The Heart of the Dales Read Online Free Page A

telephone sitting on Sidney’s desk suddenly rang, echoing round the almost empty room. Julie, standing nearest it, picked it up.
    â€˜Inspectors’ office,’ she said. She listened for a moment, nodded her blonde head, and then replaced the receiver. ‘That was Mr Reid of Social Services. He said that we shouldn’t rush as they are somewhat behind schedule and won’t be ready to move up here until Tuesday at the earliest.’
    â€˜Open the window, Gervase,’ said David, slowly and quietly, ‘I am about to jump out.’

2
    Thursday morning of the first week of the new autumn term found me at Ugglemattersby County Junior School to undertake what I imagined to be a morning’s routine follow-up inspection. The building, unlike many of the Dales village schools in Yorkshire, was entirely without character: a featureless, squat, grey stone structure with long, metal-framed windows, blue slate roof and a heavy black door. It was dwarfed by the neighbouring boarded-up, red-brick Masonic Hall on one side and a down-at-the-mouth public house on the other.
    I had visited the school some two years earlier on a bleak and blustery morning in late April. Setting off from the Inspectors’ Division of the Education Department in the bustling market town of Fettlesham, I had driven through a desolate, rain-soaked landscape of rolling grey moors to reach the school in the large sprawling village of Ugglemattersby.
    On that occasion, I had not been impressed with the standard of education provided and my largely critical report had led to the enforced early retirement of the headteacher. Mr Sharples, a dour man, with the smile of a martyr about to be burnt at the stake, had rattled on in wearisome detail about the stresses and strains, pressures and problems, difficulties and disappointments he had to face day after day. He had bemoaned the awkward parents, interfering governors, disillusioned teachers, lazy cleaners and wilful children, and now critical school inspectors had appeared on the scene to depress him even more.
    â€˜I feel like jumping off Hopton Crags,’ he had told me disconsolately, ‘or down a pothole at Grimstone Gill, I really do.’
    In actual fact, he had jumped – jumped at the chance, when offered a generous package, to retire early and the last I hadheard of him he was running a health-food shop in Whitby, happily selling dried fruit, cashew nuts and wholemeal flour.
    A new headteacher, Mr Harrison, was appointed. I had sat on the interview panel and had been impressed with this youthful, bright-eyed deputy headteacher from a large multiracial school in inner-city London, who had performed extremely well, impressing the panel with his enthusiasm, good humour and by the vivid description of how he would set about changing things for the better were he to be appointed.
    Sadly on this September morning, if the initial impressions I had were anything to go by, the new headteacher had not come up to expectations, for little appeared to have altered since my last visit. What I thought would be a meeting of ten or fifteen minutes before classes started, turned out to be quite different.
    â€˜It’s been difficult, Mr Phinn,’ Mr Harrison told me sadly, tugging nervously at his small moustache. ‘I rather imagined that moving north to such a lovely part of the country, to become the headteacher of a village school in rural Yorkshire, would be idyllic and certainly less challenging and stressful than at my last school in the inner city. I little imagined the problems I would have to face.’ He sounded unnervingly like his predecessor and, indeed, was beginning to take on Mr Sharples’ appearance, too.
    The headteacher seemed to have aged considerably since our last meeting at his interview. As I sat in his cramped office that morning, I was concerned at the change I saw in him after so short a time. Gone were the broad and winning smile, the