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Chapter 2. Our School

I. PREMISES

MISS READ (Saint, Dora Jessie). Village school (1955). Part one: Christmas Term.

Chapter 2. Our School

The school at Fairacre was built in 1880, and as it is a church school it is strongly ecclesiastical in appearance. The walls are made of local stone, a warm grey in colour, reflecting summer light with honeyed mellowness, but appearing dull and dejected when the weather is wet. The roof is high and steeply-pitched and the stubby bell-tower thrusts its little Gothic nose skywards, emulating the soaring spire of St. Patrick's, the parish church, which stands next door.

The windows are high and narrow, with pointed tops. Children were not encouraged, in those days, to spend their working time in gazing out at the world, and, sitting stiffly in the well of the room, wearing sailor suits or stout zephyr and serge frocks, their only view was of the sky, the elm trees and St. Patrick's spire. Today their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have exactly the view; just this lofty glimpse of surrounding loveliness.

The building consists of two rooms divided by a partition of glass and wood. One room houses the infants, aged five, six, and seven years of age, under Miss Clare's benevolent eye. The other room is my classroom where the older children of junior age stay until they are eleven when they pass on to a secondary school, either at Caxley, six miles away, or in the neighbouring village of Beech Green, where the children stay until they are fifteen.

A long lobby runs behind these two rooms, the length of the building; it is furnished with pegs for coats, a low stone sink for the children to wash in, and a high new one for washing-up the dinner things. An electric copper is a recent acquisition, and very handsome it is; but although we have electricity installed here there is no water laid on to the school.

This is, of course, an appalling problem, for there is no water to drink – and children get horribly thirsty – no water for washing hands, faces, cleansing cuts and grazes, for painting, for mixing paste or watering plants of filling flower vases; and, of course, no water for lavatories. We overcome this problem in two ways. A large galvanized iron tank on wheels is filled with rainwater collected from the roof, and this, when we have skimmed off the leaves and twigs and rescued the occasional frog, serves most of our needs. The electric copper is filled in the morning from this source and switched on after morning playtime to be ready for washing not only the crockery and cutlery after dinner but also the stone floor of the lobby.

I bring two buckets of drinking water across the playground from the school-house where there is an excellent well, but we must do our own heating, so that winter months, purring in a pleasantly domestic fashion, ready for emergencies. The electric kettle, in my own kitchen, serves us at other times.

The building is solid structurally, and kept in repair by the Church authorities whose property it is. One defect, however, it seems impossible to overcome. A skylight, strategically placed over the headmistress's desk, lets in not only light, but rain. Generations of local builders have clambered over the roof and sworn and sawn and patched and pulled at our skylight— but in vain. The gods have willed otherwise, and year after year Pluvius drops his pennies into a bucket placed below for the purpose, the clanging muffled by a dishcloth folded to fit the bottom.



The school stands at right angles to the road and faces across the churchyard to the church. (…) In one corner of the small, square playground is the inevitable pile of coke for the two slow combustion stoves. These coke piles seem to be a natural feature of all country schools. (…).



Date: 2015-12-11; view: 891


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