02 Mister Teacher (17 page)

Luke understood immediately and nodded slowly. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Sheffield,’ said Luke. ‘Ah don’t imagine it’ll tek long. Ah’ll drop our Scott off an’ ah’ll see to it m’self. They’ll be no charge.’

We shook hands and, as he left, Ruby reappeared.

‘Nice lad, that Luke,’ she said. ‘Teks after ’is mother.’

‘He’s certainly a good plumber,’ I said.

‘Not like ’is brother,’ said Ruby. ‘All mouth an’ no trousers!’

With that she picked up her box of toilet rolls and marched off.

The following morning at half past ten, I walked outside with a mug of hot milky coffee for Jo, who was on playground duty. She was in conversation with Jessie Wilkinson. The two women, who were of a similar age, but separated by circumstances, looked relaxed together.

‘Ah called in t’say thank you, Mr Sheffield,’ said Jessie. ‘Luke Walmsley’s a lovely man. ’E fixed t’plumbing in no time at all.’

Jo looked up at me and winked. ‘We were just swapping notes on Luke’s brother, Scott,’ said Jo, with a grin.

‘Aye, ’e thinks ’e’s God’s gift t’women,’ said Jessie. ‘Ah put ’im straight long ago.’

‘Jessie says Luke is taking her and little Joey to see
Jack and the Beanstalk
at the Theatre Royal in York,’ said Jo.

‘You’ll enjoy it,’ I said. ‘Sally Pringle says Berwick Kaler is excellent as Dame Dolly and Daisy the Cow should make Joey smile.’

‘’E’s lookin’ forward to it,’ said Jessie. ‘In fact, so am I. It’s a long time since ah’ve been tekken out.’

‘Luke’s a good man,’ I said.

‘’E were good wi’ our Joey, Mr Sheffield,’ said Jessie. ‘Real gentle, he was, an’ ’e let ’im hold all ’is plumber’s tools an’ showed ’im ’ow they worked.’

‘I hope you have a lovely night out,’ said Jo.

‘Thank you, Miss Maddison,’ said Jessie. ‘If Luke’s owt like your policeman, ah’m sure it will be.’

With a private exchange of glances, Jo and Jessie both smiled.

‘Anyway, ah’m really grateful t’you, Mr Sheffield,’ said Jessie, and then she set off down the gritted cobblestones of the school drive.

At lunchtime, Luke Walmsley called in to school to deliver his plumbing bill for the work on the school boiler.

‘No rush, Mr Sheffield. Pay when y’can. Ah’ve only charged for materials. Labour’s free for m’old school,’ said Luke.

‘Thank you, Luke,’ I said. ‘And I appreciate you helping out Miss Wilkinson.’

Luke blushed slightly. ‘She’s a really grand lass, Mr Sheffield. Jus’ ’ad it a bit tough.’

‘I heard you’re taking them to the pantomime,’ I said.

‘Aye. It seems a shame that they don’t ’ave a chance t’go,’ said Luke wistfully. ‘Our mother used t’tek me an’ Scott when we were little. Little Joey deserves ’is chance as well.’

‘You’re right, Luke, and I know that Jessie Wilkinson is appreciative.’

‘She’s a lovely person, Mr Sheffield. We got on really well.’ He looked thoughtful as he walked to the door. ‘Meks a change, a woman pickin’ me instead o’ m’brother. It’s a good feeling.’ He smiled, a little self-consciously, and then closed the door gently behind him.

Love blossoms in the most unlikely of places, as this modest, hard-working, quiet-spoken plumber was about to discover. Although we didn’t know it then, Luke and Jessie were destined to spend the rest of their lives together and, in time, young Joey began to show a remarkable natural aptitude for the art of plumbing.

Two weeks later, Ruby and I watched Luke arrive outside school in his van. Jessie climbed into the passenger seat and Joey clambered into the back. This had become a regular occurrence.

‘She’s a lovely girl,’ said Ruby. ‘An’ she deserves ’er bit of ’appiness. It’d be nice for that little lad to ’ave a proper father like Luke.’

‘Who was the father, Ruby?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know ’is name, Mr Sheffield. She met ’im on a day trip t’Skegness. ’E were a sailor from Grimsby an’ she never saw ’im again.’

Ruby picked up her tub of Saxa salt to sprinkle on the stone steps. The temperature was dropping again. At the entrance doorway she paused and shouted over her shoulder. ‘You know what they say, Mr Sheffield. Y’can’t trust sailors!’

Chapter Eleven

The Winter of Discontent

A meeting of the school governors discussed the impact of the widespread strikes of public sector workers, including school maintenance, delivery of school mail and the removal of rubbish. A letter from County Hall urged all schools to try to conserve heat during this very severe winter
.

Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:
Wednesday, 31 January 1979

‘“
NOW IS THE
winter of our discontent”,’ recited Vera, as she scanned the front page of the
Yorkshire Post
.

When William Shakespeare wrote the opening line of
Richard III
, he could not have imagined the turbulent state of England in the long cold winter of 1979.

It was the last day of January and, after the government had imposed a limit of five per cent on pay rises, Britain had been paralysed by the worst industrial action since the General Strike of 1926. The railways were in turmoil after
a
series of one-day strikes and thousands of public sector workers were marching through the streets. Hospitals turned away patients; ambulance drivers refused to answer emergency calls; and even gravediggers had downed their shovels. Meanwhile, over half the nation’s schools were closed owing to inadequate heating. Thanks to Luke Walmsley’s plumbing repairs, we were still open, but I didn’t know for how long.

As I stared out of the staff-room window at a quarter to nine, fog shrouded the school like an ethereal blanket and the droplets on the school railings were frozen pearls. Parents and children, muffled in coats and scarves, stooped like the ghosts of a Lowry painting as they crunched over the school driveway. It was minus seven degrees centigrade and the village of Ragley shivered in the grip of winter.

However, huddled next to the gas fire, Sally Pringle had other concerns. ‘Well, I finally did it,’ she said, fiddling furiously with the straining zip on the side of her dress.

‘Did what?’ asked Jo, blowing into her mittens.

‘I signed up last night for the Beginners’ Keep Fit evening class in Easington.’

‘Well done, you,’ said Anne, wiggling her frozen toes in her fur-lined boots.

‘I’m not looking forward to it,’ said Sally forlornly. ‘I keep imagining all those slim young things in Lycra leaping around to Abba music.’

‘You’ll feel better for it,’ said Jo encouragingly.

‘Hope so,’ said Sally, as she rummaged in the biscuit tin.

Vera frowned as Sally dunked a digestive biscuit in her coffee, munched it disconsolately, and then gently prodded her expanding waistline.

Sally recalled sadly that, twenty years earlier, on a summer’s day in 1959, at the age of seventeen, and with a twenty-four-inch waist, she had demonstrated to her little sister how to rotate a hula-hoop around her slim hips. As she reached for a second digestive biscuit, Sally realized her gyrating days were over.

Meanwhile, a spiteful wind forced its way through every crevice of our Victorian building and the ancient casement windows shivered in protest. Anne leaned over and clicked the dial on the staff-room gas fire to maximum.

‘There’s a lot of rubbish next to the car park now, Jack,’ said Anne. ‘The bin men didn’t come on Monday.’

‘And we’ve had no mail for a week,’ added Vera.

‘My delivery of glass prisms didn’t arrive,’ said Jo, who had not removed her mittens as it was her turn to pull the frozen bell rope at nine o’clock. ‘Reflection and refraction will just have to wait.’

If we had needed a conversation-stopper, that was it.

Suddenly, there was a brisk knock on the staff-room door.

I opened it to be met by the sight of our most eccentric parent, holding her daughter’s hand and looking anxious. I knew from past experience that conversations with her never followed a logical path.

Mrs Daphne Cathcart was a strange lady with an unusual set of teeth, bright pink hair, resembling a
Sindy
doll with attitude, and a distinct, heavy breathing problem that sounded like Darth Vader with sinusitis. Her uninhibited nine-year-old daughter, Cathy, gave me a smile like Stonehenge and leaned round the doorframe to wave at her teacher. Sally, self-consciously, moved smoothly out of dunking mode, brushed the biscuit crumbs from her sheepskin coat and joined me in the doorway.

‘Hello, Cathy,’ said Sally.

‘Ah’m going to t’dentist, Mrs Pringle,’ said Cathy, with enthusiasm, and dreams of yet another visit from the tooth fairy. She looked up at Sally and gave her a huge grin that resembled a lop-sided picket fence.

I looked at Mrs Cathcart, focusing as I always did on her nose to avoid staring at her hair and her teeth.

‘Ah’ll ’ave ’er back f’lunchtime, Mr Sheffield,’ she said.

‘Thank you for calling in and letting us know,’ I said.

‘Ah saw y’signing up las’ night, Mrs Pringle,’ said Mrs Cathcart, with a slightly unnerving smile.

‘Oh, were you there as well?’ said Sally, praying that Mrs Cathcart had not signed up for the Beginners’ Keep Fit class.

‘Yes, but ah’m fed up,’ said Mrs Cathcart.

‘Why is that?’ asked Sally politely.

‘I wanted to sign up for intermediate embalming,’ she said.

‘Embalming?’ said Sally, in horror.

‘Did you say embalming, Mrs Cathcart?’ I asked, not quite believing my ears.

Vera, Anne and Jo stared wide-eyed at this pink-haired vision in the doorway.

Mrs Cathcart was unmoved. ‘Not jus’ embalming,’ she said, sounding slightly affronted. ‘It’s intermediate embalming. Ah’ve already done t’beginners’ course.’

‘So, what happened?’ asked Sally.

‘Weren’t you able to sign up, Mrs Cathcart?’ I asked, intrigued.

‘No,’ she said, in disgust. ‘It were full up.’

‘So, what are you going to do?’ asked Sally, gripped with curiosity.

We both stared at Mrs Cathcart, wondering what the possible options were if you couldn’t do embalming; or, to be more precise, intermediate embalming.

‘Ah’ve signed up f’summat else,’ said Mrs Cathcart.

‘Yes?’ said Sally and I, in unison.

By this time Vera, Anne and Jo were crowding behind us, eager for the reply.

‘Ah’m doing advanced cake decorating instead,’ said Mrs Cathcart proudly.

We were speechless.

And so, with an asthmatic wheeze, a toss of her candy-floss hair and a final flash of a set of teeth that would have been a popular visitor attraction on the Giant’s Causeway, Mrs Cathcart grabbed Cathy’s hand and set off. ‘Ah’ll ’ave t’get goin’,’ she shouted. ‘There’s no buses runnin’ now.’

They pushed open the entrance door and stepped precariously into the freezing cold.

‘Thank God she’s not doing Keep Fit!’ said Sally, aghast.

‘Embalming,’ I mumbled.

‘Intermediate embalming,’ corrected Jo.

‘Advanced cake decorating!’ spluttered Anne.

We all stared at one another in disbelief.

‘I suppose there is a strange logic in there somewhere, Mr Sheffield,’ said the phlegmatic Vera.

We laughed so much, Sally was convinced she had already lost a couple of pounds by the time she replaced the lid on the biscuit tin.

Jo rushed away to ring the bell and we all set off to our classrooms. As the children tumbled happily into school, I reflected, once again, how they didn’t seem to feel the cold. They all wandered in, pink-cheeked and with bare knees that were impervious to extremes of weather. As I took the register, I noticed snow had begun to fall heavily and I recalled that I had promised Ruby I would buy a snow-shifter.

During the morning, my class wrote poems about the snow; Sally’s children examined hexagonal snowflake patterns; Jo helped her children to complete a weather graph and Anne’s children drew snowy pictures with white chalk on black sugar paper. At the end of morning school, Anne gathered her children into the carpeted book corner and read the enchanting story ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’.

When Jo pulled the ancient rope to ring the bell in the school belltower at twelve o’clock, I pulled on my duffel coat and thick college scarf and called into Anne’s class. The children had clearly loved the story and were full of questions about the magical elves who appeared
mysteriously
in the night to help the poor cobbler and his wife.

‘Anne, I’m slipping out to buy that snow-shifter for Ruby,’ I said, and set off for the parade of shops on the other side of the High Street. Hunched figures, buffeted by the gusts of swirling snow, nodded in recognition as they hurried by. Everyone appeared to be unhappy, worn down by the atrocious weather and the dismal state of the country.

I trudged past the Post Office and Diane’s Hair Salon and stopped outside the window of Nora’s Coffee Shop. Disco culture had begun to sweep through the Western world and the Village People’s anthem, ‘YMCA’, had just topped the charts. Behind the counter, I could see Dorothy Humpleby performing a strange aerobics routine to the music.

The jingling doorbell was the only cheerful sound in Timothy Pratt’s Hardware Emporium. Big Dave and Little Malcolm were slumped over the counter, disheartened by an excess of extreme weather and a lack of work. Mrs Betty Buttle was casting a critical eye over a collection of cast-iron coal scuttles; and Albert Jenkins, loyal friend and school governor, was searching for a new brass watch chain.

Big Dave and Little Malcolm were feeling like outcasts, as their union had told them to go on strike.

‘Country’s goin’ t’dogs,’ said Big Dave, absent-mindedly rolling an Ever Ready battery along the counter to Little Malcolm.

‘Y’reight there, Dave,’ said Little Malcolm, rolling it back again.

Big Dave saw me step into the shop and stamp my feet on the coconut matting just inside the entrance.

‘Sorry abart y’rubbish, Mr Sheffield,’ shouted Big Dave, as he rolled the battery again.

‘We’re on strike,’ mumbled Little Malcolm, glancing up at me and missing the returning battery, so it rolled over the counter and landed at Timothy’s feet.

Tidy Tim picked it up and replaced it exactly in line with the other batteries, with the label facing outwards. Then he checked its alignment and made a minute adjustment. Tidy Tim liked matching labels.