Village Affairs Read Online Free PDF Page B

conjecture in their homes at the moment, and it was hardly surprising that they shared their parents' interest.
    That afternoon when the sun was high in the heaven, and the downs were veiled in a blue haze of heat, I decided that a nature walk was far more beneficial to my pupils than a handwork lesson.
    As the sun was so hot, we kept to the lanes, in and around the village, which are shaded by fine old trees. The hawthorn hedges were sprouting young scarlet shoots, and in the cottage gardens the columbines were out. The children call them 'granny's bonnets', and they are exactly like the beautifully goffered and crimped sun bonnets that one sees in old photographs.
    Some of the lilac flowers were beginning to turn rusty, and the old-fashioned crimson peonies were beginning to droop their petals in the heat, but the scent was heavy, redolent of summer and a whiff of the long days ahead.
    The children straggled along in a happy and untidy crocodile, chattering like starlings and waving greetings to friends and relations as they passed.
    Fairacre, I told myself, was the perfect place to live and work, and early summer found it at its most beautiful. I
stopped to smell a rose nodding over a cottage gate, and became conscious of voices in the garden. Two neighbours were chatting over their boundary hedge.
    'And if it isn't Arthur Coggs, then who is it?' asked one.
    I sighed, and let the rose free from my restraining hand.
    Every Eden seemed to have its serpent, Fairacre included.

4 Mrs Pringle has Problems
    WITH the departure of the infants' teacher, Pat Smith, we were back in the familiar circumstances of looking for a second member of staff.
    As it happened, only two new children arrived for the summer term, both five-year-olds, making the infants' class seventeen in all. Altogether we had now thirty children on roll, and although this might sound a laughably small number to teach compared with some of the gigantic classes in overcrowded urban primary schools, yet there were considerable difficulties.
    I struggled alone for two weeks before a supply teacher could be found.
    It meant a proliferation of groups working in the one classroom, and an impossible situation when one tried to play games, or choose a story or a song, which could be enjoyed by five year olds and eleven year olds at the same time. I always feared that some accident might happen, when the sole responsibility rested on me to get help and to look after the rest of the school at the same time. It was a worrying time and I was mightily relieved when Mrs Ansell arrived to share the burden.
    She was a cheerful young woman in her thirties whom I had met once or twice at teachers' meetings in Caxley. She had a young son of two, and had not taught since his birth,
but her mother lived nearby in Caxley, and was willing to mind the child if Mrs Ansell wanted to do occasional supply teaching.
    All went well for a fortnight, and the children were settling down nicely under their new regime, when the blow fell. She rang me one evening to say that her mother had fallen down in the garden and damaged her hip. She was in Caxley hospital, and of course quite unable to look after Richard.
    I expressed my sympathy, told her we could manage, and hung up.
    Now what, I wondered? Supply teachers are as rare and as precious as rubies. Most of those local few who were in existence lived in Caxley and preferred to attend the town schools. I had been lucky enough to get Mrs Ansell because she particularly wanted to teach infants, liked country schools, and had her own car.
    'I shall have to ring that office again in the morning,' I told Tibby gloomily. 'And what hope there?'
    Tibby mewed loudly, but not with sympathy. Plain hunger was the cause, and I obediently dug out some Pussi-luv and put it on the kitchen floor. I then supplied my own supper plate with bread and cheese.
    It was while I was eating this spare repast that I thought of Amy. She has helped us out on occasions, and