Fiddleford Church of England Primary School opened its gates in 1854 with over a hundred pupils and has been shrinking steadily ever since. Now it has only thirty-eight pupils, and thanks to a damning report from OFSTED has been put into ‘Special Measures’; promised a dollop of extra money by the LEA (Local Education Authority) and been given two years in which to improve itself, or else.
Mrs Thomas, the outgoing head, never had any intention of rising to such a challenge. Having called in sick with sneezes almost every day for the best part of three years, she immediately applied for early retirement on the grounds of stress-related ill health. By the time Fanny’s application arrived she was killing time, waiting for a replacement so she could sidle away from the problem for ever.
But running a Special Measures school, in a small village deep in the middle of nowhere, is not an occupation very high on many people’s Must-Do lists. By the time Fanny’s application arrived, Mrs Thomas was growing impatient; there had only been one other applicant for the job. And that was the school’s deputy head, the pathologically idle Robert White.
When Robert threw his hat into the ring, the remaining six governors called an urgent, secret meeting, during which they unanimously agreed to pretend the application had never been received, which was clearly impossible, since he had hand delivered it to them himself. They had hoped he might take enough umbrage to resign. He did not. Not quite. Lazy sod. He knew which side his bread was buttered, how hard it would be for them to get rid of him, and how hard it would be, as the long-standing deputy head of a newly ‘failing’ school, for him to get a job in the same salary band elsewhere.
Besides which, he’d taken a great shine to the school’s very young new dinner lady/caretaker, Tracey Guppy, the thought of whose white-fleshed, wide-eyed innocence kept him awake for at least three delirious minutes every night.
The situation of head had remained vacant for yet another month. The school had staggered along. Governors began to wonder whether Robert White might have to be appointed after all. And then along came the letter from Fanny.
Fanny is, in fact, a very good teacher; intelligent and kind and instinctive – and reasonably industrious, if never yet quite truly dedicated. Children love her. And so do her numerous referees. She got the job.
When the summer term starts tomorrow morning, thirty-three-year-old Fanny Flynn will be the youngest and possibly the least experienced headmistress in the history of the south-west. There are plenty at the Lamsford Education Authority who sincerely hope she may also be its least successful. At which point, of course, and with minimum loss of face, they could save a lot of money and close the wretched school down for good.
The telephone is already ringing when Fanny pushes open the Alms Cottage front door, so she is less demoralised than she might have been by the pervasive stench which hits her, of damp and human piss. The landlord said he would clean the place up before she arrived, but the peeling seventies wallpaper still lies in mouldy heaps on the carpet, and she has to climb over two years’ worth of junk mail and two dead mice to get into the sitting room. He obviously hasn’t been near the place.
In any case Fanny’s dealt with enough landlords over the years to be surprised by none of them any more, and Mr Ian Guppy’s creepy, half-simple manner when he showed her round in March led her to expect the worst. She has arrived in Fiddleford equipped with dustbin bags, disinfectant etc., and even some large pots of white paint. She enjoys the process of transforming a house into a home. It lends her New Beginnings a little added emphasis, which – after so many – is never unwelcome.
She clambers over the rubble and the mouse corpses and dives for the telephone – a telephone, she can’t help noticing, which is so old it might have been fashionable again, except that, like the ceiling, curtains, windows and walls, it’s stained the patchy yellow-brown of ancient nicotine.
‘Hello?’ She holds the receiver a few centimetres from her ear, for obvious reasons, but is nonetheless half-deafened by the explosion of childish screams which comes blasting out. ‘Hello?’ Fanny shouts above them. ‘Hello?’
An efficient feminine voice glides smoothly over the surrounding racket: ‘Oh, lovely. You’re there. I’m so pleased. I’m your neighbour, Jo Maxwell McDonald. Welcome to Fiddleford!’
Fanny recognises the name. General Maxwell McDonald, Jo Maxwell McDonald’s ancient father-in-law, is on Fiddleford Primary School’s board of governors for reasons neither he nor the school can quite remember. He participated most fulsomely during her interview, grilling her about the high turnover of jobs on her CV and then refusing, unlike all the others, to overlook her irrelevant replies. Fanny has developed a particular way of speaking during her job interviews, a sort of jargon-filled auto-lingo which kicks in as soon as the questions begin. She doesn’t understand why it works, but it does. One way or another – partly, of course, because of the shortage of teachers everywhere, partly because Fanny tends to be attracted to unpopular jobs – she has never yet failed in an interview.
‘I feel,’ she said to the General, ‘that multifaceted qualifications are essential for any modern head teacher in this day and age and I’m proud to have experience in a diverse cross section of educational establishments, enabling me to bring to Fiddleford a knowledge and understanding of children from a variety of backgrounds—’
‘Hmm? Yes yes, I dare say. But didn’t it occur to you you might learn something from occasionally staying in the same place?’
‘I needed to balance objectives,’ Fanny said solemnly. ‘The objectives of the students, first and foremost, and secondly the objectives of my own career development—’
‘What? You’re the restless type, are you?’
Fanny hesitated. She said, ‘Erm, no.’
‘You’ve not spent a year in the same place since you qualified!’
Fanny said, ‘Yes. Well. As I was explaining—’
‘Do you envisage spending longer than a year at Fiddleford?’
‘Certainly I do. I envisage spending many years here, helping to establish and nurture a learning culture and environment which—’
‘Mind you, that’s probably just as well, of course,’ he interrupted, ignoring her reply. ‘Because the government says it’s given us this time to improve. Ha. When we all know perfectly well –’ he glanced around at his fellow board members, who were all suddenly staring very hard at their notes, ‘what they’re actually giving us is this time not to improve. Isn’t that right? So they can feel quite justified in closing the ruddy place down. Thereby saving themselves a great deal of money. And frankly, Miss Flynn, with our track record I can’t say I blame them…Had you thought of that possibility, Miss Flynn?’
Fanny blinked. Of course she had.
‘Which gets you off pretty much scot-free, if I’m not mistaken. To continue your –’ he glanced down at her CV once again, ‘really – admirably adventurous life, as per before. With a short but impressive stint as a head teacher under your belt thrown in. Isn’t that right, Miss Flynn?’
And all she could do was blink, and blink again. ‘That’s not true,’ she said eventually, but she was blushing because of course, in a way, when he put it like that…
In the end Mrs Thomas (for fear of losing their one and only candidate) intervened to shut him up. Fanny, full of relief, and also guilt, threw the General a shamefaced sideways glance and caught him scowling at the outgoing headmistress with such intent ferocity that for most of the rest of the interview she’d had to struggle very hard not to laugh.
So Fanny remembers the General with a mixture of awe, annoyance and some affectionate respect. More to the point she knows all about the beautiful, businesslike daughter-in-law Jo Maxwell McDonald, and her ravishingly attractive