Village Centenary Read Free

arrival.
    I was beginning to think that it just about summed her up.

    Towards the end of the month, I began to wonder if a new skylight might be the best way of celebrating Fairacre School's hundredth birthday. For all that time, it seems, the skylight, strategically placed over the obvious site for the headteacher's desk, has let in rain, snow, wind, and the rays of the sun.
    Throughout the pages of the log books mention of the skylight crops up:
'A torrential storm this afternoon delayed the pupils' departure from school, and precipitated a deluge through the skylight, damaging some of the children's copybooks and the Holy Bible.' So runs one entry in 1894.
    Four years later we read the following somewhat querulous entry:
'Was obliged to shift my desk, as a severe draught from the skylight has resulted in a stiff neck and earache, both occasioning great pain.'

    Hardly a year goes by without reference to new glazing or new woodwork needed by this wretched window. Nothing seems to improve it, and I can vouch for the beastly draught which had dogged all the headteachers, and the diabolical way it lets in water.
    Mr Willet takes it all very philosophically and quotes irritatingly 'that what can't be cured must be endured'. The wind had been in the north-east, and I was in a more militant mood. If I have complained once about the skylight, during my term of office, I must have complained twenty times. The result has been some sympathy, a little tinkering, and not a jot of difference in improvement.
    After three days of howling draught and wearing a silk scarf round my neck, I sat down to write to the office even more forthrightly than usual about my afflictions. On reading it through I was quite impressed with my firmness of tone, which was tempered with a little pathetic martyrdom, and which surely should bring results. I added a postscript about our hundred years at the mercy of this malevolence overhead, and hoped that something could be done permanently. Cunningly, I pointed out what a drain on the county's economy this must have been over the past century. Every little helps when pleading one's cause.
    I posted my letter, wondering if it was a waste of a stamp. Time would tell. On the way back, picking my steps through the slushy snow which was taking its time to disappear, I met Henry Mawne, our eminent ornithologist, who has been a good friend to all in the village.
    'How's Simon?' was my first question. His young godson had attended my school for a short time, but his brief stay was ended when a rare albino robin, the pride of the village, came to a sudden death at the boy's hands.
    'Settling down well at his $$$ school,' said Henry, 'and I may as well tell you now, before you hear it on the grapevine, that his father and Irene Umbleditch are getting married.'
    'I am delighted to hear it,' I said warmly. 'He's had so much unhappiness, and he couldn't have anyone nicer than Irene. What's more, Simon is so fond of her too.'
    'Well, we're all mightily pleased about it,' said Henry. 'No doubt they'll be visiting us before long, and I hope you will come and see them. They've never forgotten how much you did for Simon. And for us,' he added.
    We parted, and I returned home much cheered by this good news. David's first wife had been afflicted by mental illness and eventually had taken her own life. It was time that he and poor young Simon had some sunshine, after the shades of misery which they had suffered.
    When I entered my house I found a fat mouse corpse on the hearth rug, and Tibby sitting beside it looking particularly smug. Far from being praised, she was roundly cursed as I put on my Wellingtons again, collected the corpse by the tail, and ploughed my way, shuddering, to the boundary hedge and flung the poor thing into Mr Roberts's field.
    I often wonder if he notices a particularly fertile patch within a stone's throw of the schoolhouse garden. It is nourished by a steady flow of Tibby's victims, and must have made a