they. And he was writing out a fairish copy of a simple second draft when
the phone rang. 'What?'
'What?'
It was two minutes later before he spoke again: 'I'll be over straightaway.'
chapter forty-eight We trust we are not guilty of sacrilege in suggesting
that the teaching of Religious Knowledge in some schools would pose an
almighty challenge even for the Almighty Himself (From the Introduction to
Religious Education in Secondary Schools:
1967-87, HMSO)
roy holmes, aged fifteen, was a crudely disruptive pupil at school, a
truculently unco-operative son in the Witney Street house he shared with his
invalid mother, and a menace wherever he walked in the wider community. He
took drugs; he was an inveterate and skilful shoplifter; he regularly snapped
the stems of newly planted trees striving to establish themselves; he spat
disgusting gobbets of phlegm on most of the pavements in Burfbrd. In short,
Roy Holmes was an appalling specimen of humankind.
He deserved to have no real friends at all in life; and he had none.
Except one.
Ms Christine Coveriey, aged twenty-seven, in her second year at Burfbrd
Secondary School, was not an impressive personage. A small, skinny,
flat-chested, spotty-chinned, mousy-haired woman, she could scarcely have
expected admirers anywhere - either among her fellow male members of staff,
or among the motley collection of pupils, especially the boys, she was time
tabled to teach. And, indeed, she had no such admirers.
Except one.
To complicate her incompetence as a teacher, she had been appointed faute de
mieux to teach Religious Knowledge, a task wholly beyond her ability. Her
classes taunted her mercilessly; and on more than one occasion such was the
uproar in her classroom that teachers in adjacent rooms had barged in only to
find, with deep embarrassment, that a nominal teacher was already present
there; and with even deeper embarrassment for Ms Coverley herself, resulting
in fevered nightmares and anguish of soul that was often unbearable. One
class, 4 Remove (Holmes's class), was even worse than the others a group of
pagan half wits of both sexes, whose interest in the pronouncements of major
and minor prophets alike was nil.
Over the year her hebdomadal clash with these monsters had been a terrifying
ordeal; and the situation was quite hopeless. But no not quite hopeless.
Each night of term she would kneel in her bed sit and beseech the Almighty to
grant her some deliverance from such despair.
And one day her prayer had been answered.
In the middle of the summer term, at the end of one of her spectacularly
disastrous lessons with 4 Remove, her eyes smarting with tears of
humiliation, she had stopped the cocky, surly Holmes as he was about to leave
the room: 'Roy! I know I'm useless. I wouldn't be though if I got a bit of
help, but I don't get any help from anyone. I just want some help.
And there's someone who could help me so easily if he wanted to. You, Roy! '
She turned away, wiped her moist cheeks, picked up her books, and left the
empty classroom.
But Roy Holmes stood where he was, immobile. For the first time in his life
someone had asked him for help him the despair of mother, vicar, social
workers, headmaster, police; and suddenly he'd felt oddly, unprecedentedly
moved, conscious somewhere deep inside himself of a compassion he'd never
known and could scarcely recognize.
If, as Ms Coverley believed, her God sometimes moved in a mysterious way,
it was not quite so dramatic as the way in which Roy Holmes was soon to move.
In the next RK lesson one of the boys in the back row had been particularly
foul- mouthed and disruptive, whilst Holmes had remained completely silent.
After school that day, the youth in question returned home with a bleeding
mouth, two broken teeth, and one bruised and hugely swollen eye. No one knew
who was responsible.
But then no one needed to know; since everyone knew who was responsible.
The nightmares were over, and Ms Coverley's last few weeks of the summer term
