Village Affairs (25 page)

'Why not?' I said. 'You and Joe can stick it up over the porch.'

They vanished outside, and could be heard dragging an old desk to the porch. By standing on it, I knew they could reach comfortably a metal slot which Mr Willet had devised some years ago, for holding the flag stick.

The flag met with general approval when the children had finished their tidying inside and went to admire Joe and Patrick's handiwork. I managed at last to get them in again,
and we spent the rest of the morning wrestling with decimals of money.

The children worked well, glowing with the virtuous feeling of having tidied cupboards and desks.

And I glowed too, with the relief which that plain buff envelope had brought me.

That afternoon, when the children had gone home and I was alone in the quiet schoolroom, I opened the bottom drawer of my desk, and took out the weighty log book which holds the record of the school.

I heaved it up on to the desk and turned to the last entry. It had been made a few weeks earlier, and recorded the visit of the school doctor.

I took out my pen, and put the date. Then I wrote:

'Today I received official notice that Fairacre School will not be closing.'

As I gazed at that marvellous sentence, the door-scraper clanged, and Mrs Pringle appeared, oil-cloth bag on her arm, and an expression of extreme surprise on her face.

'What's Fairacre School flying the flag for?' she asked.

'For mercies received,' I told her, shutting the log book with a resounding bang.

M
ISS
R
EAD
is the pen name of Mrs. Dora Saint, who was born on April 17, 1913. A teacher by profession, she began writing for several journals after World War II and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. She is the author of many immensely popular books, but she is especially beloved for her novels of English rural life set in the fictional villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green. The first of these,
Village School,
was published in 1955 by Michael Joseph Ltd. in England and by Houghton Mifflin in the United States. Miss Read continued to write until her retirement in 1996. In 1998 she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her services to literature. She lives in Berkshire.