(1/20) Village School (6 page)

As he was scrabbling it up wildly, we heard the sound of country voices at the door, and a little knot of people entered. Mr Willet and his wife were there, two or three of my older pupils, looking sheepish at seeing me in an unusual setting, and Mrs Pringle brought up the rear. Mrs Pringle's booming contralto voice tends to drown the rest of the choir with its peculiarly strong carrying qualities. As her note reading is far from accurate, and she resents any sort of correction, Mrs Pringle is rather more of a liability than an asset to St Patrick's church choir; but her aggressive piety, expressing itself in the deepest genuflections, the most military sharp-turns to the east and the raising of eyes to the chancel roof, is an example to the fidgety choir-boys, and Mr Annett bears with her mannerisms with commendable fortitude.

I went through to the vestry to see if Eric, my organ blower, was at his post. The vestry was warm and homely. The table was covered with a red serge cloth with a fringe of bobbles. On it stood a massive ink bottle containing an inch of ink, which had dried to the consistency of honey. Leaning negligently against the table was Eric, looking unpleasantly grubby, and blowing gum bubbles from his mouth, in a placid way.

'For pity's sake, Eric,' I protested, 'not in here, please!'

He turned pink, gobbled, and then, to my consternation, gave an enormous gulp, his eyes bulging.

'Gorn!' he announced with relief.

'I didn't intend you to
swallow
it, Eric—' I began, while dreadful visions of acute internal pains, ambulances, distracted parents and awful recriminations crowded upon me.

'It don't hurt you,' Eric reassured me. 'I often eats it—gives you the hiccups sometimes. That's all!'

Shaken, I returned to the organ and set out the music. Four or five more choir members had arrived and Mr Annett was fidgeting to begin. Snatches of conversation drifted over to me.

'But a
guinea,
mark you, just for killing an old pig!'

'Ah! But you got all the meat and lard and that, look! I knows you has to keep 'un all the year, and a guinea do seem a lot, I'll own up, but still——'

'Well, well!' broke in Mr Annett's staccato voice. 'Shall we make a start?'

'Young Mrs Pickett said to tell you she'd be along presently when she'd got the baby down. He's been a bit poorly——'

This piece of news started a fresh burst of comment, while Mr Annett raised and lowered himself impatiently on his toes.

'Poor little crow! Teeth, I don't wonder!'

'She called in nurse.'

'Funny, that! I see her only this morning up the shop——'

Mr Annett's patience snapped suddenly. He rattled his baton on the reading desk and flashed his eyes.

'Please, please! I'm afraid we must begin without Mrs Pickett. Ready, Miss Read? One, two!' We were off.

Behind me the voices rose and fell, Mrs Pringle's concentrated lowing vying with Mrs Willet's nasal soprano. Mrs Willet clings to her notes so cloyingly that she is usually half a bar behind the rest. Her voice has that penetrating and lugubrious quality found in female singers' renderings of 'Abide With Me' outside public houses on Saturday nights. She has a tendency to over-emphasize the final consonants and draw out the vowels to such excruciating lengths, and all this executed with such devilish shrillness, that every nerve is set jangling.

This evening Mrs Willet's time-lag was even worse than usual. Mr Annett called a halt.

'This,' he pleaded, 'is a cheerful lively piece of music. The valleys, we're told, laugh and sing. Lightly, please, let it trip, let it be merry! Miss Read, could you play it again?'

As trippingly and as nimbly as I could I obliged, watching Mr Annett's black, nodding head in the mirror above the organ. The tuft of his double crown flicked half a beat behind the rest of his head.

'Once more!' he commanded, and obediently the heavy, measured tones dragged forth, Mr Annett's baton beating a brisk but independent rhythm. Suddenly he flung his hands up and gave a slight scream. The choir slowed to a ragged halt and pained glances were exchanged. Mrs Pringle's mouth was buttoned into its most disapproving lines, and even Mr Willet's stolid countenance was faintly perturbed.

'The
time!
The
time!
' shouted Mr Annett, baton pounding on the desk. 'Listen again!' He gesticulated menacingly at my mirror and I played it again. 'You hear it? It goes:

'They
dance,
bong-bong,
They
sing,
bong-bong,
They
dance,
BONG
and
BONG
,
sing
BONG-BONG
!

It's just as simple as that! Now, with me!'

With his hair on end and his eyes gleaming dangerously, Mr Annett led them once more into action. Gallantly they battled on, Mr Annett straining like an eager puppy at the leash, while the slow voices rolled steadily along behind.

The lights had been put on in the chancel, but the rest of the church was cavernous and shadowy, making an age-old backcloth, aloof and beautiful, for this one hour's rustic comedy.

On the wall of the chancel stood the marble bust of Sir Charles Dagbury, once lord of the manor of this parish, staring with sightless eyes across the scene. On each side of his proud, disdainful face fell symmetrical cascades of curls, and his nostrils were curved as though with distaste for the rude mortals busking below.

The furious tapping of Mr Annett's baton broke the spell.

'David,' he was saying to the smallest choir-boy, 'get up on a hassock, child! Your head's hardly showing.'

'But I'm up on one, sir,' protested David, looking aggrieved.

'Sorry, sorry! Never met such badly-designed choir-stalls in my life,' announced Mr Annett, with the fine disregard of the townsman for the dangers this sort of remark incurs. 'Much too tall, and hideous at that!'

There was a sharp hiss as Mrs Pringle drew an outraged breath.

'My old grandfather,' she began heavily, 'though a trying old gentleman at the last, and should by rights have gone to the infirmary, such a dance as he led his poor wife, was as fine a carpenter as you could wish to meet in a day's march, and these choir-stalls here,' she leant forward menacingly and slapped one of them with a substantial hand—'these here very choir-stalls was reckoned one of his best bits of work! Ain't that right?' she demanded of her abashed neighbours.

There were awkward mutterings and shufflings. Mr Annett had the grace to flush and look ashamed.

'I do apologize, Mrs Pringle,' he said handsomely. 'I meant no offence to the craftsman who made the choir-stalls. First-class work, obviously. It was the design I was criticizing.'

'My grandfather,' boomed Mrs Pringle, with awful intensity, '
DESIGNED THEM TOO
!'

'I can only apologize again,' said Mr Annett, 'and hope that you will forgive my unfortunate remarks.' He coughed nervously. 'Well, to continue! Next Sunday we shall have 'Pleasant are Thy courts above' and I thought we'd try the descant in the second verse only. All agreeable?'

There was a murmur of assent from all except Mr Willet, who has a somewhat Calvinistic attitude to church affairs.

'I likes to hear a hymn sung straightforward myself,' he said, blowing out his tobacco-stained moustache, 'these fiddle-faddles takes your mind off the words, I reckon.'

'I'm sorry to hear that you think so,' said Mr Annett. 'What's the general feeling?' He looked round at the company, baton stuck through his hair.

Nobody answered, as nobody wanted to fall out with either Mr Willet or Mr Annett. In the silence Eric could be heard creaking about in the vestry. There was suddenly a shattering hiccup.

'Then we'll carry on,' said Mr Annett, jerked back to life by this explosion. 'Descant verse two only. The psalms we've practised and—oh, yes—before I forget! We'll have the seven-fold Amen at the end of the service.'

Mr Willet snorted and muttered heavily under his moustache.

'Well, what now?' snapped Mr Annett irritably. 'What's the objection to the seven-fold Amen?'

'Popish!' said Mr Willet, puffing out the moustache. 'I'm a plain man, Mr Annett, a plain man that's been brought up God-fearing; and to praise the Lord in a bit of respectable music is one thing, but seven-fold Amens is taking it too far, to my way of thinking. And my wife here,' he said, rounding fiercely on the shrinking Mrs Willet, 'agrees with me! Don't you?' he added, thrusting his face belligerently to hers.

'Yes, dear,' said Mrs Willet faintly.

'It's a pity—' began Mr Annett.

'And while we're at it,' continued Mr Willet loudly, brushing aside this interruption, 'what's become of them copies of the hymn-books done in atomic-sulphur?'

Mr Annett looked bewildered, as well he might.

'You know the ones, green covers they had, with the music and atomic-sulphur written just above. I'm used to 'em. We was all taught atomic-sulphur years ago at the village school, when schooling was schooling, I may say—and all us folks my age gets on best with it!'

'I believe they are in a box in the vestry,' said Mr Annett, pulling himself together, 'and of course you can use the copies with tonic solfa if you prefer them. They'd become rather shabby, that's why the vicar put them on one side.'

Mr Willet, having had his say, was now prepared to be mollified, and grunted accordingly.

Mr Annett began to shovel music back into his case.

'Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Next week, at the same time? Good evening, everybody. Yes, I think the anthem will go splendidly on the day—good night, good night.'

They drifted away into the shadows of the church, past the empty pews, the font, and the memorial tablets and tombs of their forefathers. Quietness came flooding back again. I locked the organ and went out to the vestry.

Eric, glistening from his exertions, was still struggling with recalcitrant hiccups, but seemed otherwise in excellent health. Mr Annett was giving him a shilling for his labours.

'And if you buy any more of that horrible gum,' I told him, 'eat it at home. If I see any in school it goes into the waste-paper basket, my boy!'

Grinning cheerfully he clattered off down the vestry steps and we followed him into the soft evening air.

The choir members were gossiping at the church gate, hidden from us by the angle of the wall. Their voices floated clearly across the graveyard.

'I believes in speaking my mind,' Mr Willet was saying firmly, '"Speak the truth and shame the devil!" There's plenty o' sense in that. That young Annett'd have us daubed with incense, like Ancient Britons, if he had his way!'

''Tis nothing to do with him-incense and that. 'Tis the vicar's job and he's all right,' asserted a woman's voice. Mrs Pringle had the last word.

'I trounced him proper about my grandpa! What if he was a sore trial at times? He was my own flesh and blood, wasn't he? Fair made me boil to hear him spoke of so low—' The booming voice died away as the footsteps grew fainter and fainter on the flinty road.

7. Miss Clare Falls Ill

T
ERM
was now several weeks old. Jimmy, Joseph and Linda had settled down and played schools, space-ships and shops in the playground as noisily as the rest.

Mrs Coggs had taken a job at the public house down the lane. Each morning she spent two hours there, washing glasses and scrubbing out the bar and the bar parlour, while the baby slept in its pram in the garden where she could keep an eye on it.

This arrangement had happy results for Joseph. For three or four weeks he had brought craggy slices of bread to school for his lunch, with an occasional apple or a few plums to enliven it; and this dreary meal he had eaten sadly, his dark eyes fixed upon the school dinners that his more fortunate fellows were demolishing.

But now, with money of her own in her pocket, Mrs Coggs was able to rebel against her husband's order of 'No school dinner for our Joe!' and to everyone's satisfaction Joseph returned to the dinner table, a broad smile on his face and a three-helping appetite keener than ever.

The weather had been mellow and golden all through September. The harvest had been heavy, the stacks were already being thatched, and housewives were hard at it bottling and jamming a bumper crop of apples, plums and damsons. Even Mrs Pringle admitted that the weather was lovely, and looked with gratification at the two unsullied stoves.

But one morning I awoke to a changed world. A border of scarlet dahlias, as brave as guardsmen the afternoon before, drooped, brown and clammy; and the grass was grey with frost.

The distant downs had vanished behind a white mist and below the elm trees the yellow leaves were thickening fast into an autumn carpet.

After breakfast I went across to the school to face Mrs Pringle. She was rubbing the desks with a blue-check duster. Her expression was defensive.

'Mrs Pringle,' I began bravely, 'if it is like this tomorrow we must put the stoves on.'

'The
stoves!
' said Mrs Pringle, opening her eyes with amazement. 'Why, miss, wc shan't need those for a week or so yet. This 'ere's a heat mist. You'll see—it'll clear to a real hot day!'

'I doubt it,' I replied shortly. 'Get firewood and coke in tonight in case this weather has set in. I'll listen to the forecast this evening and let you know definitely first thing tomorrow morning.'

I returned to the school-house feeling that the preliminary skirmish had gone well. Mrs Pringle I had left, muttering darkly, as she nicked the window-sills.

During the morning a watery sun struggled through, its rays falling across the children's down-bent heads as they struggled with their arithmetic. It was very quiet in the classroom. There was a low buzzing from the infants' side of the partition and the measured ticking of the ancient clock on the wall.

Suddenly, we were all frightened out of our wits by a heavy banging at the door. It was Mr Roberts the farmer, and one of his men, Tom Bates. Each carried a stout sheaf of corn. Behind me, the children chattered excitedly.

'Vicar said you'd be needing this for decorating the church for Harvest Festival on Sunday,' said Mr Roberts in his cheerful bellow. He is one of our more energetic school managers, as well as our near neighbour, so that he comes in to see us very often. He stamped into the room followed by Tom Bates and put the corn down by a long desk which stands at the side of the room. The floor-boards shook with the tremor of their heavy boots and the thud of com.