02 Mister Teacher Read Free

British Rail announcer.
    A small man with a flat cap and a huge black case was staggering towards the front door. At twelve o’clock, I walked into the school office and noticed that Vera looked harassed. She was counting dinner money.
    ‘I can’t get used to these new smaller pound notes, Mr Sheffield; they’re like Monopoly money,’ said Vera. ‘The way things are going, they’ll have pound coins next.’ She chuckled to herself at the absurdity of the idea. ‘Oh, and there’s a circular from County Hall, Mr Sheffield.’ She waved a sheet of official-looking notepaper. ‘It says that, following a spate of accidents, skateboards have been banned. So I’ll prepare a note for parents, shall I?’
    ‘Thanks, Vera,’ I said. With a class to teach, as well as being a headmaster, I appreciated that a secretary like Vera was worth her weight in gold.
    ‘Also,’ she continued, ‘there’s a book salesman waiting for you in the staff-room.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘I’d better see him now.’
    Vera beckoned me over to her desk and whispered, ‘It’s Ernest Crapper from Morton village, Mr Sheffield, and his wife’s our pianist at the Women’s Institute. She’s on tablets for her nerves, poor thing.’
    When I walked into the staff-room, I began to understand why.
    Mr Crapper had opened the lid of his black case, on which his initials were stamped in gold-blocked letters. He looked like a magician about to begin a performance but, instead of white rabbits, he began to produce a collection of very large books. I felt like applauding.
    ‘You look like an intelligent man to me, Mr Sheffield,’ said Ernest Crapper, Morton village’s finest encyclopaedia salesman.
    A year ago, I would have been flattered by this astute observation but now, as a headmaster in my second year, I knew this was delivered with the sincerity of a beauty queen who promised to end poverty and deliver world peace if she won the Miss World Beauty Competition.
    ‘This is your lucky day,’ gushed the effusive Mr Crapper.
    I had heard this line before. At the start of a new school year, the book salesmen of North Yorkshire gathered like vultures. Our precious school capitation was safely in the bank but this little bald-headed man in the dark pin-striped suit was determined to take a large slice of it. He was now in full flow.
    ‘There’s a free set of Ladybird Books with every gold-blocked, hand-stitched, top-of-the-range, superior volume,’ said Mr Crapper. His large black leather suitcase, like
Doctor Who
’s Tardis, clearly defied all spatial logic as yet another huge encyclopaedia emerged and was added to the teetering pile on the staff-room coffee-table.
    ‘Perhaps you would like to display your books on the big table in the entrance hall. The rest of the staff can look at them later this afternoon,’ I suggested. ‘Then you can come back at the end of school.’
    ‘Certainly, Mr Sheffield,’ said the enthusiastic Mr Crapper, as he repacked the sum total of human knowledge into his case.
    Back in the school hall, our first school dinner of the year had already begun. Shirley Mapplebeck, the school cook, looked anxious. It was the launch of the cafeteria system and the children were lining up with their new plastic trays that had separate partitions for the main course, sweet course and a beaker of water. Because of this new arrangement, Mrs Critchley, our dinner lady, had become Shirley’s assistant. She was serving a rectangle of steak-and-kidney pie, a portion of mashed potato, a spoonful of cabbage, followed by a splash of gravy and, in the hollow alongside, a helping of rice pudding.
    I picked up a tray and joined the queue. Mrs Critchley was clearly not a woman you would want to meet in a dark alley. It was rumoured in the Ragley Sports and Social Club that she could crush a snooker ball in her right hand. As if to prove the point, with effortless ease she squeezed the strong spring on the handle of a large aluminium