03 Dear Teacher by Jack Sheffield Read Free Book Online

of coal, cutting a lawn with a pair of scissors and scrubbing the cookhouse floor with a toothbrush. As Ruby sat at her kitchen table and drank tea from a chipped Robertson’s Golly mug, she thought about her children.
    Her eldest son, twenty-eight-year-old Andy, was a corporal in the army and twenty-six-year-old Racquel, a chocolate-box packer at the Joseph Rowntree factory, lived in York with her husband. Her other four children still lived with Ruby in their council house. Duggie, a twenty-four-year-old undertaker’s assistant with the nickname ‘Deadly’, loved his mother’s cooking so much he vowed he would never leave home. Nineteen-year-old Sharon was going steady with the local milkman; seventeen-year-old Natasha had recently left Easington School and started work as an assistant in Diane’s Hair Salon; and the baby of the family, six-year-old Hazel, was a rosy-cheeked happy little girl in Jo Hunter’s class. Ruby loved them all and looked round the silent kitchen. She remembered the happy days of her life when they were growing up around her and she missed all their tears and tantrums.
    She also wondered what it would be like to meet Jimmy Witherspoon in The Royal Oak and run her fingers through his gorgeous hair. It really was spectacular. Then she glanced at Ronnie’s spare Leeds United bobble hat hanging on the coat peg on the kitchen door and sighed deeply. As she walked into her cluttered kitchen to clear up the breakfast bowls she began to sing ‘I am sixteen, going on seventeen’ from her favourite musical,
The Sound of Music
.
    Back in school, after I had collected the children’s dinner money my morning lessons went well and I was delighted that, even though Jodie Cuthbertson’s comprehension still left a lot to be desired, her spelling had finally improved. She was beginning to use her dictionary at last.
    ‘There y’are, Mr Sheffield,’ said Jodie as she put her English comprehension notebook on top of the pile on my desk. She had written: ‘Lots of mummies used to live in Ancient Egypt. They wrote in a funny language called hydraulics .’ When the bell went for morning playtime, I was ready for my morning coffee, particularly after Tony Ackroyd had written: ‘One horsepower is the amount of energy needed to pull one horse.’
    Vera had prepared five mugs of hot milky coffee and was showing Anne the front page of her
Daily Telegraph
when I walked into the staff-room. ‘Doesn’t she look wonderful in that scarf?’ she said in admiration. The front-page photograph showed a confident-looking Mrs Thatcher standing alongside Herr Schmidt, the West German chancellor, while reviewing a guard of honour in Bonn.
    ‘She could do with being back at home to sort out this ITV strike,’ said Sally grumpily. ITV workers wanted a 5 to 10 per cent pay rise to end their seven-week strike but there seemed little hope of a resolution.
    Vera ignored the perceived criticism of her political heroine and changed the subject. ‘And Miss Henderson rang, Mr Sheffield.’ She glanced at her spiral-bound notebook. ‘She said she would be in The Royal Oak at seven thirty.’
    I looked up. ‘Laura?’
    ‘Yes, Mr Sheffield,’ replied Vera with the merest hint of disapproval.
    Anne, Sally and Jo suddenly seemed to find the view out of the staff-room window of particular interest. For the rest of the school day thoughts of the two sisters, Beth and Laura, kept flicking across my mind.
    * * *
    At a quarter past seven I pulled up near the duck pond outside The Royal Oak. The bar was crowded when I walked in as the members of the Ragley Rovers football team were eager to quench their thirst after a brief training session. Their manager, Ronnie Smith, was already on his second pint of Tetley’s bitter and Ruby was sitting at the bench seat under the dartboard with her son Duggie. In the far corner, the familiar click-click of a domino game could be heard as four old farmers, all of them wealthy enough to purchase