05 Please Sir!
About the Book
It’s 1981 – the time of Adam and the Ants, Rubik’s Cube, the Sony Walkman and the Falklands War – as head teacher Jack Sheffield returns to Ragley-on-the-Forest School for another rollercoaster year.
Vera, the ever-efficient school secretary, has to grapple with a newfangled computer – and enjoys a royal occasion – while Ruby the caretaker rediscovers romance with a Butlin’s Redcoat. And for Jack, wedding bells are in the air. But the unexpected is just round the corner…
PLEASE SIR!
The Alternative School Logbook 1981–1982
Jack Sheffield
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First published in Great Britain
in 2011 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Jack Sheffield 2011
Jack Sheffield has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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ISBN 9780593065686
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About the Book
Title
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Map
Prologue
1 Enid Blyton and the Library Van
2 Vera’s Brief Encounter
3 Ruby and the Butlin’s Redcoat
4 Forgotten Harvest
5 The World of Timothy Pratt
6 Separate Lives
7 The Latchkey Boy
8 A Doll Called Jesus
9 A Present for Christmas
10 The Secrets of Sisters
11 The Knock on the Door
12 The Leeds Pals
13 Routine and Romance
14 Ted Postlethwaite and the Missing Cat
15 Oliver Cromwell’s Underwear
16 The Busby Girl
17 The Enemy Within
18 Perfect Day
19 The Summer Ball
20 Please Sir!
For my sweet Elisabeth
Jack Sheffield was born in 1945 and grew up in the tough environment of Gipton Estate, in north-east Leeds. After a job as a ‘pitch boy’, repairing roofs, he became a Corona Pop Man before going to St John’s College, York, and training to be a teacher. In the late seventies and eighties, he was a headteacher of two schools in North Yorkshire before becoming Senior Lecturer in Primary Education at Bretton Hall College. It was at this time that he began to record his many amusing stories of village life as portrayed in Teacher, Teacher!, Mister Teacher, Dear Teacher and Village Teacher. Please Sir! is his fifth novel and continues the story of life in the fictional village of Ragley-on-the-Forest. He lives in York and Hampshire.
Visit his website at www.jacksheffield.com
Acknowledgements
I am indeed fortunate to have the support of my superb editor, the ever patient Linda Evans, and the wonderful team at Transworld, including Larry Finlay, Bill Scott-Kerr, Nick Robinson, Madeline Toy, Lynsey Dalladay, Sophie Holmes, Vivien Garrett, copy-editor Judy Collins, and the ‘footsoldiers’ – fellow ‘Old Roundhegian’ Martin Myers and the quiet, unassuming Mike ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Edgerton.
Special thanks go to my industrious literary agent and Britain’s most youthful forty-year-old, Philip Patterson of Marjacq Scripts, for his encouragement and good humour.
I am also grateful to all those who assisted in the research for this novel – in particular: Patrick Busby, Pricing Director, church organist and Harrogate Rugby Club supporter, Hampshire; Janina Bywater, nurse and lecturer in psychology, Cornwall; Rob Cragg, ex-European Director, Molex, and classic-car enthusiast, Hampshire; The Revd Ben Flenley, Rector of Bentworth, Lasham, Medstead and Shalden, Hampshire; David Hayward, retired environmental scientist and radio-controlled model aircraft enthusiast, Hampshire; Steve Holford, postman and former potter from Stoke-on-Trent, Hampshire; John Kirby, ex-policeman, expert calligrapher and Sunderland supporter, County Durham; Jennifer Lines, retired headteacher and local artist, Hampshire; Roy Linley, Enterprise Architect, Unilever Global Expertise Team, and Leeds United supporter, Port Sunlight, Wirral; Sue Maddison, primary school teacher, Harrogate, Yorkshire; Kerry Magennis-Prior, ex-churchwarden, St Andrew’s Church, Medstead, Hampshire; Sue Matthews, primary school teacher and John Denver enthusiast, Wigginton, Yorkshire; Phil Parker, ex-teacher and Manchester United supporter, Holme-upon-Spalding Moor, Yorkshire; The Revd Canon John Rendall, retired parish priest and Canon Emeritus of York Minster, Yorkshire; Charlie Shaylor, retired headteacher, lay reader and expert bread-maker, Hampshire; Pat Skinner, nurse and bread-pudding champion, Hampshire; Caroline Stockdale, librarian, York Central Library, Yorkshire, and all the wonderful staff at Waterstone’s Alton, Hampshire, and Waterstone’s York.
Prologue
Fate is a capricious companion … Just one look and I knew.
‘So you didn’t get the job?’ Beth said quietly.
I shook my head. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Jack, what do you mean?’ she said.
I took a deep breath and the words tumbled out. ‘Well, Ragley School is staying open, so I chose not to go forward to the final interview.’
There was a hint of sadness in her green eyes. ‘I see,’ she said.
‘But it’s wonderful news, Beth, and … I love being a village teacher.’
She sighed deeply and shook her head. ‘I know, Jack, I know.’
I put my arms around her slim waist and kissed her gently. ‘This won’t affect our wedding plans, will it?’
She looked at me as if she was seeing me for the first time and said nothing. The air was still and there were no clouds on this perfect day but the look in Beth’s eyes made my heart sink. In the heaven that was once my heart, the sky was broken.
That was six weeks ago and the school summer holiday was now almost over. My interview at County Hall for a large primary school on the east coast of Yorkshire had ended abruptly. At the last moment I had withdrawn my application when Miss Barrington-Huntley, the Chair of the Education Committee for North Yorkshire, had informed me that Ragley Church of England Primary School was not on the list of schools to be closed. My fiancée, Beth Henderson – like me, a village school headteacher in her mid-thirties – found to her great relief that her school, Hartingdale, was also r
eprieved. It should have been a time for celebration. Instead it seemed to cause unease in our relationship. Falling in love had been easy; the next step was proving difficult.
It was Tuesday, 1 September 1981, and I was sitting alone in the school office. All was still and quiet. A watery sun streamed in through the high-arched Victorian windows and tiny motes of dust were suspended in the shaft of hazy sunlight waiting for a waft of air from the open doorway. Gentle rain was sweeping over from the Hambleton hills, but it was a quiet rain. Droplets caressed the bare branches of the avenue of horse-chestnut trees at the front of this lovely old school and I recalled the first time I had sat at my headteacher’s desk. Later I had met Beth … and it was a perfect memory.
My fifth year as headmaster of Ragley-on-the-Forest Church of England Primary School in North Yorkshire was about to begin. It was a day of silent aspirations, a morning of new directions … and I wondered if I had made the right decision to return to Ragley School.
Then I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk, took out the large, leather-bound school logbook and opened it to the next clean page. I filled my fountain pen with black Quink ink, wrote the date and stared at the empty page. The record of another school year was about to begin. Four years ago, the retiring headmaster, John Pruett, had told me how to fill in the official school logbook. ‘Just keep it simple,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t say what really happens, because no one will believe you!’
So the real stories were written in my ‘Alternative School Logbook’. And this is it!
Chapter One
Enid Blyton and the Library Van
86 children were registered on roll on the first day of the school year. We were informed by County Hall that as part of the ‘Reading for All’ initiative, the North Yorkshire county library van will begin weekly visits to school. The newly appointed Computer Studies and Library Development Adviser will be visiting school to examine our reading policy and make recommendations.
Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:
Thursday, 3 September 1981
‘Y’still ’ere, then!’ shouted Mrs Winifred Brown through the open office door. ‘Ah ’eard they were shutting y’down,’ she added bluntly. As usual, our angriest parent had the demeanour of a snorting rhino and the finesse of a wrecking ball.
I looked up from my headteacher’s desk. ‘No, Mrs Brown, Ragley School is definitely open.’
‘Pity,’ she growled as she pushed little Damian Brown back out of the entrance door towards the school playground. Her seven-year-old son, with his skinhead haircut and sticking-out ears, was simultaneously picking his nose and sucking a giant gobstopper. Multi-tasking came easily to Damian. ‘Ah were jus’ checkin’,’ retorted Mrs Brown. ‘Y’don’t know if y’comin’ o’ goin’ in this school.’ Then, with a parting withering look, she turned on her heel and stormed off.
I unwound my six-feet-one-inch frame from my chair and put on my old herringbone sports jacket with the frayed leather patches on the elbows. Then I gave my black-framed Buddy Holly spectacles a quick polish using the end of my outdated flower-power tie and walked out into the entrance hall.
‘Tek no notice, Mr Sheffield. Y’can’t please some folk.’ It was Ruby the caretaker, her rosy cheeks flushed with the effort of sweeping the stone steps in the entrance porch. She leant on her yard broom and shook her head. ‘Winifred’s been proper vexed since ’er Eddie lost ’is job mekkin’ them toilets.’ Eddie Brown had been a fitter at Portaloo in York but was now resigned to sitting at home and listening to the regular tirades of his formidable wife. Only his pet ferret, Frankenstein, was a source of true companionship. It occurred to me that no matter how complicated my life seemed to be, there was always someone worse off.
I walked out to our tarmac playground surrounded by a waist-high wall of Yorkshire stone, amber in the sunlight and topped with black metal fleur-de-lis railings that cast long shadows. In the distance the church clock struck the half-hour. It was 8.30 a.m. on Thursday, 3 September, the first day of the autumn term, and my fifth year as headteacher of Ragley-on-the Forest Church of England Primary School in North Yorkshire had begun.
For this was 1981. The first computers had arrived in schools and Professor Ernö Rubik had announced that fifty million of his cubes had been sold. However, this went largely unnoticed by the ladies of the Ragley and Morton Women’s Institute when they heard that Sue Barker, the darling of ladies tennis, had to retire from the American championships at Flushing Meadow with a swollen knee. In Liverpool the locals were trying to raise £12,000 for a bronze statue of the late John Lennon, while the new music scene had embraced the New Romantics. Adam and the Ants were riding high in the charts and young men in baggy shirts had begun to wear black eyeliner. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher knew her honeymoon period was over when Glaswegian factory workers welcomed her with a barrage of eggs and, on a distant horizon, there was trouble brewing in a group of islands in the South Atlantic. Closer to home, in the window of the Co-op in York, an incredible new electronic device from Grundig called a video recorder had gone on show and shoppers stopped to stare in wonder. The world was changing fast but, happily, in the quiet Yorkshire village of Ragley-on-the-Forest there was still time to pause a while and smell the flowers.
I walked down the cobbled driveway, through the school gates and breathed in the clean Yorkshire air. Then I stood back to admire our village school. It was a solid Victorian building of reddish-brown bricks, a steeply sloping grey slate roof and a tall incongruous bell tower. On this perfect September day the sun reflected from the high arched window in the gable end. Recent fears of the closure of Ragley School, at least for the time being, were over.
Bordering the front of the school was a row of tall horse-chestnut trees, heavy in leaf and spiky fruit, and I stood under the welcome shade and watched the village coming alive. Off to my right in the centre of a row of pretty terraced cottages with pantile roofs and tall brick chimneys stood The Royal Oak with the autumn fire of Virginia creeper clinging to its whitewashed walls. Opposite me, on the village green, a group of mothers chatted nervously. Their four-year-olds were about to experience a first full day in Anne Grainger’s reception class. The children looked relaxed and made daisy chains while their mothers stood anxiously with handkerchiefs at the ready. As usual, a few tears would be shed when the time came for them to say goodbye to their tiny offspring.
Down the High Street, Big Dave Robinson and his cousin, Little Malcolm Robinson, the council binmen, were collecting rubbish in their wagon from Prudence Golightly’s General Stores & Newsagent, Piercy’s Butcher’s Shop, the Village Pharmacy and Pratt’s Hardware Emporium. They paused outside Nora’s Coffee Shop, where the assistant, Dorothy Humpleby, was leaning in the doorway, humming along to Soft Cell’s recent number one record ‘Tainted Love’ and hoping for a glimpse of her boyfriend, Little Malcolm. Meanwhile, next door, Diane Wigglesworth was putting a large poster of Farrah Fawcett in the window of her hair salon.
The tranquil scene was suddenly shattered by loud, excited voices as a posse of children appeared from the council estate and ran towards the school gates. Red-faced and panting, nine-year-old Jimmy Poole looked concerned.
‘What’s the problem, Jimmy?’ I asked.
His sun-tanned, freckled face looked up at me with black-button eyes from under a fringe of ginger curls. ‘Thorth, Mithter Theffield,’ he lisped.
‘Thoughts, Jimmy? You mean you’re having unhappy thoughts?’ I asked. Jimmy had always been a cheerful boy and it was strange to see him looking so downcast, particularly on the first day of term.
‘No, Mithter Theffield,’ replied Jimmy, shaking his head. ‘Ah’ve forgotten me thorth for boyth gameth.’
‘Ah, I see,’ I said with a smile. ‘Well, don’t worry, we’ll find you a spare pair.’
He looked relieved and ran into the schoolyard to talk to his friend Heathcliffe Earnshaw about the forthcoming conker season. Then he stopped and shouted over his sh
oulder, ‘Mithter Theffield, don’t worry … ah’m going thopping for thum after thcool with my mam and my thithter.’
I smiled as I watched the eager young faces of the children gathering in small groups on the playground, ready for another academic year. Like the changing seasons, there was a steady rhythm to the life of a village schoolteacher and, for me, it was the job I loved.
Suddenly a large cream and blue mobile library van came into sight from Morton Road. It drove sedately past the village green and slowed up outside the Post Office, where the village postman, Ted Postlethwaite, had just finished his usual cup of Typhoo with the postmistress, Miss Amelia Duff. It pulled up outside the village hall and the driver, a short, portly woman in her mid-forties, got out and surveyed her vehicle with a critical eye. Then she leant in and picked up a Thermos flask in a mighty fist that had stamped countless thousands of library books. It was well known in the village that if you valued your knuckles you didn’t shake hands with Rosie Backhouse.
Since leaving her home in Featherstone, Rosie had spent the past twenty years driving the county council library van round the cluster of villages to the north of York. One morning each week she parked in Ragley village and her regular customers would trundle out to select a new novel. Rosie ruled her empire with a rod of iron, to such a degree that Don Bradshaw, the barman in The Royal Oak, was convinced she had been trained by the Gestapo. Her husband was the timid Cyril, manager of the Cavendish furniture store in York, and he would probably have agreed. Rosie was a very fierce lady and woe betide anyone caught smudging the front cover of a book or, God forbid, turning down the corner of a page. She settled down on the bench outside the village hall, glanced up at the clock and unscrewed the top of her flask. A nice beaker of coffee before her nine o’clock start would be just the job.