frustrated because they are not getting on fast enough with their reading, than there are slow ones who are being harmed by too-rapid progress. I have known several children—I was one myself—who could read enough simply-written stories to amuse themselves at the age of four and a half to five. We were not forced, but it was just one of those things we could do easily, and the advantages were enormous.

  In the first place we could amuse ourselves, and reading also gave us a quiet and relaxed time for recovering from the violent activity which is the usual five-year-old's way of passing the time.

  Secondly, the amount of general knowledge we unconsciously imbibed, stood us in good stead in later years. Today, with the eleven-plus examination to face, this is particularly pertinent. Incidentally, I have known children who have come to reading so late in the primary school, that they have found real difficulty in reading the questions, let alone knowing enough to answer them. Even more important, the early poems and rhymes, read and learnt so easily at this stage have been a constant and abiding joy.

  Thirdly, the wealth of literature written and presented expressly for the four to six age-group—the Beatrix Potter books are the first that spring to mind—can be used, loved and treasured to an extent that is not possible to a late reader. The child who has never been taught to read until the age of seven or eight has missed the thrill of discovering a vast number of attractive books. He is beginning to want fairy stories, adventures, legends and so on, which may well be in language still too difficult for his retarded mechanics of reading.

  The battle raged with great zest.

  'I have never over-worked a child in my life,' I insisted. 'It always seems to me to be a most difficult thing to accomplish anyway, natural resistance to learning is remarkably resilient. There are some here who never will be able to read with ease—but, broadly speaking, I expect the average child to be able to read well enough to amuse and instruct himself by the time he is eight—and if he can't, then he is probably below average and will need a little extra encouragement. And if I get the odd infant who can rattle away at five—why then, good luck to him—and all the books in Fairacre School, and in Fairacre School-house, for that matter, are at his disposal.'

  Mr Arnold twinkled, and said I was a renegade, but that he must admit that he had seen n
o cases of nervous disorders in my school. And after school, he, Miss Clare and I enjoyed a cup of tea in my garden, among the apple blossom, with the greatest goodwill, each knowing that he would never convert the other, but content to let it be so.

  Erie and Eric have struck up a strong friendship and are quite inseparable. It dates, I think, from the day when I banished Erie's weapons from school premises, and, united against stern tyranny, the pair flourish. Before prayers this morning, as I was wondering if I could manage five flats in the morning hymn and dusting the yellow piano keys, I listened to their conversation. Eric was giving out hymn books, dropping them with a satisfying smack on each desk, as the rest of the class wandered in, deposited their elevenses on the side table, or waited beside my desk with bunches of flowers or messages from their mothers. Erie traded behind him giving brief information about education in American schools.

  'We don't have all this,' he said, touching a hymn book, 'we have the pledge.'

  'The what?' said Eric, stopping dead. 'Like what you have in the Band of Hope?'

  'Don't know nothin' about a Band of Hope,' replied Erie. 'The pledge is what we say every morning. We all look at the flag—our flag, Stars and Stripes—and promise to be real good Americans.'

  Eric looked surprised and mildly disgusted.

  'You tells all that to a flag?' he enquired.

  Erie's good-natured face took on a perplexed expression.

  'It's the flag,' he explained. 'It's a real good flag, with gold fringe and all.' Eric's reply was crushing.

  'We got a flag too. But we don't keep all on about it.' He resumed his hymn-book slinging as though the matter were closed. Erie was not to be side-tracked.

  'Well, forget the flags,' he said doggedly, 'but we don't have hymns and prayers like you do. That's ad I said. We just have this pledge—like I told you.'

  Eric flicked the last hymn book on to the corner desk with a pretty turn of the wrist. Satisfied with the results, he dusted his hands down his shirt, and explained the position succinctly to this stranger from another shore.

  'Well, that's all right where you come from, I don't doubt. But over here, Miss Read says we has a bit about God each morning—and rain or shine, a bit about God we has!'

  ***

  Miss Clare invited me to her cottage for the evening. She refuses to let me fetch her or run her home in the car, but cycles, very slowly and as upright as ever, on her venerable old bicycle.

  As usual, the best china, the snowiest cloth and the most delicious supper awaited me.

  Miss Clare's cottage is a model of neatness. The roof was thatched by her father, who was the local thatcher for many years. She has an early-flowering honeysuckle over her white trellis porch, and jasmine smothers another archway down the garden path.

  In the centre of the table stood a cut-glass vase of magnificent tulips, flanked by a cold brisket of beef on a willow-pattern dish garnished with sprigs of parsley from her garden, and an enormous salad. The freshly-plucked spring onions, were thoughtfully put separately in a little shallow dish.

  'It's not everyone that can digest them,' said Miss Clare, crunching one with much enjoyment, 'but my mother always said they were a wonderful tonic, and cleared the blood after the winter.'

  Miss Clare's silver was old and heavy and gleamed with recent cleaning. How she finds time to keep everything so immaculate I don't know. Her house puts mine to shame, and she has no one to help her at all, whereas I do have Mrs Pringle occasionally to turn a disdainful hand to my affairs.

  After we had consumed an apple and blackberry pie, the fruits of Miss Clare's earlier bottling, we folded our yard-square napkins—which were stiff with starch and exquisitely darned here and there—and washed up in the long, low kitchen, while the coffee heated on the Primus stove.

  Miss Clare's larder is one of the pleasantest places I know. It is a long narrow room, at the side of the kitchen and has a red brick floor and whitewashed wads. The wooden shelves have been scrubbed so often and so wed that the grain stands out in fine ribs.

  From the ceiling hang ropes of bronze onions, dried herbs in muslin bags, and a ham, equally well-draped, which I know her brother gave her at his last pig-killing. Bottles of fruit, cherries, plums, blackberries, greengages and gooseberries, and jars of jam and jelly, flash like jewels, as they stand in serried ranks: and on the floor stand bottles of home-made wine, dandelion, parsnip, sloe and damson, beside two large crocks containing salted runner beans. How Miss Clare ever gets through these stores I don't know, for she has little rime for entertaining and has her main meal at school, more often than not; but as a true countrywoman she bottles, preserves, salts and stores all the good things that grow in her own garden and are given her by kindly neighbours, and would count it a disgrace not to have a larder well-stocked for any emergency.

  That she is generous with her possessions, I do know, from personal experience and from hearsay. No one goes away empty-handed; and I suspect that many of those bottles of fruit and wine will be carried away by visitors. Typical of her largeness of heart is the shilling which always waits on the corner of the mantelpiece in the dining-room.

  'I keep one there for whoever calls,' she told me. 'They are all treated the same—Salvation Army, Soldiers and Sailors, Roman Catholics, Blind Babies, Red Cross, and ad the rest.' When I think of Miss Clare's tiny pension and see how ready she is to give—not only these impartial shillings, but cakes to fetes and bazaars, knitting to raffles, gifts to sales of work and the like, and always unfailingly, her time and little store of strength—to any good work in the village, I cannot help contrasting her attitude of mind with those others among us, earning perhaps five times as much, who never give one penny, one minute or one thought to others around them, but grab all, and grumble because it isn't more.

  In the end, of course, it is Miss Clare, who scores, for she, ipso facto, is a happy woman, while their treasure turns to dust and ashes.

  Mrs Moffat has undertaken to make Amy's costume for the forthcoming county pageant. Bent, the village where Amy lives, has been lucky enough to draw 'The Visit of Charles II and Queen Catherine of Braganza to Branscombe Castle' for its part in the series. Amy is to play the queen, and is full of enthusiasm. Her handbag was crammed with patterns of silks, satins, lace and brocade, and a number of small portraits of that royal lady, culled from the postcard stands at the National Portrait Gallery to snippets from the historical features in back numbers of Everybody's.

  She had been to discuss the costume early in the afternoon, and called at the school as we were about to go home. She smiled kindly upon Linda, and took in, with an expert's eye, the cut of the tartan pinafore frock that Miss Moffat was wearing.

  'She's going to be a beauty,' was her comment, when the children had trickled out into the sunshine. 'And with a mother like that to make her clothes, she's going to be a very lucky girl'

  She helped me to stack away the paintings which were draped around the room, on the piano top, the fire-guard, the side desk, window-sills—anywhere for that matter where the masterpieces could have ten minutes' peace in which to dry—and rattled on excitedly about Mrs Moffat's genius for dressmaking. Four or five other members of Bent W.I. had also enlisted her services, one of whom was an authority on costume and had worked, before her marriage, as an adviser on historical costume to a film company. Amy had high hopes that she would take an especial interest in Mrs Moffat's work and that this might lead to great things in the future, for the Moffat-Finch-Edwards partnership.

  'And what might this be?' she enquired suddenly, holding up a damp painting by one corner. I said it was supposed to be Mr Lamb at the Post Office unlocking the post-box and taking out the letters.

  'But it's a lilac letter-box,' objected Amy. 'There's not a spot of scarlet anywhere!'

  'There's not a spot of scarlet in the whole wretched range of powder paint,' I told her. 'You can have anything from lime green to clover. We're ad a bit greenery-yadery these days.'

  'We h
ad three good fat squeezes of red, blue, and yellow, when I was at school,' said Amy, looking back across the years. 'Primary colours, you know, and we made ad the others from those three. Much more fun than these myriad pots of depressing paint.' She surveyed, with dislike, the large tray, laden with jam jars of paint, that stood on my desk.

  I agreed heartily, and told her that in some painting lessons the children did exactly as she had done as a child, and that I believed they found the mixing of colours more absorbing than slapping on those already done for them.

  'To have no ready good red!' mused Amy sadly, as we locked up, and went across to the school-house. 'How you manage these days when it comes to buses and mail-vans and geraniums and poppies, I ready can't think!'

  I switched on the kettle, and washed my hands at the kitchen sink. I was amused to see how seriously Amy had taken this art problem. Her troubled gaze was fixed, unseeing, on the garden.

  'Not to mention Chelsea pensioners and lobsters!' she added.

  Mr Mawne has paid us his long-awaited visit. The children were delighted to have someone fresh to listen to, and a few of Miss Clare's older children were allowed to come in with their elders to hear his talk on our local birds. He had some excellent coloured pictures, some of which he had drawn and coloured himself, and these he has very generously handed over to Fairacre School. He had to hurry away, as he had promised the vicar that he would help him with the church accounts after an early tea, but he met Mrs Pringle as she was stumping in from the lobby with her broom. The arch smile that I was treated to, enhanced by the loss of her upper plate, broken earlier in the week, was so infuriating in its toad-like hideousness that I could cheerfully have floored her with my weighty ink-stand, but alas!—common civility stayed my hand.

  'A real gentleman that!' was her comment, as she watched his thin retreating back. 'Wouldn't stop to tea, I'll be bound. Wouldn't want people to start talking!' She bent, wincing, to pick up a milk straw from the floor. Her leg, I noticed, was dragging slightly, as she limped towards the waste-paper basket.