Miss Purdy's Class (20 page)

‘Come on – come in here with me.’

Curled up beside the warm, purring body he slept, comforted. Sometime before dawn the cat woke with a commotion and scrabbled about, frantic to be released from the sheet.

‘Don’t go!’ he heard himself say, but as he lifted his head the cat shot past him. He lay down, feeling how sore his throat was. His head ached and his neck felt stiff. He didn’t feel well all day and he didn’t move far. That night he slept in the same spot, hoping the cat would come back, but there was no sign of it. He lay on the hard ground, cheeks burning, yet his body was shaking and the cold seemed to bite right into him. He barely slept and when he did his dreams were frightening. When he woke in the morning he could hardly tell who he was, and it was later that day that he found himself waking on a doorstep, propped up next to two big green doors, with a greasy bag of broken biscuits in his hand.

He leaned his head against the rough bricks. His breathing was too quick, his body pulsing like a chick he once saw hatch from an egg in the brewhouse when his father kept hens. Everything about the baby bird had seemed too fast, as if it must burn itself out with living within minutes of being born. Joey’s vision blurred, then corrected itself. He could hear his pulse banging in his ears. It was a quiet street and only a couple of people passed, who gave him no more than a glance. Joey didn’t move. He sat still, his eyes half open.

A figure was approaching briskly along the street. Joey watched dully, then his eyes snapped open. That uniform! It was the School Board man, whistling as he came along the road! He’d come to get him, to take him away and lock him up behind the walls of the orphanage! Joey wanted to get up and run away, but his body wouldn’t obey. He managed to turn himself sideways and cringe back into the darkest corner of the doorway, pulling his knees up tightly to his chest and turning his face away. The whistling came closer. Joey pushed his head down against his knees, eyes squeezed shut. His kneecaps felt huge and hard. He held his breath. The whistling passed without a pause and he uncurled, trembling.

He couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping out again that night. He would have liked to go and find the shed from where he’d taken his sheet, but he didn’t have any idea where it was, or where he was now. By the time darkness was falling he found himself in a street of high houses with roofs like triangles and front gardens and gates. There were curtains and lights on inside – electric lights like the ones in school. He had eaten nothing all day except that one mouthful of biscuit and his legs were shaky. A road intersected with the one along which he was walking, and at the end the last two houses were dark with no curtains in the windows.

Hardly knowing what he was doing, Joey pushed open the gate of the end house. The path was overgrown and plants brushed against his legs, scratching him. Joey wondered if anyone lived there. He went round to the back. There might be a shed down the garden. He was desperate to lie down anywhere under cover and rest his pounding head and shivering bones. Even the weight of the sheet he was carrying felt almost too much to bear.

The path took him round to the back door. To his surprise, when he went up close, he saw it was slightly ajar and he pushed his way in. It was dark and he noticed that the floor felt uneven underfoot. There was a sound like running water somewhere near him. If he could just lie down anywhere – he didn’t care now if someone lived there, if he got caught. He had to lie down, to sleep . . .

In the hall he felt his way along the wall and came to a doorway on his left. He fumbled for the handle and stumbled inside. Here – he’d sleep here. It was the last thing he would remember for some time after that: taking his sheet from round his neck and sinking onto it on the hard floor, as he pulled it round him. Later he remembered that, as he drifted quickly into unconsciousness, he heard the sound of someone snoring.

S
UMMER
T
ERM

1936

Sixteen

‘Donald Andrews? Joan Billings?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

‘Here, Miss!’

‘Ernie Davis?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

Gwen smiled at her class as she took the register. It was a bright spring morning and she felt full of energy and enthusiasm. The classroom looked colourful now, with all the Easter pictures they’d painted pinned up round the walls, and the sun was pouring in through the long windows. It occurred to Gwen just how much she liked being a teacher.

‘Lucy Fernandez?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

She glanced up to see Lucy’s intense dark eyes fixed on her face.

‘Ron Parks?’

As usual, there was some sort of kerfuffle going on round Ron. His hands were stuffed into his pockets and the boys round him were grinning from ear to ear.

‘Oh – yes, Miss!’ he said distractedly.

‘Ron –’ Gwen looked sternly at him – ‘if you’re going to be our milk monitor this term, you’re going to have to behave much better and learn to be sensible.’ She moved closer to Ron’s place in the third row. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘Yes, Miss.’ Ron clamped his mouth shut, looking as if he was going to burst with the need to laugh.

‘Well, take your hands out of your pockets and sit up straight. What
is
the matter with you today?’

Ron carefully extracted his hands from his pockets. Puzzled, Gwen could see the other children watching intently. Freddie Peters’s mouth gaped open. Doreen Smith had a hand clasped over hers. Gwen was just about to ask whether the sight of Ron Parks taking his hands out of his pockets was really so fascinating when she saw Ron give a great squirm and his expression turn to one of horror. Suddenly everyone was staring at the floor by his chair. Sitting in a confused heap, after its escape into the light, was a sizeable toad. The children erupted with equal delight and revulsion, the boys roaring, some of the girls squealing.

Then everything went quiet for just a second. They all looked at Miss Purdy, waiting for her reaction. Ron had gone very red.

‘Sorry, Miss,’ he said.

‘Sit still, all of you!’ Gwen dashed across to the corner, seized the empty wastepaper basket and stalked along the aisle towards the toad. Even in the midst of everything, her capacity to view the situation from the outside and see its funny side was bringing her dangerously close to giggles herself. The terrible thought that Mr Lowry might be patrolling in the hall outside and peering in through the windows somehow made it even funnier. He’d probably give her the sack!

The toad saw her coming and began to hop frantically towards the back of the classroom.

‘Don’t let it get under the desks or we’ll never catch it!’ Gwen cried. ‘Hold your hands out – fend it off!’

The toad reached the skirting board at the back of the room. On each side children’s hands were flapping at it and a strange creature was homing in on it with a waste bin. Caught in this impasse, the toad looked understandably gloomy. Gwen dropped the bin over the top of it and held it down with her foot. The children all started to clap. Gwen couldn’t help a grin spreading over her own face.

‘There!’ she laughed. ‘Got him!’ She attempted to look more sober. ‘Well, Ron has given us an interesting natural history lesson this morning – before I’ve even finished taking the register. Unfortunately, though, we’re supposed to be having a geography lesson. Ron, come and remove this toad, please, and take it outside. Preferably without running into Mr Lowry.’

She finished the register.

‘Alice Wilson?’

‘Here, Miss.’

Gwen was reassured. Alice had been absent the day before.

‘Were you poorly yesterday, Alice?’

‘Yes, Miss.’ The child barely spoke above a whisper.

Gwen frowned. She was growing increasingly concerned about Alice. Even though she had suggested such a time ago now that Alice should be provided with some spectacles, she still had none and sat through the classes squinting hopelessly, unable to see the blackboard, even though Gwen had seated her at the front. And, having begun the year neat as a pin, she was looking more and more down at heel.

‘Now – books out, children. We’re going to learn some more about Australia. But first of all – can anyone tell me the name of a famous lady pilot who flew to Australia all on her own?’

Alice Wilson’s hand flew up.

‘Alice?’

‘Amy Johnson,’ the girl said enthusiastically. ‘And her aeroplane was called Gypsy Moth.’

‘Very good.’ Gwen smiled. ‘Amy Johnson landed in Darwin on May 24th, 1930. That’s
eleven thousand
miles away. Now, I’m going to show you where Darwin is.’

At the end of the morning, she told Ron Parks to stay behind. He came to her as she sat at her desk.

‘What I should do by rights is send you to Mr Lowry.’

‘Yes, Miss.’ Ron lowered his head.

She paused, thinking with distaste of Mr Lowry and his collection of canes. ‘I don’t think it will be necessary this time. But, Ron, do you think you could try to come to school with
nothing
in your pockets – just for once? No gobstoppers, marbles, toads . . . Nothing except a handkerchief, perhaps?’

The corners of Ron’s mouth twitched.

‘Yes, Miss Purdy.’

Fondly she looked at his round face, the rumpled brown hair. Ron seemed to her to be a boy without a streak of malice in him.

‘Ron, have you seen anything of Joey Phillips since he left?’

Ron’s face creased in a worried sort of way. ‘No, I ain’t seen him. Don’t know where he can’ve gone to. I s’pose they took him to the home. That’s what they said.’

‘Who said?’

Ron shrugged. ‘I dunno. Just, you know, our Mom. I ain’t seen him.’

‘All right. Well, if you do, will you tell me?’

Ron nodded.

‘All right – go and get your dinner or your mother’ll be cross. And . . .’

‘Yes, Miss?’ he said, from the doorway.

‘Where exactly did you put the toad?’

‘I put him down over by the wall of the pub, like, so he daint have to cross the road by himself. I thought he might be able to get back down to the cut.’

‘Well, let’s hope so,’ Gwen smiled. ‘Go on. Off you go.’

They’d been back at school for a couple of weeks. Millie Dawson had been replaced by a young woman called Miss Rowley, who was now teaching in the room next to Gwen, and she was civil enough, though Gwen didn’t find the immediate warmth of friendship that she had with Millie. Charlotte Rowley was a tiny, doll-like person with brown eyes, a sallow complexion and black hair cut short and very neatly round her collar. She was always immaculately dressed and, despite her shrill, childlike voice, seemed to wield absolute control over her class. At the same time, the fact that she was young and had a slightly sultry air about her provoked the immediate and bitter suspicion of Miss Monk, who couldn’t find a polite word to say to her.

‘What is the matter with
her
?’ Miss Rowley asked Gwen on her second day, when Miss Monk had been blatantly rude to her. ‘Have I done something to upset her?’

‘Only being young and pretty,’ Gwen said. ‘She thinks anyone younger than her is a threat to her chances with old Lowry.’

‘Lowry?’ Charlotte Rowley’s brow wrinkled.

‘She keeps waiting for him to notice her. It’d be sad if she wasn’t so incredibly unpleasant to everyone else.’

Miss Rowley said nothing in reply. She just stared back at Gwen, who decided she was rather strange.

The first weeks of term had been a period of calm. Gwen returned to school full of common-sense resolve. She had been measured for her wedding dress, she had managed to get on amicably enough with her mother and she was going back to marry Edwin in August. Edwin was right: that was where she belonged, not trying to concern herself with the woes of the poor of Birmingham or anywhere else. Something about her marriage to Edwin felt inevitable. Anything else would be unthinkable now. And this was not just because of herself and Edwin – it involved her parents, and James and Edwina Shackleton. She was almost like one of their family already. There was something reassuring and safe about this, but at the same time it was frightening, as if she had no say in deciding her own fate.

All brides are nervous and worried
, she’d told herself as her train chugged its way closer to Birmingham at the end of the holidays.
This is just normal
. And on the first day of school, as soon as she reached the prison and got off to walk along Canal Street, her whole being seemed to tingle with anticipation and she worked hard to persuade herself that this was not because she was in the neighbourhood where
he
lived, that she was not hoping with every fibre of her body that round every corner might appear Daniel Fernandez.

The first afternoon, as the children left at the end of school, Lucy was the last one out as usual.

‘Lucy.’ Gwen called her to her desk. Surely it would not be out of place to ask after the family now?

‘How are you all?’ She tried to sound casual, fiddling with the top of her fountain pen. ‘Everyone well at home?’

Lucy nodded with a shy smile. ‘Daniel’s not here.’

Gwen felt the blood rise in her cheeks. It was as if the child could read her mind! Was it written all over her face that this was the one thing she was really longing to know? But she soon realized this was not the reason.

‘He’s gone to Cardiff,’ Lucy announced proudly. ‘He’s going to speak to people outside the assizes and tell them not to send all the miners to prison.’

‘Is he?’ Gwen replied, startled. She hadn’t the least notion of what the child was talking about. ‘Why should the miners be sent to prison?’

‘Because of the strikes. They stayed down the mine at Taff Merthyr.’ As Lucy spoke, Gwen could see in her the same fire that she saw in her brother. ‘Daniel says they were on strike against the company’s union – last year. They stayed down the pit for days and wouldn’t come out. And now the bosses want to send them to prison.’

‘And Daniel?’

‘Daniel goes all over the place, speaking and that.’

Ashamed of her own ignorance once again, Gwen bought a newspaper on the way home. Why was she so unaware of everything going on in the world? It was as if she had been living in a dream all these years. Waiting for her tram, she scanned through the paper. In a column inside she read that the trial at Cardiff Assizes was to be the biggest mass trial of industrial workers ever held in Britain and she sat on the tram burning with pride that Daniel was there, would be speaking out against injustice. She wasn’t even sure why it was unjust, but Daniel would know. She imagined him standing in front of a crowd, shouting out with the passion she had seen when he talked to her.