Diary of an Assistant Mistress (11 page)

Fortunately, Olive did not want a reply because she then proceeded to answer her own question at some length and in a very firm tone.

I was almost totally mystified. I recall that her contribution to moral education in the school was to give the girls a lecture in assembly about not wearing patent shoes because boys could see their underwear reflected in them. I hoped she didn't want me to emulate her.

As I left I saw George hovering around and I decided to wait in the Staff Quiet Room - a room set aside for marking. Needless to say I didn't have any marking with me and I set about reading all the references to morality in the Staff Guide. This turned out to be a reference to gross moral turpitude (as opposed to net moral turpitude) which was not defined but for which one could be sacked. One can also be sacked for epilepsy, I noted, which seems a rather outdated regulation. James "suffers" from epilepsy to the extent that he takes four tablets a day: that's it, no fits no blackouts, four tablets.

When George came out he looked as mystified as I felt. He had assumed that Olive was trying to drum up support for assemblies but couldn't be sure.

Tuesday 14th June

The thick plottens! George commandeered my free period and called me into his office - actually it is Oz's office, it even has a picture of a great tit on the door. When I saw Edie was already there, I wondered what he had in mind.

He explained that he and Edie had both been called in for the same little talk with our beloved head yesterday. As far as he could ascertain, nobody else had been.

I began to wonder out loud if anyone had been talking about our personal affairs and both Edie and George looked coy. One forgets that George is about as discreet as a drunken Sun journalist and usually as accurate.

WHAT had he said and to whom? He would not say. I did point out (I was in no mood to spare his feelings) that George often boasted about conquests he hadn't made. I have no idea if this is true but it seems likely and he was in no position to deny it. In any case the Snooks couldn't do any more than she had.

I saw the way Edie was looking at George and made the merry parting quip: "It looks like the whips and chains for you tonight." It was just at this point that Tessa walked in to the office. Tessa! It is very hard for a member of our department to look disapproving about anything, but Tessa manages.

Wednesday 15th June

I heard the phrase "gross moral turpitude" for the second time this week and I was in no mood to ask if it was used for thinning paint.

I had been summoned to the Snooks again. Some of my colleagues were kind enough to start humming the Death March as I left the staffroom. Such a summons usually elicits sympathy because the head does not call people in to her office to offer good news. On the one occasion in the last decade that she had cause to congratulate me, she came to find me rather than calling me in.

The discussion began with one of her mystifications. "There have been complaints." I settled down to ferret out who had complained before I was prepared to discuss what they complained of.

After about fifteen minutes, she then went in for another piece of mystification by saying that she hadn't got the "correspondence" to hand, called in her long-suffering secretary and started a bureaucratic minuet about who had which letters.

As they did this, which lessened the impact of the Snooks interrogation considerably, I remembered a piece of advice from my mother. When someone is trying to intimidate you, imagine him or her with no clothes on. I am not sure this works with the Snooks, it is just as likely to put me off my lunch. Snooks has rather remarkable breasts. I don't think she has silicon implants, they must be reinforced concrete. Nothing sexy (at least not to my eye) merely formidable. However, I was distracted from these observations because they had found the "correspondence", which turned out to be one letter.

By stonewalling, I eventually got to see the letter. It was one of those crabby handwritten little A5 notes on lined paper with ring-binding perforations along the top. She wouldn't give it it me, "because it dealt with other matters as well."

However, it transpired that a parent was complaining that I advocated "forbidden practices." I immediately recognised this as a term used by the Church of the Second Coming. It is rather difficult to give a categorical undertaking to refrain from advocating "forbidden practices" when I do not know what the Second Comers forbid.

In any case, the Snooks decided that she didn't want to tell me the name of the parent. I decided this was ridiculous and settled down to wait again. Eventually she did reveal the name. It was the name of a parent whose child I do not teach. I think Oz does. I imparted this information to the Snooks but she still felt the need to give me a reprimand for moral turpitude.

Thursday 16th June

I looked up the name of the pupil to whom I had been advocating forbidden practices. It turned out that I had covered a lesson for this class back in May and I had not explicitly condemned Julie for being fingered in the cinema, I had condemned her fairly explicitly for not doing any work instead.

Oz said that he wouldn't stand for this nonsense himself and he would have given Snooksy a piece of his mind. The concept of Oz giving anyone a piece of his mind is comic.

Friday 17th June

Strange fault on the IBM Clone. Every time we switch on the printer about ten pages of a document about tree planting start spewing out like the contents of the magic porridge pot. Eventually resolved the problem by removing the document from the printer queue.

Computers produce magic of exactly the kind in nursery stories: get one word wrong in the spell and disaster will ensue. I suppose this is why there are so many sword and sorcery games for the PC around.

How many stories are there in which a magician gives some unsuspecting bozo three wishes and the whole thing turns out to be a trick because he accidentally wishes his wife would shut up so he has to use another wish to get her power of speech back and the third to get her to forget the whole incident so he ends up with an amnesiac wife and a profound distrust of magicians?

There are just as many stories in which someone utters the magic spell "Erase *.*" to save herself a minute and then has to spend half an hour to an hour with PC Tools trying to retrieve the files she didn't mean to destroy; finds out half of them cannot be recovered at all and ends up with an amnesiac PC and a profound distrust of MS-DOS.

Saturday 18th June

Shopping at Sainsbury's. Their layout does make sense in its own way. Went to the White Lion. James clearly wanted to get me drunk and take advantage of me. I mentioned fairly quietly that it was still the wrong time of the month for that kind of thing.

Sunday 19th June

Fourth year essays on "Much Ado about Nothing" make me despair. It must be something about the way I teach it. My analysis of overhearing in the plot: not noted by 40% of candidates; not understood by 60%. A flippant remark about overhearing things in the girls' loo: regurgitated by 100%.

Monday 20th June

"InfoTec is groovy fun,

So if you've got a brain, get off of your bum."

This was the result of my attempts to solicit advertising copy from my third years, designed to attract girls into Information Technology. Perhaps it was just as well that PMT of CDT has scattered the components of the CPVE camera to the four winds so we cannot make a commercial in any case.

I wonder where the Archimedes is.

Judo. I am too old for this.

Tuesday 21st June

I said "Good morning!" to Mr Sikes, or "beaming Bill" as the pupils call him. He said, "Good morning!" back. This is the first time in the eight years he has been at the school (it seems a lot longer) that he has been known to utter any human sounds to a member of staff. I wonder what this presages.

Wednesday 22nd June

Today is the day the blind man comes. I hoped to get hold of him because the wretched blind in my room still needs fixing but he is as difficult to catch as the Loch Ness monster. I caught sight of him at the end of the day on the far side of the car park as he was driving away. Mr Sikes was having a word with him through the window of the car and then came walking towards me with the kind of grin on his face he usually reserves for when a child has fallen over on the ice.

Thursday 23rd June

A school Governor, a Mrs Stoat or Stopes (Oz called her by both names and several others of his own invention) came to observe one of my lessons today. She made a few ignorant remarks about Information Technology before she got down to business which was apparently to gauge my moral fitness to teach children.

She sat on my desk and attempted to cross her rather plump little legs and asked me how many of my children came from "broken homes" and whether I thought we were doing right to teach "gairls" about Information Technology when we should be preparing them for their proper role as wives and mothers. I was very good, I almost kept a straight face.

Friday 24th June

Another summons to the Snooksery. Are they trying to break me down? If so into what?

This time she just wanted to discuss the governor's visit. At first I thought Oz has excelled himself in his feats of misnaming guests because La Snooks referred to a Mrs Greengage. However she corrected herself, it was apparently a Mrs Stoat who thought I had an "attitude problem."

I could have said that the problem was her attitude but I didn't feel up to it on a Friday. The last thing I wanted was a lecture on moral standards. As so often in life, the last thing I wanted was what I got.

Saturday 25th June

Chopin at Sainsbury's. At least the musak is better quality than the muesli - which is fit only for cat-litter. (Actually I am not sure Samovar would tolerate it. Those nuts!)

Sunday 26th July

Making love on a Sunday morning is a great way to start the day - though not a great incentive to get out of bed - but Samovar leapt on the bed and decided to join in the fun. Haven't they got rough little tongues!

Monday 27th June

Walked in to the stock cupboard to find Oz and Tessa aimlessly looking at the shelves. There is nothing remarkable in this - they didn't look particularly guilty, just aimless (in Oz this is a natural state in any case) except that I couldn't help noticing that Tessa was wearing a rather fetching blue blouse, plain with just a slight frill at the collar, with most of the buttons undone for some reason.

Judo.

Tuesday 28th June

First Year Parents' evening. I do think that telling an English teacher that you have a large collection of Enid Blyton is a bit like telling Torquemada that you have a large collection of Linda Lovelace videos. [Telling him in his official capacity as head of RE that is - what he does in his own time I do not know.]

Wednesday 29th June

Like yesterday, Tessa has been noticeably avoiding eye contact all day. Not Oz of course, he does that by instinct anyway.

Limericks with 1M:

"There once was a girl from Devizes,

Who had tits of such different sizes,

That one was so small,

It was nothing at all

But the other was big and won prizes." I wonder whether I should have let Simon get away with this, although he did have an asterisk next to the word "tits" which explained that it referred to garden birds. Another bit of gross moral turpitude I suppose, the Second Comers are in for a field day.

Thursday 30th June

Sports day. It rained but not enough . My form came eighth out of nine. The boys blamed the girls.

One or two parents were there. One put on a smile of some sort and another pointedly spoke to someone else. Word gets around.

Fortunately,or otherwise, John was there. Fortunately because it looks highly respectable to be seen talking to the vicar and in any case I like talking to John. Unfortunately, the Second Comers regard John as an incarnation of the devil because of his mildly progressive views.

Friday 1st July

The boys in my form spent most of the day complaining about the performance of the girls. I got hold of the exact sports day figures from Edie. These show that the girls were only six points behind the boys. I nearly fell into the trap of using the fact. That would have proved that it was reasonable to bait people who are not good at sport.

I don't think sports day should be a blood feud. I think Edie disagrees, I remember that she wrote a set of reports on my class saying the girls were not aggressive enough. I didn't send back the reports but I did drop the dictionary definition of aggression into her pigeon hole: "act of hostility or injury." I assume she wasn't complaining that they didn't get enough injuries or weren't hostile enough!

Saturday 2nd July

Shopping at Safeways. Old ways are the best ways. Now I don't know my way around Safeways. In the high street I was given a leaflet by a girl doing a promotion for a local jewelry shop. I do think people with excessive amounts of pubic hair should avoid wearing swimming costumes in the high street.