06 Educating Jack by Jack Sheffield Read Free Book Online

‘Guinness Book o’ friggin’ Records,’ he said.
    ‘Y’what?’ said Ronnie.
    ‘Y’sacked,’ said Norman, ‘after two minutes an’ thirty-five seconds.’
    Back in Ragley School, we decided to encourage all the children to send a Get Well card to Ruby. In the reception class Anne picked up a stick of chalk and in large neat letters printed ‘Get well soon Mrs Smith’ on the blackboard.
    ‘Now, children,’ she said, ‘Mrs Smith, our caretaker, is poorly at home so I want us all to cheer her up … shall we do that?’
    It sounded fun and everyone nodded.
    Anne had distributed her new collection of safety scissors with their rounded ends and the children were soon busy cutting pieces of white card. By the end of school they had all drawn a picture with a thick pencil on the folded card, coloured it in with wax crayons and written a sentence inside. Two of her brightest five-year-olds, both sons of local farmers and fast approaching their sixth birthdays, had created wonderful messages, although they had yet to discover capital letters. Ted Coggins had written, ‘get well soon and i hope you arnt all thin’, and Charlie Cartwright, in scratchy lower case, had penned his own personal stream of consciousness, ‘my hamster dide last week it was orfull i hope you don’t di i hav a verooker luv charlie’.
    Meanwhile, in the other classes, eight-year-old Ben Roberts had written, ‘I hope you get well soon Mrs Smith cos my ball is stuck in that gutter outside your boiler house’. Seven-year-old Sonia Tricklebank appeared keen to give Ruby a secret present. ‘Get well soon Mrs Smith,’ she had written. ‘My mummy gave me a Lion bar and I thort you wud like it so I have hidden it at the bottom of our mucky washing basket xx from Sonia’. And so it went on … sincere messages from the heart, written as only children can.
    * * *
    During lunchtime we gathered in the staff-room, collected the cards in a decorated shoebox and settled down for a welcome cup of tea. Vera was reading her
Daily Telegraph
. ‘They’re raising the
Mary Rose
,’ she said suddenly, ‘and the Prince of Wales has donned diving gear to view it. What a brave young man we have for our future king.’ Vera loved the royal family.
    ‘Fifteen forty-five,’ mumbled Sally, our resident historian, from the other side of the staff-room, through a mouthful of garibaldi biscuit.
    I looked up. ‘Pardon?’
    Sally took a sip of her tea. ‘It was Henry the Eighth’s great Tudor flagship, Jack, and over four hundred men died when it sank in the Solent.’
    Vera made some rapid calculations. ‘Four hundred and thirty-seven years,’ she mused. ‘Wonder what state it will be in?’
    ‘Probably the same as him,’ said Sally, nodding towards the window. A forlorn Ronnie was walking past the school entrance in the direction of The Royal Oak and I recalled Ruby’s description of her work-shy husband: ‘Seven stone drippin’ wet an’ neither use nor ornament.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Vera, ‘doesn’t look as though he got the job.’
    ‘What job?’ we all chorused.
    ‘Something to do with the packaging industry,’ said Vera, ‘at the chocolate factory.’
    ‘That reminds me,’ said Sally, rummaging in her open-weave ethnic shoulder bag. She took out a brightly coloured paper bag full of assorted sweets and offered it round. ‘Well, whatever happens, think on the bright side,’ she said. ‘There’ll always be a pick ’n’ mix in Woolworths.’
    During afternoon school I called in to Anne’s classroom to borrow her set of magnifying glasses for a science experiment. All the children were painting on large sheets of A3 paper. Little Katie Icklethwaite looked up and gave me a toothy smile. ‘Ah’m painting our farm,’ she said.
    ‘It’s lovely,’ I said. ‘I like the black pig in the garden.’
    ‘’S’norra pig, Mr Sheffield,’ said Katie, ‘it’s a rat. We’ve got some reight big uns,’ she added proudly.
    Then Katie