Coronation Chicken. Nigel Barley
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Название: Coronation Chicken

Автор: Nigel Barley

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Юмористические стихи

Серия:

isbn: 9781456621971

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ was just as good and made them scream. Jack saw the competitive peeing as not distinct in kind from any other athletic pursuit, running, jumping and throwing things. A concrete canteen, bolted together with rusted iron clamps, was haunted by ghosts of boiled cabbage and prunes. The fifth form dwelt apart and exclusive in a separate modern prefab of brieze blocks and metal windows that offered an alluring taste of the perks of maturity.

      In short, it looked the way a school should look, ramshackle, serviceable, territorially diverse, was immediately identifiable as such and could in fact be nothing else. The authorities tried to humanise the blank playgrounds with a policy that combined kindness and parsimony. A painter turned up and painted large bullseye patterns on the outside walls of the hall before the puzzled eyes of the children. The idea was that they would amuse themselves by throwing balls at these targets. But disorderly ball games were strictly banned on school premises and anyway the children would not have used the bullseyes, being primly shocked and baffled by this unsuitable and punishable graffiti.

      Across the way was the war memorial. The First World War had led to the erection of a yeoman redbrick version of the cenotaph with bronze name tablet and garland-brandishing goddess of peace whose leaves corroded and dropped over the years so that she now seemed to invite to a game of deck quoits. The Second War, being a sort of sequel to the First, was economically accommodated by putting up an extension to one side so that the original structure was now lopsided like a one-armed veteran but the older and least mature members of the village still raised their hats to it as they passed. Children avoided that by not wearing their caps until out of its range and to climb on it carried a rumoured threat of the death penalty.

      Since school was a thing of good works, it fell largely within the female domain like church-going and midwifery. Some of the teachers were married but since only charladies on the wireless could use plain 'Missus' as a form of address, they were all called 'Miss' in class, spinsterhood thrust upon them out of politesse. The headmistress, Miss Dappleforth, known to generations as ‘Dora Duckweed’, was as short as her patience, ancient and frightening with hair-sprouting warts – one on her chin had two black hairs exactly like the feelers of an insect - blue veins and a penchant for tweeds and sensible shoes. These she repaired herself with iron brads so she combined the tread of an Aldershot drill sergeant with the smell of old leather and Yardley's lavender. She spat when she talked.

      ‘Don't spray it, say it,’ the children chanted under their breaths. If they didn't dare say the words, just humming the rhythm and pitch of the refrain was good enough. ‘Da-daa-da. Daa-da.’

      Nature had compensated Miss Dappleforth for her other frailties by making her profoundly deaf so she wore a hearing aid, a large bakelite box hung round her neck, its huge earpiece coloured bright pink to make it inconspicuous against her grey skin. In the buzz and rumble of crowded rooms, often the only word she picked up was her own name which led to a paranoid belief people were talking about her behind her back.

      On Thursday afternoons, by ancient convention, she gathered together with three other ladies to sit in a circle and saw out Haydn string quartets. As arthritis stiffened their hands, playing became more difficult and less satisfactory, paining the joints and so the ears. Nowadays, they still met and sat in a circle in the same places as before and still gripped their instruments but now just to listen in close harmony to gramophone recordings of Haydn string quartets. Sometimes Miss Dappleforth preferred to turn her hearing aid off and hear them just in her head.

      Lesbianism was in those days a purely literary possibility of London fringe groups who betrayed themselves by also practising nudism and alpine rambling, so local rumour invented for her instead a great heroic love tragically lost in the trenches of the Somme. It went without saying that her great age reduced any passion to either tragedy or comedy. In the godless but deeply superstitious world of the children, this explained the dedication with which she put on black and hung a dead fox around her neck every Sunday to wobble to church on her bicycle, attending both services, with a large hymnal in the basket before her like a loaf of bread. She had been appointed to her post from outside the town some thirty years before and local people felt she was starting to get the hang of it and might well stay. Familiarity bred content.

      In Jack’s school, the other members of staff were less substantial without being flighty, for the word 'teacher' still evoked great respect and overtones of dedication and had none of the implications of semi-literate sociologese and moral dubiety it would later acquire. There was always at least one male teacher, however, for it was obscurely felt that one master was obviously 'needed' amongst all those women, like a steadying white officer amongst unreliable colonial troops, to stiffen the backbone. Not surprisingly, these men often turned out to be made of poorer stuff than the women and constant re-postings alone preserved the male mystique. Several masters had disappeared quite suddenly in mid-week. One had openly chased lady teachers with a quite unreasonable optimism which had not passed unnoticed among the slum-wisdom of some pupils. Schoolboy folklore credited him with an enormous penis so that when he walked past a radiator one of them would always go, ‘Drrrr!’, the sound of a stick being run along railings. Another was sensationally crushed on his motorbike in Weyland's only major motoring accident, an event as rare as being struck by lightning and just as needful of moral explanation. He had been seen - shockingly for a man of learning - in the pub. Worse, in the village it was known that he had misused the advantages of his education for mere barroom wit. On one occasion he had pointed at his pint and asked the barmaid before a hushed audience. ‘Can you get a vodka in that love? You can? Then why don't you fill it up with beer you silly cow?’ His demise seemed only fitting at a time when films unanimously clung to the trite message that wickedness was atoned for by death.

      After the crash, one of Jack's exercise books was returned to him from the squashed paniers, corrected in the dead man's hand but with a glamorous tyre track across its cover and just a suggestion of what might be blood in one corner. It was like a letter from beyond the grave. Mum, unaware of the terrible administrative consequences, dumped it with finality in the salvage bin. ‘It's not decent, morbid, giving a boy a thing like that. You can tell them I said so.’ He knew they'd kill him at school.

      ***

      Jack felt that, for a man of the cloth, the Rev. Maclehose was a relatively godly person. Unlike the curate, he had not embraced that modern version of the Church of England that saw itself solely in terms of social work and the dispensing of soup instead of unpalatable moral direction. Instead, he clung to embarrassing residues of theology and ritual - even including a belief in God as an ancient man with a grey beard - that had the comforting virtue of familiarity for older villagers. For the curate, Man was good and all bad things therefore came from the Devil. God made little, green apples but the stomach ache they caused could only be from the Prince of Darkness. Jack found the notion of a world without a looming judgmental presence that cast down guilt, shame and thunderbolts confusing, since it contradicted everything he knew about life but, if it turned out that there was no Judgement Day of hellfire and damnation, then it wouldn’t be the end of the world and he gradually formed an idea of religion as a sort of deliberate incoherence. For Reverend Maclehose, God was good and so he sent bad Mankind bad things as deserved punishment for sin but he sometimes wondered what he had done to deserve his own curate. Such principles were the evocative objects - the equivalent of red pillar boxes, Victorian pennies and digestive biscuits - of his theological experience. His church was a place of sonorous organs and flower arrangements, hand-embroidered hangings and vestments, the warming glow of polished wood, brass and stone that his flock already knew from the saloon bar as the signs of a refuge from an unhappy world. And the Reverend Maclehose embraced joyfully his role of providing cosy ceremonial accompaniments for the major life-cycle rituals, a sort of loud-voiced MC of their lives. Many were baptised, most were married and almost all were buried at his hands. In the end, he won them all, adequate proof of the rightness of his calling.

      He was a tall, somewhat funereal man whose height was diluted by a stoop and perfectly, almost aggressively, bald. A mixture of vanity and deafness - the result of a wartime stint as chaplain to a gunnery regiment СКАЧАТЬ