Free Small Island by Andrea Levy Page B

are to mention, even if only in passing, the Pennine Hills – and only the Pennines will do this – her eyes will focus somewhere only she can see and instead of the geography lesson she will tell tales of her childhood in Yorkshire. While these tales are not particularly interesting they do allow you to look out the window on the trees.’
    Celia whispered that Oliver Cromwell had a large ugly wart on his face when she found me struggling with a composition on this man’s accomplishments. Placing a delicate hand on my shoulder she informed me that Miss Newman who taught history held a theory that Mr Cromwell’s wart was a conspicuous sign that he had been sent by the devil to destroy the English monarchy. Mention this wart, Celia hushed, and Miss Newman, who believed coloured girls had a better understanding of these sorts of things, being less civilised and closer to nature, would write in my margins that I was astute. And all girls classified as astute were given the honour of entertaining everyone at evening assembly with a recitation.
    I could not choose between Henry V’s speech before the battle of Agincourt or Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Both allowed for rousing dramatic interpretation. The daffodils, however, Celia thought too simple – no girl at the college would be unable to recite that.
    ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.’ It was Celia who instructed me to physically intimate the expressions referred to in the text – to stiffen the sinew and summon up the blood by raising my shoulders while holding my head aloft, so my chin could rise with the dignity of the oration, and to end with a genteel cry, but not too loud, for Harry, England and St George.
    I was the talk of the college for several weeks. And when I thought my spirits could go no higher, my fairy cakes – with their yellow cream and spongy wings – were declared by the domestic-science teacher, Miss Plumtree, to be the best outside the tea-shops of southern England.
    There were sixty pupils in the first class I had to teach. Sixty children fidgeting like vermin behind rows of wooden desks. Sixty nappy-headed, runny-nosed, foul-smelling ragamuffins. Sixty black faces. Some staring on me, gaping as idiots do. Some looking out of the window. Some talking as freely as if resting under a lemon tree.
    I was used to children from good homes. In Mr and Mrs Ryder’s school wealthy, fair-skinned and high-class children sat ruly waiting for my instruction before lowering their heads to complete the task satisfactorily. In that school no child ever wiped their running nose across their sleeve before raising their hand high into the air and waving it around like semaphore. No child would chant, ‘Miss Roberts, Miss Roberts’, over and over until I could not recognise my own name. And no child ever subtracted five from ten and made the answer fifty-one.
    Job himself would have wept genuine tears trying to get this rabble to face the board at once and Solomon would have scratched his head trying to understand what the wretched boy Percival Brown did with all the pencils. This light-skinned, green-eyed boy had looked the most trustworthy pupil for the task of handing one pencil to each member of the class. Half-way round the room he came to me saying the pencils had run out.
    ‘How they run out? I gave you sixty pencils,’ I queried him. ‘Did anyone get more than one pencil?’ I enquired of the class. Every one of those senseless children was suddenly attentive enough to shake their heads. ‘What you do with the pencils?’ I asked Percival Brown again. And this thieving boy just looked on me with a rascal’s eye and shrugged. I searched in his pockets, I went through his desk, while this class of seven-year-old ruffians peered at me and silently laughed.
    And all through this mockery I was closely observed by Miss Cleghorn, who sat at the back of the class, her glasses on the tip of her nose,