Speak about meals at school.

3. What did the teacher employ the children in while she was busy?

4. What is the ‘elevenses’?

5. How did Linda and Ann become friends?

THE PATTERN OF THE AFTERNOON

One of the most difficult things to teach young children is to express themselves in sentences. When you listen to them talking you realize why. There is hardly a complete sentence in the whole conversation.

'Coming up shop?' says one.

'Can't. Mum's bad.'

'What's up with her?'

'Dunno.'

'Doctor come?'

'Us rung up. May come s'pose,' and so on. There is a sure exchange of thought and some progress in this staccato method,* but it does not make for any literary style when it comes to writing a composition.

The children in these parts are not, as a whole, great readers. A neighbouring schoolmaster, Mr Annett, put it briefly and clearly:

'Most parents take the viewpoint of "What the devil are you doing wasting your time with a trashy book, when the carrots want thinning!" Or the beans want picking, or the wood wants chopping, or the snow wants sweeping* —any of the urgent matters which beset a country child more than the town one. So out they are sent, with a box on the ear* to help them, and it almost seems wrong to some of them to read.'

Because of this attitude, and the children's own desire to help in outside activities in an agricultural area, they do not get accustomed to seeing or hearing thought expressed in plain English. A great number of them have great difficulty in spelling, other than phonetically, for they are not readers by habit and not familiar with the look of words.

So, after play, we settled down to writing together on the blackboard a composite account of the holidays.*

'John tell me something that you did.'

'Went to the seaside, miss.'

'How?'

'Bus.'

'By yourself?'

'No. Lot of us kids went. Us went with the Mothers' Union, miss.'

'Right. Now put all that into sentences that I can write on the blackboard.'

There was a horrified silence. It was one thing to answer leading questions, but quite another thing to put them into even the simplest English.

'Well, come along. You can start by saying, "During the holidays I went to the seaside".'

John repeated this with some relief, hoping that left to my own devices* I would do the whole composition for him. The first sentence was put up.*

'What shall we put next?'

'I went in a bus,' said Anne.

I put it up.

'Now what?'

'I went with the Mothers' Union.'

'I went with some others.'

'I went on a Saturday,'

'I went with my sister.'

I pointed out that although these were all good sentences in themselves, it became a little monotonous to start every one with 'I went'. It was while we were engaged in wrestling with different wordings of these sentences that footsteps and clankings were heard. Sylvia rushed to the door and revealed Mrs. Crossley, or, as the children call her, 'The Dinner Lady'.

She was balancing three tin boxes against her cardigan, and willing hands relieved her of them.

'Only two canisters today,' she said, and the children sat rigidly, hoping to be the lucky person chosen to fetch it from the mobile dinner-van* at the school gate. Anne and Linda were chosen for this envied task, and while they were gone, I signed the daily chit* for Mrs. Crossley, to say that I had received the number of dinners ordered. Then I gave her the slip* showing how many dinners I estimated that I should need for the next day.

Mrs. Crossley drives the dinner-van, loaded up about ten in the morning at the depot, and delivers dinners at about a dozen schools. Each school has a plate-heating oven which is switched on just before dinners are due,* and the tins are put in to keep warm with the plates. The bin canisters are heat-retaining and very heavy to handle. Stews, hot potatoes, and other vegetables, custard or sauces, are delivered in these and the meals are usually very good indeed. In the summer, salads are frequent, and the children eat most things heartily except fish. They don't like fish even when it is fried and recently it has been struck off the menu* as there was so much wasted.

Cathy was sent through to the infants' room to see if the tables were ready. Miss Clare's class had gone out for the last period of the morning to have their physical training lesson, leaving the classroom empty for the arrangement of three tables for the dinner children. Miss Clare had switched on the oven, which was in her room, and Cathy laid the table for thirty. Those who went home to dinner were sent off; the others washed their hands and then we all took our places at the tables. It was ten past twelve and we were all hoping for something good in the tins.

Miss Clare and I served out slices of cold meat, mashed potatoes, and salad, and Sylvia and Cathy and Anne carried them round. Miss Clare sat at the head of one table and I at the other and when we had finished the first course, two big boys, John and Ernest, cleared away. It was followed by plums and custard. Jimmy Waites was still very timid in his new surroundings and ate very little, but Joseph Coggs, who, I suspected, very seldom had a dinner as well-prepared as this, ate a lot, coming up for a third helping* of plums and custard with the older children.

When we had placed the dirty crockery and cutlery ready for Mrs. Pringle, and cleared the tables of their checked mackintosh tablecloths,* the children went out to play and Miss Clare and I went over to the school-house to wash ourselves and tidy up ready for afternoon school.*

*

Mrs. Pringle was surrounded by clouds of steam when I returned to the lobby.

'Did you have a good holiday?' I asked her.

'Not much of a holiday for me, scrubbing this whole place out!' was the reply.

'Well, it all looks very nice, anyway!'

'How long for?' said Mrs. Pringle acidly. Why she carries on the job of school caretaker* I can't think. She looks upon children as conspirators against cleanliness and order; and the idea that any sort of mess* caused by the children, may be accidental, is unbelievable to her.

At a quarter past one the children came back into their desks, breathless and cheerful, and after we had marked the register* we tackled our joint composition again. After a while sleepiness began to descend upon them, and when I thought they had studied the example of fair English* long enough, I went to the piano and we sang some of the songs which they had learnt the term before.

After play large sheets of paper were given out and the boxes of wax crayons; and the children were asked to illustrate either their day at the seaside or any particular day that they had enjoyed during the past few weeks.

Industriously they set to work, thick blue lines were drawn along the bottom of the papers for the sea and yellow suns like daisies flowered on all sides. The room was quiet and happy, the afternoon sun beat in through the Gothic windows and the clock on the wall soon struck half past three which is the children's home time.

As most of the children stay to dinner, and those that go home live very near, it seems wiser to have a short break at midday, start afternoon school early, and finish early. In the summer this means that the children get a long spell of sun­shine outdoors, and in the winter they can be safely home before it becomes dark.

We collected up our pictures and crayons and tidied up the room. The first day at school is always a long one, and the children looked sleepy.

The infants, who had been let out earlier, could be heard calling to each other as they ran up the road.

We wished each other 'Good afternoon', and made our way into the lobby. Jimmy and Joseph were standing there, anxiously waiting for Cathy.

'Did you enjoy school?' I asked them. Jimmy nodded.

'What about you, Joseph?'

'I liked the dinner,' he answered diplomatically in his husky voice.

Miss Clare was wheeling her bicycle across the playground. It struck me suddenly that she was looking old and tired.

She mounted carefully and rode slowly away down the road, upright and steady, but it seemed to me, as I stood watching her progress, that it needed more effort than usual; and this was only the first day of term. How long, I wondered, would she be able to continue?

*

I had my tea in the warm sunshine of the garden at the back of my school-house. The schoolmaster who had lived here before me was a great gardener, and had planted currant bushes, black and red, raspberries and gooseberries.

I had planted only flowers in my garden. Vegetables I did not bother to plant,* not only because of the lack of room, but also because kind neighbours gave me more than I could cope with, week after week. Beans, peas, carrots, turnips, brussels sprouts, cabbage, they all came in generous supplies to my door. Sometimes the donors were almost too generous, forgetting, I suppose, how relatively little one woman can eat.

I made some jam in the evening with a basket of early black plums which John Pringle, Mrs Pringle's only son, and a near neighbour of mine, had brought me.

The kitchen was very pleasant as I stirred. The window over the stone sink looks out on to the garden. A massive lead pump* with a long handle stands by the side of the sink, and it is from this that I fill the buckets for the school's drinking water.

In one corner stands a large brick copper and my predecessors used this to heat water for their baths, lighting a fire each time, but I have an electric copper which saves much time and trouble.

The rest of the house downstairs consists of a large dining-room with a brick fireplace, a small hall, and a small sitting-room. I rarely use this room as it faces north, but live mainly in the dining-room which is warmer, has a bigger fireplace and is convenient for the kitchen.

Upstairs there are two bedrooms, both fairly large, one over the kitchen and sitting-room, and the other, in which I sleep, directly above the dining-room. It is a solidly-built house of red-brick with a red-tiled roof, and in its setting of trees it looks most attractive. I am very fond of it indeed, and luckier, I realize, than many country headmistresses.

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