A Somerset Lad

Arriving in her blue Ford Anglia each morning, bespectacled and stern, our infant teacher Miss Everitt took education seriously.

There was never homework, but there was hardly need for it.  The school day for infants ran from 9.15 until 3.30.  Apart from breaks, the day was filled with active teaching, there was rarely a moment to drift, rarely a moment when concentration was not demanded.

Miss Everitt would have ‘ladders’ on the mantlepiece, league tables formed from cork board in which labels were pinned, your name could go up or down, according to how well you were doing.  Never being at the top, the ladders were never very encouraging.

A friend had cardboard football league tables with the clubs’ names being printed on labels with tabs that could be inserted into the slits in the card after each Saturday’s results.  For some reason we had a bizarre, and utterly irrational, dislike of Charlton Athletic, about whom we knew nothing, and would put them at the bottom of Division 4, regardless of the result.  There would have been a desire at times to similarly manipulate the classroom tables, but one would not dare have touched anything. Miss Everitt would know if something had been changed and would know who was responsible.  Miss Everitt always knew who was responsible, no matter what the misdemeanour.

More encouraging than the tables were charts with spots, the spots being earned by attainments, though fifty- odd years later, it is hard to remember what the attainments might have been.

Encouragement was not a quality that was in plentiful supply, doing one’s best was the default position for being in Miss Everitt’s class.  If there were the slightest suspicion that maximum effort had not been applied to the completion of a piece of work, Miss Everitt would express her disapproval in forthright terms.

There was little patience shown towards those who did not meet expectations of literacy and numeracy.  One pupil, almost a year younger, but in the same academic year, was told in no uncertain terms that the work that had been done was not comparable with that of others in the group.

It seemed unfair when watching at the time, it seems even more unfair five decades later.  To be spoken to about work, when one had tried, was bad enough; to be spoken to in front of the whole class must have been a painful experience.

Perhaps the regime was harsh, stories from those in later years suggested a mellowing with the passing of time, but there are no memories of anyone being slapped and hardly a memory of a raised voice.

Trained in the 1930s, Miss Everitt was a teacher of a former age.  The world had changed beyond recognition during her classroom years, but the lessons she taught have endured through many years since.

To drive past the old Kelway’s building going into Langport, is always a moment to recall memories of two summers spent working there,

The most abiding memory of those summers will always be of the astilbes.

One Monday morning, along with a friend, I was asked by Don, the foreman, to clear a bed close to the greenhouses in which he was working.

We felt we had done a good job, for an hour later there was not so much as the smallest of weeds left in the bed.

On his return, Don turned a shade which is often described puce. In Anglo-Saxon English he asked us where his astilbes were.

We didn’t know what an astilbe looked like, so couldn’t answer his question.  A frantic search through the rubbish heap ensued, as Don, along with the two of us scrambled to find the unearthed plants before the owner came around on his morning rounds.

In later years, it was not hard to believe the story of the man who knew only one sort of tree – it was called “tree.”

Having a list of trees that runs to oak, not-oak, silver birch and Christmas, it is not hard to imagine someone having as little knowledge as I have.It must have been hard to have got through an entire education in rural England without developing even a slight awareness of the countryside around.

My ignorance is despite the best efforts of Miss Everitt, who took the primary school class for Nature every week, trying to teach not only the sorts of trees and flowers, but also their components – sepals and stamens and all that sort of stuff.

My list of recognizable flowers is longer than that of trees: daffodils, tulips, primroses, cowslips, things that might be bluebells, the red ones in the corner, and lily things that always gave me hay fever on Easter morning.

Not being any lazier than the next person when it came to studying at school, what happened that an entire component of education seemed to disappear? Historical stuff like the day of the death of Marie Antoinette and the youngest person in the Royal Navy to be awarded the Victoria Cross stuck in the brain (16th October 1793 and Jack Cornwell).  English was not bad, except for the handwriting classes. Arithmetic was manageable, even the long division. But ask what was the tree that grew in the hedge beside the school field, and there would be bewilderment.

Perhaps it was just dislike of the everyday familiar things – maybe stuff about trees and flowers had not much appeal in a rapidly changing England. Sometimes, an evening class on all the things one never learned would sound an attractive proposition.

As for the astilbes, they still look like weeds.

Mrs Dyer is recalled each time I drive the road.

The A361 at Pedwell is a two lane road. Were it not for the 30 mph speed limit signs, turning out onto the road, from either of the side roads that join it, would be a hazardous undertaking.

Oddly, immediately you turn off the main road to cross the moor, the speed limit ends. Legally, you could drive at 60 mph, though to do so would invite a damaged sump or broken suspension. It is a road across peat moorland with a series of dips and rises and a propensity to cave into the ditches that run alongside it. On Friday morning, I passed a trailer that must have been behind a tractor the driver of which had erred too close to the edge, for the trailer lay on its side, wedged between the banks of the ditch.

However, between the River Cary and the bends at the bottom of the hill that rises to High Ham, there is a stretch of road that is straight and relatively flat. Perhaps the soil beneath it is different from the black peat, perhaps it was built with firmer foundations. It is here that Mrs Dyer would push down hard with her right foot and the needle of the speedometer of the brown minibus would hover around 60 mph.

To attempt such a speed in my Peugeot 207, with just a few inches of clearance between the surface of the road and the front bumper would probably be to invite irreparable damage to my car, which was serviced in Langport on Thursday.

Mrs Dyer would accelerate for the fun of it, because she knew that we enjoyed the sensation of hurtling along. Mrs Dyer was always fun, always smiling, always positive, always with a kindly word for those of us she drove to and from Strode College each day.

Somerset County Council always had an eye to saving money, and in the second of the two years I attended Strode, Mrs Dyer was expected to drive us to a pickup point where we would meet a larger bus, rather than drive us herself. Frequently, on the return journey, she would drive to the college herself to save us the extra journey time. There would have been no extra mileage payment for her, but it saved us about half an hour each evening. In retrospect, I have a sneaking suspicion Mrs Dyer would have driven us for no payment, that was the sort of person she was.

An abiding memory was of her handing out Christmas cards on the last day before term ended. I have put a £5 note in one of them she announced, as she handed out the cards. I was delighted to discover the money tucked inside my own card, supposedly handed out at random. I always suspected she knew I had no money.

Are there still Mrs Dyers out there, people who make the world happy by being happy? Or have we been engulfed by a universal mood of whinging and grumpiness?

Once, I was called upon to make the presentation at the retirement of a primary school teacher. It was a poignant occasion, (especially if you have to try to make the speech to say ‘thank you’). After decades of teaching the youngest children, she was calling it a day, as gentle and kind and patient as I believe she had been throughout her career. It was sobering to think how many lives she had shaped.

Primary school teachers in small schools had an extraordinary power to influence us, for good or for ill. They were people held in extraordinarily high regard. (In at least one part of rural Co Down, in the early 1990s, the headmaster of the local Catholic primary school was still referred to as ‘Master’ so and so, rather than as just plain ‘Mister’. It made the point that here was a man who was important to the community).

Perhaps it’s not just the attitude we have towards them, perhaps it’s also the way we treat them. Teaching salaries were never going to make anyone rich, but I suspect they used to go much further. School teachers, if they did not live in the schoolhouse, would have had good houses in villages. Now their salaries would not go near buying the sort of houses their predecessors occupied. In a society where someone’s worth is often reckoned by how much they earn, where do we put those primary school teachers?

When I was young we didn’t even know what teachers Christian names were, they were just ‘Miss’, even if they were ‘Mrs’, (in primary schools, ‘Mr’ was rare). I only discovered that the headmistress of the first primary school I attended was called ‘Susan’ at a wedding I attended in Dublin in 1999  – a different country and thirty-two years later to discover that Miss Todd had a Christian name!

I thought about Miss Todd when driving through Long Sutton today.

Miss Todd used to have groups of children to play board games in her house at lunch times. I remember having no idea about how to play the game, but at being overawed to be in Miss Todd’s house. (Miss Todd was the niece of the Archbishop of Canterbury and had been to Lambeth Palace – lots of times!) Miss Todd must have felt frustrated at times, most of us would not have been the most exciting or inspiring of pupils, but my only memories of her are of a firm and gracious lady.

On All Saints’ Day, when we recall the good and faithful down through the generations, I think I would want to put amongst them Miss Todd in Long Sutton and Miss Everitt and Miss Rabbage in High Ham, without whose efforts the lives of hundreds of Somerset children would have been very different.