(1/20) Village School (2 page)

Above me the rooks still chattered. Far below they could see, converging upon the school lane, little knots of children from all quarters of the village. Cathy had Jimmy firmly by the hand: Joseph's grimy paw she disdained to hold, and he trailed behind her, his dark eyes apprehensive.

Linda Moffat, immaculate in starched pink gingham, walked primly beside her mother; while behind and before, running, dawdling, shouting or whistling, ran her future school fellows.

Through the sunny air another sound challenged the rooks' chorus. The school bell began to ring out its morning greeting.

2. Our School

T
HE
school at Fairacre was built in 1880, and as it is a church school it is strongly ecclesiastical in appearance. The walls are made of local stone, a warm grey in colour, reflecting summer light with honeyed mellowness, but appearing dull and dejected when the weather is wet. The roof is high and steeply-pitched and the stubby bell-tower thrusts its little Gothic nose skywards, emulating the soaring spire of St Patrick's, the parish church, which stands next door.

The windows are high and narrow, with pointed tops. Children were not encouraged, in those days, to spend their working time in gazing out at the world, and, sitting stiffly in the well of the room, wearing sailor suits or stout zephyr and serge frocks, their only view was of the sky, the elm trees and St Patrick's spire. Today their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have exactly the same view; just this lofty glimpse of surrounding loveliness.

The building consists of two rooms divided by a partition of glass and wood. One room houses the infants, aged five, six and seven years of age, under Miss Clare's benevolent eye. The other room is my classroom where the older children of junior age stay until they are eleven when they pass on to a secondary school, either at Caxley, six miles away, or in the neighbouring village of Beech Green, where the children stay until they are fifteen.

A long lobby runs behind these two rooms, the length of the building; it is furnished with pegs for coats, a low stone sink for the children to wash in, and a high new one for washing-up the dinner things. An electric copper is a recent acquisition, and very handsome it is; but although we have electricity installed here there is no water laid on to the school.

This is, of course, an appalling problem, for there is no water to drink—and children get horribly thirsty—no water for washing hands, faces, cleansing cuts and grazes, for painting, for mixing paste or watering plants or filling flower vases; and, of course, no water for lavatories.

We overcome this problem in two ways. A large galvanized iron tank on wheels is filled with rainwater collected from the roof, and this, when we have skimmed off the leaves and twigs and rescued the occasional frog, serves most of our needs. The electric copper is filled in the morning from this source and switched on after morning playtime to be ready for washing not only the crockery and cutlery after dinner but also the stone floor of the lobby.

I bring two buckets of drinking water across the playground from the school-house where there is an excellent well, but we must do our own heating, so that a venerable black kettle stands on my stove throughout the winter months, purring in a pleasantly domestic fashion, ready for emergencies. The electric kettle, in my own kitchen, serves us at other times.

The building is solid structurally and kept in repair by the church authorities whose property it is. One defect, however, it seems impossible to overcome. A skylight, strategically placed over the headmistress's desk, lets in not only light, but rain. Generations of local builders have clambered over the roof and sworn and sawn and patched and pulled at our skylight—but in vain. The gods have willed otherwise, and year after year Pluvius drops his pennies into a bucket placed below for the purpose, the clanging muffled by a dishcloth folded to fit the bottom.

The school stands at right angles to the road and faces across the churchyard to the church. A low dry-stone wall runs along by the road dividing it from the churchyard, school playground and the school-house garden. Behind this the country slopes away, falling slightly at first, then rising, in swelling folds, up into the full majesty of the downs which sweep across these southern counties for mile upon mile. The air is always bracing, and in the winter the wind is a bitter foe, and that quality of pure light, which is peculiar to downland country, is here very noticeable.

The children are hardy and though, quite naturally, they take their surroundings for granted, I think that they are aware of the fine views around them. The girls particularly are fond of flowers, birds, insects and all the minutiae of natural life, guarding jealously any rare plant against outsiders' prying eyes, and having a real knowledge of the whereabouts and uses of many plants and herbs.

The boys like to dismiss such things as 'girls' stuff,' but they too can find the first mushrooms, sloes or blackberries for their mothers or for me; and most of the birds' nests are known as soon as they are built. Luckily, stealing eggs and rifling nests seem to be on the wane, though occasional culprits are brought to stern judgment at my desk. They suffer, I think, more from the tongues of the girls in the playground in matters like this, for there is no doubt about it that the girls are more sympathetic to living things and pour scorn and contumely on any young male tyrants.

In one corner of the small, square playground is the inevitable pile of coke for the two slow combustion stoves. These coke piles seem to be a natural feature of all country schools. This is considered by the children, a valuable adjunct to playtime activities. A favourite game is to run scrunchily up the pile and then to slither down in gritty exhilaration. Throwing it at each other, or at a noisy object such as the rainwater tank, is also much enjoyed, hands being wiped perfunctorily down the fronts of jackets or on the seats of trousers before the beginning of writing lessons. All these joys are strictly forbidden, of course, which adds to the fearful delight.

Furthest from the wall by the road at the other side of the playground, grows a clump of elm trees and their gnarled roots, which add to the hazards of the playground's surface, are a favourite place to play.

The recesses are rooms, larders, cupboards or gardens, and the ivy leaves from the wall are used for plates and provisions, and twigs for knives and forks. Sometimes they play shops among the roots, paying each other leaves and bearing away conkers, acorns and handfuls of gravel as their purchases. I like to hear the change in their voices as they become shopkeepers or customers. They affect a high dictatorial tone of voice when they assume adult status, quite unlike the warm burr of their everyday conversations.

The fields He two or three feet below the level of the playground and a scrubby hedge of hazel and hawthorn marks this boundary. The sloping bank down is scored by dozens of little bare paths, worn by generations of sturdy boots and corduroy breeches.

Altogether our playground is a good one-full of possibilities for resourceful children and big enough to allow shopkeepers, mothers and fathers, cowboys and spacemen to carry on their urgent affairs very happily together.

On this first morning of term Miss Clare had already arrived when I walked over at a quarter to nine. Her bicycle, as upright and as ancient as its owner, was propped just inside the lobby door.

The school had that indefinable first-morning smell compounded of yellow soap, scrubbed floorboards and black-lead. The tortoise stove gleamed like an ebony monster; even the vent-pipe which soared aloft towards the pitch-pine roof was blackened as far as Mrs Pringle, the school-cleaner, could reach. Clean newspaper covered the freshly-hearth-stoned surroundings of the stove—which officially remained unlit until October—and the guard, just as glossy, was neatly placed round the edges of the outspread
News of the World.

My desk had that bare tidy look that it only wears for an hour or so on this particular morning of term; and the inkstand, an imposing affair of mahogany and brass, shone in splendour. I wondered as I walked through to Miss Clare's room just how quickly its shelf would remain unencumbered by the chalk, beads, raincoat buttons, paper clips, raffia needles and drawing pins that were its normal burden.

Miss Clare was taking a coat-hanger out of her big canvas hold-all. She is very careful of her clothes, and is grieved to see the casual way in which the children sling their coats, haphazard, on to the pegs in the lobby. Her own coat is always smoothed methodically over its hanger and hung on the back of the classroom door. The children watch, fascinated, when she removes her gloves, for she blows into them several times before folding them neatly together. Her sensible felt hat has a shelf to itself inside the needlework cupboard.

Miss Clare has taught here for nearly forty years, with only one break, when she nursed her mother through her last illness twelve years ago. She started here as a monitress at the age of thirteen, and was known officially, until recently, as 'A Supplementary Uncertificated Teacher.' Her knowledge of local family history is far-reaching and of inestimable value to the teaching of our present pupils. I like to hear the older people talk of her. 'Always a stickler for tidiness,' the butcher told me, 'the only time I was smacked in the babies' class was when Miss Clare found me kicking another boy's cap round the floor.'

Miss Clare is of commanding appearance, tall and thin, with beautiful white hair, which is kept in place with an invisible hair-net. Even on the wildest day, when the wind shrieks across the downs, Miss Clare walks round the playground looking immaculate. She is now over sixty, and her teaching methods have of late been looked upon by some visiting inspectors with a slightly pitying eye. They are, they say, too formal; the children should have more activity, and the classroom is unnaturally quiet for children of that age. This may be, but for all that, or perhaps because of that, Miss Clare is a very valuable teacher, for in the first place the children are happy, they are fond of Miss Clare, and she creates for them an atmosphere of serenity and quiet which means that they can work well and cheerfully, really laying the foundations of elementary knowledge on which I can build so much more quickly when they come up into my class.

Her home is two miles away, on the outskirts of the next village of Beech Green. She has lived there ever since she was six, a solemn little girl in high-buttoned boots and ringlets, in the cottage which her father thatched himself. He was a thatcher by trade, and many of the cottages in the surrounding villages are decorated with the ornate criss-crossing and plaiting which he loved to do. He was much in demand at harvest time for thatching ricks, and Miss Clare often makes 'rick-dollies' of straw for the children like the ones her father used to put on top of the newly-thatched stacks.

In the corner of the room John Burton was pulling lustily at the bell-rope. He stopped as I came in.

'Five minutes' rest,' I said, 'then another pull or two to tell the others that it's time to get into lines in the playground.'

Miss Clare and I exchanged holiday news while she unlocked her desk and took out her new register, carefully shrouded in fresh brown paper. She had covered mine for me too, at the end of last term, and written in the names of our new classes in her sloping copper-plate hand.

We should have forty children altogether this term; eighteen in the infants' room and twenty-two in mine; and though our numbers might seem small, compared with the monstrous regiments of forty and fifty to a class in town schools, the age range, of course, would be a considerable handicap.

I should have five children in my lowest group who would be nearly eight years old and these would still have difficulty in reading fluently and with complete understanding. At the other end of the classroom would be my top group, consisting of three children, including Cathy Wakes, who would be taking the examination which would decide their future schooling at eleven. These children would need particular care in being shown how to tackle arithmetical problems, how to understand written questions and, more important still, how to set out their answers and express themselves generally, in clear and straightforward language.