monitor, and the person who wrote the words on the outside window-ledge of this classroom.’
A girl put up her hand. Laura looked at her sourly.
‘Please, miss,’ said the girl, ‘what’s a fort-holder?’
‘Ah, that,’ said Laura. ‘I’m glad you asked me that. I gather that you are teacher’s yes-man, so that’s one problem solved. A fort-holder, as you ought to know, and probably do know, at your age, is the stooge who stands at the classroom door when teacher has gone out of the room, remains on guard during the consequent chaos, and sings out at the appropriate moment, “Shut up, you twerps! She’s coming!” And upon the strength of my personality,’ Laura concluded, ‘depends whether the twerps shut up or whether they don’t… a point which will soon be established. And now you can all get down to the hall for morning assembly, and heaven help the one who is out of line by the time that
The allocation of text-books, stationery, pens, ink, blotting-paper, rulers, compasses, protractors, set-squares, and copies of the form time-table occupied the time pleasantly and noisily until break. Laura saw the class out and went in search of the staff-room. She was almost run into at one end of the corridor by a stout, florid, middle-aged man in a suit of shiny-seated navy-blue, who said:
‘Hah! The new recruit, eh? My name’s Tomalin. English master and so forth. Let me guide you towards the coffee and biscuits.’
‘My name is Menzies,’ Laura responded. ‘Thank you very much. But I thought,’ she added, as they walked along the corridor towards the staircase which led to the staff-room, ‘that somebody called Cardillon took English.’
‘Oh, well, actually, yes, of course, she does. That’s to say, we run a G.G.E. course here and so have to take on these young lady B.A.s. Unfortunately, in my opinion. They may have been to a university, and all that, but when it comes to a spot of honest spade-work, there’s nobody like the good old choked-in-the-chalk-dust practitioner to ram it home good and solid. Up here, and look out for boys rushing round corners and jumping down eight stairs at a time. They’re not supposed to, but they
He gave the partly-open door a push with his foot, and Laura found herself in a biggish, square room with a fireplace, a gas-oven, a large table and three small ones, a Dutch wardrobe, two bookcases, several armchairs and even more small chairs, a chaise-longue, a large waste-paper basket, a nest of lockers, and a photograph of the Roman Colosseum. Enamel trays covered most of the surface of the large table and, when Laura entered, the coffee was being poured out by two schoolgirls whilst a third carried round the filled cups.
Mr Tomalin made no attempt to introduce Laura. He charged up to the table, collected a cup of coffee from the girl who was about to pass it to one of the mistresses, grabbed two biscuits from an open tin which stood beside one of the trays, planted one of them in his mouth and the other on his saucer, fished in his waistcoat pocket for a couple of saccharine tablets, dropped them in his cup and made for a vacant chair.
A grey-haired, quiet-voiced man came forward from where he had been standing with his back against a radiator.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘May I introduce myself? I’m Rankin, senior assistant. Miss Golightly has a parent, so she asked me to do the honours.’
The bedlam into which Laura had been ushered by Mr Tomalin had calmed down. Raised voices were lowered. Mr Rankin slightly raised his.
‘Miss Menzies,’ he said. ‘Mrs Moles, Miss Cardillon, Miss Franks, Miss Batt, Miss Ellersby, Miss Welling, Mr Taylor, Mr Roberts, Mr Tomalin, Mr Fennison, Mr Trench. I won’t bother with what we all teach. You’ll find out soon enough. Perhaps,’ he continued, in a lowered tone as the babble broke out afresh, ‘Miss Cardillon, you’d give Miss Menzies the low-down. Cissie, some coffee for Miss Menzies. That’s the style. Help yourself to the biscuits, Miss Menzies. If you take sugar I’m afraid you’ll have to provide it for yourself. We get a tea and a milk allowance, but that’s all.’ He raised his voice again. ‘By the way, we seem to be all here. Who’s on playground duty?’
Miss Welling and Mr Taylor, who had hoped, on the first day of term, to escape this loathsome task, betook themselves to the open spaces, there, presumably, to make more difficult the art of mayhem and to cause litter to be cleared up, washbasins emptied and chains pulled. In the staff-room the flood tide of post-holiday conversation welled up once more. Miss Cardillon led Laura to a chair. She was a tall, fair-skinned, freckled woman in her thirty- second year, and Laura liked the look and sound of her as much as she had disliked the look and sound of the mediocre, disgruntled Mr Tomalin.
‘It’s a bigger staff than I should have thought,’ she said, in order to open the conversation.
‘Yes. Miss Golightly cuts a good deal of ice at the office, thank goodness, so we’re pretty well looked after. It makes a good deal of difference to the non-teaching time we get, and, with a subject like mine – six sets of essays a week, among other things – it’s rather useful to have a few periods off to do the marking.’
The break, all too short, came to an end on these words, and Laura asked, as she went down the stairs with Miss Cardillon, ‘What about lunch, by the way? Are we all on duty?’
‘Oh, no, there’s a rota and you won’t be put on it yet. We always give the new ones a chance to get acclimatized before the extraneous duties begin. But you can have canteen lunch if you want it.’
‘I don’t, really,’ Laura confessed.
‘Good. Let’s do the local pub, then. It’s the only place in Kindleford where one can get a decent meal, and Miss Golightly doesn’t mind. She goes home to lunch herself, most days, and leaves Rankin in charge. He’s a married man with kids, so he’s quite glad to get a free meal. If you’re on duty you don’t pay, you see. Well, here we part until twelve. Don’t forget to see your girls and Tomalin’s girls round the cloakroom. He looks after both sets of boys. And chivvy the little brutes, otherwise they’ll be all day, and the dinner hour is short enough as it is.’
Laura went into her classroom to discover that the zealous ink-monitor had overfilled most of the inkwells, a feat which was greeted joyously by the boys and with shrill disgust by the girls. Ink pellets began to fly. There were tears over ink-spotted frocks. Laura went into action, clouted heads, cursed the ink-monitor and ruined the blackboard duster. She had restored order, however, just as Mr Tomalin, with the unctuous crocodile sympathy of one colleague for the disciplinary troubles of another, came into the room without knocking. He carried a cane.
‘I thought I heard a noise,’ he remarked to the unnaturally silent class.
‘Yes, you did,’ said Laura, loudly and clearly. ‘I am sorry if we disturbed you. I am not an advocate of free discipline, but I am opposed’ – she eyed the cane sternly – ‘to a show of weakness masquerading as strength.’
‘Oh, well,
