Free What Was She Thinking? by Zoë Heller Page A

reversed and the pupils get the chance to teach their teachers. (Pabblem joins in the fun by adopting the persona of “Lord of Misrule” and touring the classrooms wearing a jester’s cap.)
    Yet, even among staff members who like this sort of thing, Pabblem is not a popular headmaster. Beneath his easygoing exterior, he has turned out to be a thoroughly pedantic man—a a petty-minded despot obsessed with staff punctuality charts and compulsory staff “bull sessions” and time-wasting, bureaucratic folderol in all its manifestations. At least once a term, Pabblem makes the entire staff attend a special lecture given by some sour-faced young person from the education authority. Because he is a progressive bully, the subjects are always things like Meeting the Challenge of Diversity, or Teaching the Differently Abled. Shortly before Sheba came to the school, he set up a system called Morale Watch, which requires all staff members to fill out a weekly report card on their mental and spiritual health. (Any admissions of dissatisfaction are rewarded with agonising follow-up interviews, so naturally everyone always fills in the cards with slavish avowals of personal joy.) The original Pabblem boosters try to save face by saying that power has transformed Pabblem. My own sense is that power has merely given opportunity to an unpleasant, Gauleiter tendency that was always there. Either way, no one says he is fresh air anymore.
    When Pabblem had finished his phone conversation, he buzzed back through to Dierdre—“No more calls unless they’re
urgent.” Then he turned to me. “Okay!” He held up my report. “So, Barbara, I think I am right in saying that you were asked to write an analysis of how discipline broke down on the St. Albans trip and, if possible, to offer some suggestions for how we might improve our security procedures on future excursions of this sort.”
    “Actually … ,” I began. Pabblem held up a palm, to silence me.
    “But you didn’t … ,” I said.
    “Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “Hang on, Barbara, let me finish. Whatever exact phrases I used, I think I made it pretty clear that I was looking for a practically oriented paper on school control issues. What you have handed in is, well … an attack on the St. George’s history syllabus.”
    “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘practically oriented’ … ,” I began.
    Pabblem closed his eyes. “Barbara,” he said. “Please.”
    Presently, he opened his eyes again. “I think you’ll agree, Barbara, I run a pretty relaxed ship here. I am very open to different approaches and ideas. But you know and I know that this report is not what I asked for. Is it?” He moistened his index finger on his tongue and began flicking through the pages of the report. “I mean, really, Barbara.”
    I stared at him blankly. “I thought what I wrote was very much to the point,” I said.
    He gazed, frowning, into the middle distance for a moment, and then he pushed the report across the desk to me. “Look at that,” he said. It was open to the last page, which was headed “Conclusion.”
    “I don’t need to,” I said. “I wrote it.”
    “No, no, I want you to read it again. From my point of view.
I want you to consider whether this is the sort of thing that enhances my ability, as a headmaster, to respond to the St. Albans crisis.”
    “I am prepared to believe that you didn’t find it helpful. I don’t need to read it again.”
    “Barbara.” Pabblem leaned forward in his chair and smiled, tightly. “Please do as I ask.”
    Odious little man! I crossed my legs and bent my head to read.
    All the way down the margin of the page, Pabblem had printed triplets and sometimes quadruplets of miniature exclamation points and question marks. The final paragraph had so excited or enraged him that he had highlighted the entire thing with yellow fluorescent ink:

    Gavin Breech, whom I regard as the ringleader of the shoplifting expedition, is a very nasty