Epilogue
September
The school was large, the school was ultra-modern – This is a place where children strive and thrive!
screamed out the school logo. The corporate identity was everywhere, the Airforce blue colour scheme, the logoed sweatshirts and books, the identical fonts on the hessian-backed noticeboards, in the endless signs exhorting all young learners to push themselves on to that next level.
To stand in one classroom was very much to stand in all of them – with the exception of the corner room on the ground floor.
Yes, there were the notices, the hessian, the fonts – but there was also so much more.
A display of books about elephants presided over by an enormous multicoloured Elmer.
A mound of rainbow-coloured beanbags in one corner, in another a wobbly construction of painted cartons proclaimed itself to be the Wearside Longship.
‘Excuse me?’ The tentative voice accompanied by a tentative knock arrested her just as she was reaching for the paper cutter.
Looking up, she saw Thelma Cooper in the doorway accompanied by her two friends, the worried one who’d been with her at the school that day, and the hennaed one who she’d met at Annie’s funeral.
‘The office did say as it’d be all right to come down,’ said Liz, anxiously fingering her dull blue lanyard.
‘Hello!’ Chloe smiled in the slightly abstracted way primary school teachers do when interrupted mid-task.
‘We’re so sorry to interrupt,’ said Thelma.
‘No, it’s fine,’ said Chloe. ‘Only the kids’ll be in, in five minutes—’
‘—and you’ve nine million things to do,’ supplied Pat.
Chloe smiled. ‘Something like that,’ she said.
‘We won’t keep you,’ Thelma told her.
‘We just wanted to wish you well in your new job.’ Pat smiled.
‘How’s it all going?’ asked Liz. ‘It all looks lovely in here!’
‘Well, we’re getting there,’ said Chloe, a wistful sadness softening her features. ‘I mean it isn’t Pity Infants.’
There was a brief pause of acknowledgement.
‘And how’s your class?’ asked Thelma.
‘Lively,’ said Chloe.
‘Good lively or not-so-good-lively?’ asked Pat.
‘Both, God love ’em,’ said Chloe, raising her eyes with a grin. ‘Again: we’re getting there!’
‘Anyway, won’t hold you up,’ said Thelma. ‘We just wanted to give you a little something.’
‘A sort of hope-it-all-goes-well present,’ said Liz.
Confusion and embarrassment clouded Chloe’s face. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’
‘Wait till you see what it is,’ said Pat.
Liz handed her a pair of what looked like scissors but with thick, serrated blades. ‘Pinking shears,’ she said. ‘They give a zig-zag edge. They’re ideal when you do Mother’s Day and Christmas cards. Give that extra bit of pizzazz.’
Chloe looked doubtfully at the heavy shears.
‘Who’s Topsy Joy?’ she said reading the label on them.
The three women exchanged smiles of love and sadness. ‘She was our nursery nurse,’ Thelma told her. ‘Sadly no more.’
‘Could get through a stack of mucky paint pallets quicker than anyone I know,’ said Pat, handing her a second object.
‘I’ve got a stapler already,’ objected Chloe, looking at the scarred orange tool.
‘Not this stapler you’ve not,’ said Pat. ‘These plastic ones you get these days last five minutes. This is the real deal – and here’s some staples to go with it.’
‘A tip,’ said Liz. ‘When you staple – don’t hold it flat against the wall. Hold it at an angle – that way it’s so much easier to get the staples out when the time comes.’
A rather insipid hooter sounded.
‘That’s the end of playtime,’ said Chloe. ‘The kids’ll be here any second—’
‘This is from me,’ said Thelma, handing over a new, A4 sage green notebook. ‘Not to put too fine a point in it, this is your bible. You record everything in there—’
‘Spelling tests,’ said Liz.
‘Maths tests,’ said Pat.
‘All the times you hear the children read,’ said Thelma. ‘I’ve set it all up for you, all you need is to enter the names of your class.’
‘We’re meant to do all of that online,’ said Chloe. ‘Only sometimes the system’s slow, and one time it wouldn’t even come on.’ She leafed through the book. ‘I was thinking I could do with some sort of hard copy.’ Those clear blue eyes looked at her visitors. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
The hooter sounded again.
‘That’s our cue, ladies,’ said Pat. ‘Best of British—’
‘Not that you’ll need it,’ said Thelma.
‘One sec,’ said Chloe as the three turned to go. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about Bun Widdup?’
Without looking at each other, the three exchanged glances in that way lady primary school teachers do.
‘Not as such,’ said Thelma.
‘Just that she’s thrown everything up and gone to work in Africa,’ said Liz.
‘Nairobi,’ specified Pat.
None of them mentioned the brief but rambling email Thelma had received a week earlier, saying how at Pity Me school, Annie had created something truly special, a unique environment for children to learn, and that to destroy that was a crime of the darkest order.
‘It was just all so sudden, her going like that,’ said Chloe. ‘I couldn’t understand it.’
‘Sometimes in life that’s the way things happen,’ said Pat. ‘Suddenly.’
‘Miss!’ The voice was shrill, outraged, not far from tears. ‘Everyone’s pickin’ on me!’
‘What’s happened, Nirmal?’ said Chloe. She crossed quickly to the small figure in the doorway, face screwed up against the injustice of the world.
‘Come here,’ she said. ‘And the rest of you—’ She raised her voice to the others hopping and stamping and skipping into the classroom.
‘The rest of you, dates and learning outcomes at the top of your next clean page.’
She looked up to say goodbye, but her three visitors had gone.
She knew that they must have just walked out of the door, but it felt as if they’d simply vanished.
And in days and weeks and years that followed – when stapling, when entering spelling scores, when adding pizzazz to Christmas cards and Easter baskets, she would reflect that maybe this was how a visitation from angels perhaps must feel.