along that she wasnât coming back, but the crazy system didnât allow the powers that be to accept that. She had the right to change her mind until the last minute, whilst her former pupils suffered at the hands of a succession of supply teachers.
Except that in this case they hadnât suffered. Theyâd had Elfrida Potts, and after the normal classroom trials of strength at the beginning of term, sheâd asserted her control of her classes and achieved progress. More progress than theyâd been making under pregnant Mrs Grieves, as far as Elfrida was able to divine from their exercise books and the few comments they volunteered. In her view, history could be either a lively experience or âdead boringâ, the description most of her classes had volunteered to her during her first week at St Wilfredâs.
Elfrida was doing her very best to give class 3B a lively experience on this Monday afternoon, when the temperature was far too low for May and the clouds scudded low and threatening past the windows. Anne of Cleves, Henry VIIIâs fourth wife, has gone down in history as âthe mare of Flandersâ. So she was no looker: Elfrida quelled lively discussion on that topic from the male section of the class. But how did it feel for a foreign lady who had only a few phrases of English to be deposited in an alien land as a mere marriage pawn in a political game she did not understand? What did Anne feel after her rejection by Henry and her consignment to affluent obscurity in this strange country? How would you feel if that happened to you?
Mrs Potts sternly diverted an attempted discussion on whether the ageing English monarch could âstill get it upâ and how much his new spouseâs disappointing appearance might have contributed to that. She concentrated on the relative opulence in which Anne was allowed to live after her humiliations at court. She managed to draw from her class a good twenty minutes of lively exchanges and initiate some real learning. Without realizing it, her charges discovered a good deal of what life was like in sixteenth-century England for the various levels of society below the aristocracy.
At the end of the day, the teacher was left with a feeling of modest satisfaction. She knew by now that the teaching experience will rarely be perfect and that its successes will almost invariably have limitations. But now she had other, more personal concerns to occupy her. She told herself firmly that she was thirty-five, not nineteen, and that she should control the excitement she felt coursing through her veins.
That must be literally the case, because she felt her pulses racing as she sat in the staff room, crouching dutifully over some fifth-form essays and waiting for the rest of the staff to leave. She wondered again if her name would affect her relationship with him. Elfrida was bad enough, but sheâd made it much worse when sheâd married George Potts. It was all right for George, stuck away for weeks on the oil rigs. Your name was the least of your problems there. No doubt you lived for the money and the good times which came between the periods of intensive work.
But Potts made the Elfrida much worse. Elfrida Potts. It sounded like a name from a kidsâ comic. It would sit well alongside Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace and Pansy Potter. Hopefully Wayne wouldnât be as conscious of her name as she was. Hopefully sheâd set his hormones racing so fast that he wouldnât give a bugger about names. She was pretty sure hers were racing, along with her pulse. That must be a good start. But she needed privacy, if she was really to enjoy this. Go home to your wives and your loved ones, you teachers, for Godâs sake. And leave those of us with hormones to get on with it.
Mercifully, most of them took their work home with them rather than lingering over it in the staff room, as she had pretended to do. There were only two other cars