06 Educating Jack Read Online Free Page A

weekly RE lesson. Major Forbes-Kitchener, school governor, visited school to discuss tomorrow’s Harvest Supper. County Hall requested responses to their discussion document ‘The Need for a Common Curriculum’
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    Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:
    Friday, 17 September 1982
    VERA TOOK HER two-pint baking dish from the kitchen cupboard, propped her handwritten recipe book alongside it and then paused to look out of the vicarage kitchen window. Whispers of morning sunlight flickered through the branches of the high elms in the nearby churchyard.
    It was Friday, 17 September, the day before the annual Harvest Supper in the village hall, and there was the small matter of an apple courting cake. Vera wrote a list of ingredients to purchase at Prudence Golightly’s General Stores & Newsagent, called to her brother, Joseph, to hurry up, checked her appearance in the hall mirror, bade a fond farewell to her three cats, Jess, Treacle and Maggie, then walked out to face a new day that she was destined never to forget.
    A mile away on Ragley High Street, the queue of villagers in the General Stores was becoming restless as ten-year-old Heathcliffe Earnshaw and his nine-year-old brother Terry finally made an important decision.
    Heathcliffe clutched a five-pence piece and stared intently at the glass jars of sweets, including sherbet dips, penny lollies, giant humbugs, dolly mixtures, aniseed balls, chocolate butter dainties, jelly babies and liquorice torpedoes. ‘Two lic’rice bootlaces
please
, Miss Golightly,’ said Heathcliffe, ‘an’
please
can we ’ave three penn’th o’ aniseed balls
please
in two bags,
please
.’ Heathcliffe always emphasized the word
please
when he spoke to the kindly sixty-five-year-old Miss Golightly. She appreciated good manners and he gave her his best fixed smile. It was the one he had perfected over the years and also the one he had been told by his Aunt Mavis from Doncaster that, if he kept doing it, his face would stay like that.
    ‘And here’s a sherbet lemon for being such polite boys,’ said Miss Golightly.
    ‘Thank you, Miss Golightly,’ said the two brothers in muffled unison as they left the shop, sucking their sweets with occasional synchronized crunching.
    Next in the queue was Betty Icklethwaite with her five-year-old daughter, Katie. ‘Ah want t’spend a penny,’ said Katie.
    ‘Everything on the bottom shelf is a penny,’ said Miss Golightly, pointing to the liquorice laces, gobstoppers and penny chews.
    ‘No,’ said Mrs Icklethwaite, her cheeks flushing rapidly. ‘I think she actually
does
want t’spend a penny, Miss Golightly … if y’take m’meaning,’ and she grabbed her daughter’s hand and rushed out.
    Finally I reached the front of the queue. ‘Good morning, Miss Golightly,’ I said. The diminutive lady had a set of wooden steps behind the counter and she stepped up to be on the same level as me.
    Prudence knew her customers well and had already folded my copy of
The Times
. ‘And good morning to you, Mr Sheffield,’ she said. ‘I trust
Mrs
Sheffield is well.’
    ‘Fine thank you, Miss Golightly.’ Then I looked up at Yorkshire’s best-dressed teddy bear sitting on his usual shelf next to a tin of loose-leaf Lyons tea and an old advertisement for Hudson’s soap and Carter’s Little Liver Pills. ‘And good morning, Jeremy.’
    Jeremy was her lifelong friend and Prudence took great pride in making sure he was always well turned out. On this bright and busy day he was wearing a white shirt, blue bow-tie and a striped apron. Miss Golightly followed my gaze. ‘Yes, we’ve been stocktaking this morning,’ she said as she took my twenty pence and placed it in the drawer of the ancient till.
    I climbed back into my Morris Minor Traveller and, as I drove past the village green towards the school gates, I pulled up and wound down my window. ‘Be careful, Jimmy,’ I shouted. Ten-year-old Jimmy Poole was throwing a stick into the branches of the