Chapter 7

Vera and the Hydra’s teeth

Vera was Head of English and Head of the Sixth Form at St. Wilfrid’s, and prior to that she’d been deputy head at the girls’ grammar. All in all, I think she’d been teaching for thirty-five years or more. She was as old-school as old-school can get. She smoked like a chimney, had the hearing of a bat, a razor-sharp wit, and a tongue that didn’t take prisoners. If you didn’t know, and you just saw her out and about in the street somewhere, you’d have marked her down as a timid and rather tubby old lady who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But she really wasn’t intimidated by anyone or anything, and when 5M’s ‘Big Billy’ Chapman went mental in the dinner hall one day, it was Vera who took him down.

As an English teacher, she liked that I was well-read and could string a sentence together, and she also apparently liked that I smiled a lot and drew pleasure from me smoking cigars. The aromatic clouds from my Castellas, she said, reminded her of her father and her Christmases spent at home as a young girl. As a consequence of her support, and despite the dense fog that I created, there were never any complaints about me smoking in the staff room. You had to be some kind of idiot to clash swords with Vera.

And while my official mentor as a probationary teacher was the frosty-faced Janet McGinty, Vera happily took me under her wing and furnished additional advice and support, albeit that it was oft times contentious. In the early days, whenever I had a free period and didn’t have marking or lab prep to be busy with, Vera would invite me to attend one of her lessons just to sit at the back and watch and learn. The tips that I picked up from Vera were not the kind of thing I imagine that they teach you in teacher training college.

In one of my observations, Susan Timpson arrived at Vera’s O-level English class a good ten minutes late. ‘Time of the month, miss,’ the girl explained breezily as she entered, and Vera folded her arms under her chest and peered at her quizzically over the top of her glasses.

I and most other male teachers faced with such a reply, of course, would simply have given a limp and embarrassed smile and hastened the girl to her seat. Vera, however, ever sensitive to the smell of cigarette smoke inadequately masked by a half-sucked polo mint and a quick squib of cheap perfume, exercised no such reticence.

‘Well, you need to have a chat with your mother, my dear,’ she said, and in a voice loud enough for the whole class to hear. ‘It’s not normal, you know, to have more than one period a month, and I seem to recall that you reported blood in your knickers last Thursday, and also on the Monday in the week before that.’

The girl turned bright scarlet, mumbled sorry miss and something else quite unintelligible, then sheepishly took her seat.

And on another occasion, when confronted by a similarly-scented individual who arrived late to her lesson – this one male – Vera took much the same stance.

‘And where the devil have you been, Jonathan Parker?’ she enquired.

‘Toilet, miss,’ came the reply.

‘What? For fifteen minutes?’

‘Yes, miss,’ the boy confirmed.

‘Good God, is there something wrong with you?’ Vera asked. ‘Or have you been entertaining yourself in a way that might threaten your eyesight?’

The boy flushed red as he noted that all fifteen girls in the room had clocked Vera’s suggestion that he’d been for a quick wank.

Suffice it to say that Vera did not generally subscribe to the pedagogical equivalent of the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules, and she was also a strong advocate for leaving punishments to be meted out by peer groups.

She demonstrated the satisfaction to be gained through this latter practice when she and I were one day paired for prowl duty.

The onus of prowl duty came around roughly once a month and required that you spent your mid-morning break and the better part of the lunch hour wandering through the school grounds and buildings, serving as the school’s equivalent of police officers on the beat. You were generally paired male and female, so that you were equipped to cover all bases.

It was in the middle of the second half-term, and Vera and I were returning back down the north staircase in lower school having just put a stop to the mixed doubles long-distance spitting contest in progress in room 7. Vera was regaling me with some story about her four-year-old granddaughter, and we were met on the second-floor landing by a gaggle of second-year boys.

“You need to come quick, miss,” said the lad at the head of the pack. “It’s Maddie MacKenzie,” he continued. “’Er and ’er mates is salting Jimmy Finnegan.”

“I presume you mean a-ssaulting,” Vera corrected, and the boy said yes.

“Whereabouts are they?” I asked, and I started to move and follow the boys, but Vera laid a restraining hand on my arm.

“When you say assaulting, Graham, what exactly do you mean?” she asked.

“They gorrim on the floor, miss, and they’s tryin’ to take ’is trousers off,” Graham replied.

“Jimmy Finnegan?” Vera said. “A big strong lad like him - being wrestled to the floor by a group of first year girls? I find that very hard to believe.”

“It’s true, miss. Honest to God it is,” said Graham. And the boys all nodded vehemently in further confirmation.

“Well, this we must see for ourselves, Mr Wilde,” Vera said. “But first we must check that all is as it should be in rooms 5 and 6. We can’t go chasing after one fracas and leave other misdemeanours to go potentially unchecked.”

Then, with a discrete wink, that I confess I was slow to comprehend, Vera led the way into room 5, and I followed on as far as the doorway. Young Graham and his cronies remained open-mouthed and bemused on the landing.

There was no one in room 5 but Vera leisurely walked between the centre rows of desks down to the far wall and back to the door again, superficially, at least, carrying out a fingertip inspection for dust on the desktops as she went along. She then went into room 6, which proved equally devoid of life, and repeated the performance.

“Right now,” she said when she’d returned to the landing, “lead the way, boys. Lead the way.” And off we went down the main corridor, with Graham and his pals pacing ahead and then stopping periodically to wait for us to catch up.

Vera, it has to be said, was built more for comfort than for speed but, even by her standards, our progress down the corridor was painfully slow. I surreptitiously looked about to ensure there was no one to overhear, and quietly asked her why.

“As you well know, Sheridan,” she replied – with her lips barely parting as she spoke – “Jimmy Finnegan is a thoroughly obnoxious and sadistic little bully. He is well-overdue to get his comeuppance and I have no wish to deprive young Maddie and her Hydra’s teeth† of their revenge.”

When we rounded the corner by the Home Economics room, Graham and his cronies all stopped and pointed anxiously down to the writhing mass of bodies at the far end of the corridor. In the time it had taken for us to wend our way there from the rooms on the north staircase, Maddie and her gang had clearly gained the upper hand and were close to achieving their objective.

Jimmy Finnegan was laid flat on his back with one of the first-year girls unashamedly sat with her skirt hitched up and her legs straddling his chest so as pin his arms to the floor. Two other girls were squatted to either side of his lower body trying as best they could to keep him from wriggling as Maddie fought to pull his second trouser leg down over his foot.  Jimmy’s shoes and socks were already removed and tossed beyond arm’s reach.

Jimmy’s mate, Tommy Riley, and another second-year boy had seemingly sought to come to Jimmy’s rescue but were at that point nursing their wounds in the Home Economics room doorway, Tommy with a handkerchief held to stem the blood coming down his nose, and the other lad doubled over and clutching his groin.   

“Were you aware that Madelaine Mackenzie is Mary Collinson’s cousin?” Vera asked sotto voce. “The girl whose pigtails he tried to set alight in your lesson,” she clarified.

And the penny then dropped as to her motive in coming so tardily to intervene. As the result of young Maddie’s retribution and the humiliation that she and her gang had thus inflicted, it would likely be quite some time, I realised, before Jimmy Finnegan tried to pull any more stunts like that.

For the sake of appearances, Vera lined Maddie and her Hydra’s teeth along the wall and delivered a vehemently theatrical telling-off. I despatched Tommy Riley and his side-kick to the school office for first-aid, and Jimmy collected up whatever items of his clothing as he could find and disappeared into the Home Economics room to get dressed again.

† In conversation with Maddie one lunchtime, I’d previously discovered that she’d christened her little gang as the Hydra’s teeth because of her love of Ray Harryhausen’s pioneering stop-motion animation, and of Jason and the Argonauts, in particular.

*

It was about a week later when it came to light that Jimmy had not been able to locate his underpants after the fracas and had spent the remainder of the day going commando.

“Word on the street,” Clara Bishop told me, “is that Maddie put the pants up for auction.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said, and Clara shook her head.

“Nope. One of her lot apparently hid them behind the fire extinguisher and retrieved them later in the day. The auction was held Wednesday lunchtime. Sealed bids only. I don’t yet know who secured the winning bid, but I’m working on it.”

“Who on Earth apart from Jimmy would want them?” I asked. “What the hell would they do with them?”

“God alone knows,” Clara said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I know.”

But Clara never did discover, which was really rather unusual. Despite that she was in her early thirties, small of stature, quite undemonstrative, and pretty staid in her appearance, she had an easy rapport with the kids and was always well-informed as to any wrongdoings and kept abreast of all the latest gossip. She cultivated and maintained an elaborate network of confidantes and snitches across all seven year groups and could rapidly discover the identity of miscreants, as well as knowing who fancied who, who was going out with who, and who had just been dumped by who.

*

Little by little, I was discovering that being a schoolteacher involved so much more than just standing in a classroom and teaching, and I learned a hell of a lot of the more practical aspects involved, not just from Vera, but also from being a form tutor.