I pointed out that if the children had paid the pence, and the mistress had received the pence, the Earl was safe: all that remained was to record the payment and receipt. Otherwise, I said very emphatically, the accounts would be returned by the Department, and payment of the grant would be delayed for weeks.
Her grasp relaxed. “I think I see,” she said slowly: and I escaped into the school and joined my colleague in the examination of the children. The Dowager finished her accounts by the light of my suggestions, and followed. My sub. was hearing the first class read, and at the same time was keeping an eye on the second class, to which the teacher was giving Dictation. I saw her Ladyship make her way between the wall and back row of desks, glancing over the girls’ shoulders, as they wrote: I saw her pause behind one girl, and with a suggestive finger indicate that a word was wrongly spelt: I saw my ever watchful colleague shoot out a long arm, clutch the girl’s paper, crumple it up in his pocket: I heard him continue in his cheerful tones, “Very nicely read, Mary Smith; go on, Jane Brown.”
The Countess withdrew: the Grotto Hall did not provide lunch: I would have given a good deal to hear her Ladyship’s account of the morning’s work.
“And other simple souls,” I said: for I had in my mind the strangely parallel conduct of my friend Mr. Shippon. Citoyen fermier Shippon was elected treasurer of the village school, and he found Form IX. a hard thing to tackle. So far his experience of public education had only taught him that it interfered with the supply of cheap labour on farms; notably in the scaring of crows, and the dropping of ’taters. When it came before him as an offshoot of the Civil Service in connexion with a code and a balance sheet, he was—in the expressive language of north-west England—“fairly moithered,”[20] and he came to me for help. I got a slate and collected the items: income from school-pence, subscriptions, and proceeds of a bazaar—£98 11s. 4d. Expenditure on salaries, books, coal, &c.—£36 8s. 8d. Balance in treasurer’s hand—£62 2s. 8d. If he would copy down those figures, he would be safe.
“Na, na, it conna be,” said Shippon with much emotion: “yo’ve rackoned in t’ skule pence, and t’ governess ’as took ’em all.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I have included them in her salary: it’s as broad as it is long.”
“It conna be,” he repeated very emphatically; “yo knaw nowt about it.”
When a man holds all the cards, he can keep his temper, and I laughed, and left him. But I added a warning that if he didn’t bring out a balance of £62 2s. 8d. he would get no grant; and after some weeks’ meditation he yielded.
Managers generally were far more agreeable than these two: we got to tolerate one another, and established an armed neutrality; then we made advances on either side, and in most cases we became friends. They became part of our little solar system in our annual revolution round the district, and as the years rolled on we got strangely to associate them with the season of the year in which their school inspection fell due. “I hope, Mr. Kynnersley, you don’t regard me as November,” said a rector’s wife to whom I had made this confession. I prevaricated, but the association of ideas was unavoidable. We never met in any other month.
There were places which I never saw except in winter: there were others which I connected with climbing roses in the village, and great bunches of wild flowers in white jugs inside the school. If I lunched with A., I had ducks and green peas: B. came in rhubarb-tart time (I hate rhubarb): C. fed me on game: D. gave me the first mince-pies of Advent. I knew the exact spot in E.’s garden where he would draw himself up to his full height and say, “November’s sky is chill and drear”: and I was prepared for F.’s annual defence of the rainy weather by his cheerful cry of “February fill-dyke, don’t you know?”