Wicked! (3 page)

1

Larkminster, county town of Larkshire, has long been considered the most precious jewel in the Cotswolds’ crown. Throughout the year, its streets are paved with tourists, admiring the glorious pale gold twelfth-century cathedral, the Queen Anne courthouse and the ancient castle, whose battlements descend into the River Fleet as it idles its way round the town.

Larkminster, famous for its splendid beeches and limes and designated England’s Town of Trees at the Millennium, was anticipating further fame because its newly elected Conservative MP, Jupiter Belvedon, was hotly tipped to take over the Tory party and oust Tony Blair at the next election.

In his Larkminster constituency, the machiavellian Jupiter was frustrated by a hung Labour and Lib-Dem county council who always voted tactically to keep out the Tories. But in January 2001, to the county council’s horror, central government decided to take the running of Larkshire’s schools away from the local education authority, who they felt was mismanaging its finances and not adhering sufficiently to the national curriculum. They then handed this task to a private company called S and C Services, the ‘S’ and the ‘C’ standing for ‘Support’ and ‘Challenge’.

Larkminster itself boasted a famous public school, Bagley Hall, some five miles outside the town; a choir school attached to the cathedral; two excellent state schools: Searston Abbey and St James’s, known as St Jimmy’s; and a perfectly frightful sink school, Larkminster Comprehensive, which was situated on the edge of the town’s black spot, the notorious Shakespeare Estate.

Like many outwardly serene and elegant West Country towns, Larkminster was greatly exercised by the increase in violent crime, for which it believed the Shakespeare Estate and Larkminster Comprehensive, or ‘Larks’ as it was known, were entirely responsible.

Randal Stancombe, a Rich List property developer and a hugely influential local player with a manicured finger in every pie, was particularly concerned. Cavendish Plaza, one of his private estates of desirable residences newly built above the flood plain of the River Fleet, was constantly troubled by Larks delinquents mugging, nicking car radios and knocking fairies off Rolls-Royces on their way to school. Randal Stancombe was putting increasing pressure on the police and the county council to clean up the area.

Larkminster Comp had for some years been a candidate for closure. It was at the bottom of the league tables and could only muster five hundred children rattling around in a building large enough for twelve hundred. Taxpayers’ money should not be squandered heating empty schools.

Reading the graffiti on the wall, and not liking the prospect of bullying interference from a private company like S and C Services, the then headmaster, Ted Mitchell, had immediately resigned in February 2001. Larks Comp should have been shut down then, but the county council and S and C Services, nervous of the local uproar, the petitions, the poster campaigns, the marches on County Hall and even Westminster and the inevitable loss of seats that occur whenever a school is threatened with closure, dodged the issue.

They should have handed the job to Larks’s deputy head, Mike Pitts, a seedy alcoholic who would have killed off the place in a few months. Instead they decided to give Larks a last chance and in April advertised in
The Times Educational Supplement
for a new head. This was why on a hot sunny day in early May, Janna Curtis, head of English at Redfords Comprehensive in West Yorkshire, caught the Intercity from Leeds to Larkminster.

On any journey, Janna overloaded herself with work which she truly intended to do. Aware that Year Eleven would be taking their first English exam in less than three weeks, she should have reread her GCSE revision notes. She should also have checked the English department’s activities for the rest of term. Even more important, she should have tackled the pile of information about Larks Comp and the area that she had downloaded from the internet.

But after registering that Larks was underachieving disastrously and those ‘right-wing bastards’ Randal Stancombe and S and C Services were putting the boot in, she was sidetracked by a
Daily Mail
abandoned by a passenger getting off at Birmingham. Despite her horror at its right-wing views, she soon became engrossed in a story about Posh and Becks, followed by Lynda Lee-Potter’s much too enthusiastic comments about ‘another right-wing bastard’: Rupert Campbell-Black.

The train was stiflingly hot. Even if she’d had the money, Janna would never have done anything so revoltingly elitist as travel first class, but she wished air conditioning extended into standard class as well, so she didn’t go scarlet before her interview. She was gagging for a large vodka and tonic to steady her nerves, but, on no breakfast, she’d become garrulous. Not that she was going to get the job; they’d think her much too young and inexperienced and she wasn’t even sure she wanted it.

Gazing at a cloud of pink and white apple blossom clashing with bilious yellow fields of rape as the train trundled through Worcestershire, Janna reflected that the past three years at Redfords had been the most thrilling of her life. The cheers must have been heard in Westminster the day she and the other staff were told their school had finally struggled out of special measures (the euphemism for a dangerously failing school).