Classroom Assistant and School Helper for Mixed Infant C of E school. Experience useful but not essential. Must love young children and rural life in this remote farming community in the north of England.
She had seen the notice, and ignored it, seen it again the following week, and the one after that, and so on for almost two months. So they had found no one, then, or no one suitable.
And then she realised that she was the one and she must apply. She was the one who would be suitable.
It seemed so. She had loved the place, the people, the children, the building, the job, from the moment she had arrived, and been happy at once, as she had never believed she could ever possibly be happy again.
The rest of her life, the distant and the near past, were so far away they might never have been, though she dreamed of them sometimes. Dreamed of poems taught, and recited them in her sleep. Donne. Herbert. Chaucer. John Skelton. John Clare.
Dreamed of the narrow lane leading to her flat and of the long cool corridor in the school.
Dreamed of the bright apartment. Dreamed of her father. Dreamed of the sea.
But although she thought of her a great deal, she never dreamed of Thea.
Her thoughts skidded away. What she had been. What had happened. What she had done.
Love.
Shock.
Betrayal.
The need to unpick everything she had believed and trusted in.
She was renting a farm cottage two miles from the school, and cycled to it most days in fair weather. The winter had been harsh so she had walked, but some days could not even do that, and had been forced to stay at home, like everyone else. In the worst of late January, the school had closed for two weeks, the snow had been so deep, the cold so intense, the gales so violent.
What was the sound she was listening to and which had become so familiar that, like the birdsong or the keening of the wind, she scarcely noticed?
Shouts. Shrieks. Cries. Calls. Laughter. Singing. Chanting. More shouts, blown away on the wind and returned again by the hills.
Playground noise, she thought, was the same here today as it had been two or three hundred years ago, the same across the world.
Two small girls wandered by, arms round one another, whispering.
Two small boys raced past, flailing their arms, making whirring sounds.
And then a different cry, louder and more urgent.
A small group had gathered round the one who had tumbled, running too fast and skidding.
He lay on the ground, surrounded by others, bending over him, anxious, interested.
She went quickly.
‘William Dove, Miss Piper, he’s got blood and everything.’
William Dove, stocky, compact, dark-haired, not yet six years old, lay crying, his nose running, his knee scraped, gravel and blood mingling.
Olive knelt down and took his hand. ‘All right, William, it’s going to be fine. I know, it’s horrid to come crashing down like that, it gives you an awful shock, as well as hurting. Let me have a look and then we’ll get you up and inside. Melanie, will you please go and ask Mrs Runton to come here?’
His small face was white, and scoured with tears.
And suddenly, he was James. He was James grown older, and injured and needing her, and this time, she was here, beside him, tending him, not in some other place, where he could not reach her, where strangers had him, where everything sounded and smelled and felt different.
She stroked William Dove’s hand and he gripped hers and snuffled back the next stream of tears.
‘There … good boy. We’ll soon make you feel better. Poor you.’
Poor James.
She shook herself. Not James.
And everything else was remote and distant and did not matter. Did not matter at all.
‘Hello … what’s happened?’
Mrs Runton. Jenny. Infant teacher. Loving. Loyal. Devoted to every child and all the children.
Together, they helped him up and he leaned on Olive and went hopping beside her into the school, and the playground noise rose again, and boys wheeled and spun round and girls shrieked and giggled and the sun shone and small clouds raced like hares across the fields below, and everyday life went on.
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Copyright © Susan Hill 2017
Cover: Keys, printed hair cloth, 1954 by Ruth Adler Schnee © Ruth Adler Schnee. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Susan Hill has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Chatto & Windus in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784741648
Susan Hill, From the Heart
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