To Sir With Love

  The door opened to admit Mrs. Dale-Evans, who smiled at us and began bustling about in what was evidently her familiar routine of collecting cups and washing them.

  “Got to fix a bath presently, for the Murphy girl in Clinty’s class. Kids complaining again, won’t sit near her. Some mothers ought to be shot. Child stinks. A pity.”

  I felt that she expected some comment from one of us.

  “What’s the matter with the child?” I asked “Enuretic?”

  “God, no. Been wearing the same sanitary napkin for days, I guess. Fourteen years old and as helpless as an infant. You men teachers don’t know how lucky you are; the things we women have to do for these kids.” And she lifted her eyes in mute supplication to Heaven.

  The washing done, she came over to us, wiping her hands with a towel. “Show you around my domain if you like.”

  I stood up, excused myself from Miss Blanchard, and followed Mrs. Dale-Evans out of the staffroom.

  The Domestic Science Department was a large well-equipped room on the top floor and evidently her pride and joy; she showed off the gleaming gas cookers, pots and pans, the rows of well-scrubbed heavy deal tables, the pedal sewing machines and the washing machines all spick and span in their places like guardsmen paraded for inspection. Along one wall were rows of drawers containing cutlery and all the paraphernalia of the housewife’s art. From the roof, at intervals, hung about a dozen rubber-sheathed electric cables each of which ended in a protected socket ready to receive an electric iron. In a tiny alcove sectioned off from the rest of the room was a child’s cot in which lay a life-size baby-doll, and on a table nearby were neatly laid out the general equipment for the care of the baby. She kept up a running commentary on everything I saw, and at this point remarked, waving her hand at the cot in the alcove: “Some of them know more about this lot than I do; regular bunch of little mothers they are; call this fancy stuff.”

  As we were speaking a group of girls arrived for their cookery lesson. They were ordered to scrub their hands thoroughly at the sink, after which they stood quietly behind their deal tables while Mrs. Dale-Evans explained the simple recipe she wished them to follow.

  I remained with her, marvelling at the high standard of cleanliness and order she was able to achieve with the children. If she could accomplish such near perfection without recourse to beatings, then I would most certainly have a shot at it. This woman with her ready, listening ear and proven, sound advice, was both teacher and mother to these girls. But I felt certain that, should the occasion arise, she could also be tough—very tough.

  Chapter

  Three

  THE DINING HALL-CUM-GYMNASIUM EXTENDED over most of the ground floor. We entered and sat at a table slightly apart from the rows of folding tables occupied by the children. When everyone was assembled, Mr. Florian stood up and said grace: “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.” The chorused “Amen” which followed was lost in the din of rattling cutlery, chatter of children, and clanging of pots and pans as the kitchen staff filled and refilled the tureens.

  The children were seated in groups of eight, two of them in turn being responsible for collecting and distributing the food for their particular group. Both boys and girls took turns at this and showed remarkable skill in portioning each course evenly and quickly. At the end of each course the day’s two servers stacked the dishes, collected the cutlery and rushed them away to the kitchen staff. At the end of the meal the tablecloths were shaken and folded, and each group sat quietly awaiting the signal of dismissal.

  When we were all finished Mr. Florian rose and there was an immediate hush; at a signal from him the children stood and group by group left the dining hall quietly. I followed the others up to the staffroom, where Mrs. Dale-Evans was soon busy preparing a cup of tea.

  I stood at the window looking across to the ruined church, until a loud blare of swing music from close at hand caused me to turn around. Noticing the look of inquiry on my face, Miss Clintridge said:

  “That’s the midday dance session. The kids are allowed to use the hall from one to one forty-five each day; they play the records on a gramophone pick-up through the wireless loudspeaker. Sometimes I join them, and so does Grace. Even the Old Man shakes a leg on occasions.”

  “That, my dear newcomer, is the understatement of the year.” Weston’s voice was as shrill as his person was untidy. “It is grossly unfair of you, Clinty, to mislead our sunburned friend with so innocent a remark. One look at those energetic morons should convince him that they’re not dancing for the fun of it.” He slowly pulled himself out of his chair and leaned indolently against the fireplace. Everyone was now watching him. “They’re ever so cute. Dancing is the voluntary exercise by which they keep themselves fit for the more exciting pastime of teacher-baiting. The music seems somewhat louder than usual, so one can suppose they’re having a sort of celebration jamboree over the abdication of our late but not lamented colleague.”

  “What a ham you are, Weston,” Miss Clintridge remarked.

  “Take no notice of Mr. Weston,” Mrs. Drew’s voice was even and controlled. “He will have his little joke.”

  Weston smiled sweetly. “Well,” he said: “One way or another our fine feathered friend will soon learn for himself. Let us hope that he fares better than some of his predecessors.”

  “Don’t you think you might be a little less discouraging, Weston?” Mrs. Dale-Evans cut in.

  Weston raised both his arms heavenwards in mock solemnity. “You do me an injustice, Grace dear,” he bleated pleasantly. “The last thing I want to do is discourage him. After all, none of us would want to be saddled with that crowd of, shall we say, blithe spirits, would we?”

  “I wonder if they’ll advertise Hackman’s job,” interrupted Mrs. Drew. Her remark set them chattering all at once, and I moved towards the door, remembering that the Headmaster expected me in his office. Miss Blanchard reached it ahead of me, and together we went out into a barrage of sound.

  “Odd fish, don’t you think?” Even though raised above the intruding blare of trumpet, her voice was pleasing, and warm.

  “Do you mean Weston?”

  “Him, and others. I strongly suspect I would have slapped his face if he had dared to speak to me like that.” She spoke with a quiet confidence which left no doubt that she would have done just that. “He hasn’t scared you off, I hope?”

  I turned to look at her, but could read nothing in her frank, impersonal glance. All the same, I felt a bit irritated by that remark.

  We moved a little way into the auditorium and the rush of sound hit me like a blow. Four couples and about twenty pairs of girls were jiving to the music of an inspired trumpet player. Faces taut and expressionless, mouths slightly agape, skirts cartwheeled out, they spinned and reversed in the spontaneous intricacies of the dance, with an easy confident dove-tailing of movement which suggested long and frequent practice. Several boys were seated on low forms set alongside one wall, watching the dancers and whispering among themselves, pointing with their eyes at the generous leg exposure which their worm’s eye view afforded. The dancers, I thought, were well aware of this, and strove to outdo each other for this attention.

  Against the insinuating pulsation of the drums the muted trumpet urged the dancers on: even the low-level watchers kept up the tempo with a soft, rhythmic clapping, or a quick twitching of haunches and shoulders felt a desire to join them growing on me.

  “They’re good, aren’t they?” Miss Blanchard’s whisper was close to my ear. “I wish I could dance as well as that.”

  I turned to her. “Would you like to try?”

  “What, me, here?”

  There was both surprise and a certain disgust in her tone, and I turned again to watch the dancers, as they disengaged themselves to move into little groups, chatting and laughing while awaiting a change of record. One of them moved
away from a group and approached us; it was the red-headed girl with whom I had collided earlier that morning. There was something uncomfortably compelling about her full figure, clear skin, and casual wide-legged stance as she stopped in front of me and enquired: “Can you jive?”

  I was quite unprepared for this, and quickly muttered something in what I hope was polite refusal. The girl looked coolly into my face, then pirouetted lightly on her heel and sashayed back to rejoin her friends, her clear laugh floating back in her wake with the opening bars of the next record.

  I turned to Miss Blanchard, but she must have slipped away when the girl approached me, so I quickly steered my way through the dancers, disturbed and excited at the prospect and challenge of having to cope with such nearly adult individuals.

  Mr. Florian was sitting at his desk juggling with a small object. When I was seated, he extended it for my inspection—an ugly little nude statuette in green mottled earthenware. “Terrible, isn’t it? Picked it up in Austria some time ago; been trying to break the damned thing for ages.” With a sigh he set it down with exaggerated care on his desk.

  “Well, what is it to be?” His glance was kindly but direct.

  “I’ll have a shot at it,” I replied, carefully moderating my enthusiasm.

  “Good, now let’s get you into the picture.” And with a crisp economy of words he outlined his policy for the school.

  “You may have heard some talk about this school, Braithwaite. We’re always being talked about, but unfortunately most of the talk is by ill-informed people who are intolerant of the things we are trying to do.

  “The majority of the children here could be generally classified as difficult, probably because in Junior school they have shown some disregard for, or opposition to, authority. Whether or not that authority was well-constituted is beside the point; it is enough to say that it depended largely on fear, either of the stick or some other form of punishment. In the case of these children it failed. We in this school believe that children are merely men and women in process of development; and that that development, in all its aspects, should be neither forced nor restricted at the arbitrary whim of any individual who by some accident of fortune is in a position to exercise some authority over them.

  “The children in this area have always been poorly fed, clothed and housed. By the very nature of their environment they are subject to many pressures and tensions which tend to inhibit their spiritual, moral and physical growth, and it is our hope and intention to try to understand something of those pressures and tensions, and in understanding, to help them.

  “First of all we must appreciate that the total income of many of these families is quite insufficient to provide for them the minimum of food, warmth and dry shelter necessary for good health. Some of these children are from homes where the so-called breadwinner is chronically unemployed, or, in some cases, quite uninterested in seeking employment. As a result, meals are irregular and of very poor quality. A child who has slept all night in a stuffy, overcrowded room, and then breakfasts on a cup of weak tea and a piece of bread, can hardly be expected to show a sharp, sustained interest in the abstractions of arithmetic, and the unrelated niceties of correct spelling. Punishment (or the threat of it) for this lack of interest is unlikely to bring the best out of him.”

  While Mr. Florian was speaking, something was happening to me. I had walked into his office full of high regard for him and ready to fall in with any plan he was likely to propose, but I found I was becoming increasingly irritated by his recital of the children’s difficulties. My own experiences during the past two years invaded my thoughts, reminding me that these children were white; hungry or filled, naked or clothed, they were white, and as far as I was concerned, that fact alone made the only difference between the haves and the have-nots. I wanted this job badly and I was quite prepared to do it to the best of my ability, but it would be a job, not a labor of love.

  “The next point I want to make,” he continued, “deals with their conduct. You will soon discover that many of them smoke, use bad language and are often rather rude. We try our best to discourage these things without coercion, recognizing that it is all part of the general malaise which affects the whole neighborhood and produces a feeling of insecurity among the children. Instead, we try to give them affection, confidence and guidance, more or less in that order, because experience has shown us that those are their most immediate needs. Only a small part of their day is spent in the supervised security of this school; for the rest they may be exposed to many very unsatisfactory influences. A quick look round this neighborhood will show that it is infested with a wide variety of social vermin, prostitutes, pimps, and perverts.”

  I sat watching him, carefully attentive, impressed in spite of myself, by his deep, enthusiastic concern and undoubted love for the children. My irritation passed, but a feeling of doubt remained. He was speaking as if they were all tiny, helpless children, a description very much at variance with what I had seen of the husky youths and girls jiving in the auditorium. Evidently Mr. Florian had the children’s welfare very much at heart, but did he really believe all that he was saying about them—or was it all laid on for my benefit? Was every new applicant given this same sermon? Had Hackman received similar encouragement? I liked this man; his fervor and integrity gave him a stature which more than compensated for his lack of inches; his voice went on, deep, intense, spell-binding …

  “It is said that here we practice free discipline. That’s wrong, quite wrong. It would be more correct to say that we are seeking, as best we can, to establish disciplined freedom, that state in which the child feels free to work, play and express himself without fear of those whose job it is to direct and stimulate his efforts into constructive channels. As things are we cannot expect of them high academic effort, but we can take steps to ensure that their limited abilities are exploited to the full.” Here he smiled briefly, as if amused by some fleeting, private reflection. “We encourage them to speak up for themselves, no matter what the circumstances or the occasion; this may probably take the form of rudeness at first but gradually, through the influences of the various Committees and the Student Council, we hope they will learn directness without rudeness, and humility without sycophancy. We try to show them a real relationship between themselves and their work, in preparation for the day when they leave school.

  “As teachers, we can help greatly if we become sufficiently important to them; important enough for our influence to balance or even outweigh the evil.”

  He got up and walked over to the large single window which overlooked the churchyard and remained there in silence for a while, his hands clasped behind his back, his leonine head resting against the cool glass. After a little while he turned to me with a gentle smile.

  “Well, there it is. I’m afraid I can offer you no blueprint for teaching; it wouldn’t work, especially here. From the moment you accept, you’re on your own. All the rest of the staff, myself included, will always be ready to help and advise if need be, but success or failure with them will depend entirely on you. So long as you work within the broad conceptual framework I have outlined, I shall not interfere. Unfortunately, we have had a number of teachers at one time or another who, though excellent in themselves, were totally unsuited for this type of work; and, as you’ll appreciate, too frequent changes of staff neither help the children nor advance our work. Anyway, on behalf of the school and staff, I welcome you. You will have charge of the top class, beginning tomorrow, and will share the boys’ P.T. periods with the other men on the staff. Mrs. Drew, my deputy, will give you all the relevant information you need. I would suggest that you spend the afternoon finding your way about.”

  He came towards me, hands outstretched. I rose, and he took my right hand in both his own with a firm, friendly grip.

  “Remember,” he said, “they’re wonderful children when you get to know them, and somehow, I think you will. Good luck.??
?

  I left him and wandered back to the staffroom. They all looked up inquiringly at my entry. Mrs. Dale-Evans closed her newspaper and said:

  “Well, what’s the score?”

  “I’m taking over Mr. Hackman’s class tomorrow,” I replied.

  “And may the Lord God have mercy on your poor soul,” Weston intoned with mock solemnity.

  “Lucky girls,” chirped Miss Clintridge. “Along comes a man at last and they cop him all to themselves.”

  “Don’t look now, Clinty, but your psyche is showing all over the place.” Weston’s hollow voice pushed its way through the hedge of reddish beard; there was no noticeable movement of his lips. But Clinty’s Cockney humor was equal to his barb.

  “It always does whenever there’s a man around.” The emphasis she put on the word “man” was devastating.

  As the bell sounded for class, Mrs. Drew came over to me and offered to brief me on the routine of registration, the collection of dinner money, and other duties which I would be expected to fulfill. I spent the afternoon, therefore, in her classroom, observing and admiring the skillful way in which she blended patience with firmness, order with bubbling activity. The youngsters were engaged at different tasks in small groups, resulting in a constant hum and buzz which I found somewhat irritating. I asked Mrs. Drew about her reaction to it and she replied that she did not mind it; as long as they were busy they were learning, even though it seemed rather chaotic; and as they grew older they would see the need for greater concentration and quiet.