27. GRIME AND PUNISHMENT

An incident involving a poor teacher and school meals...

Primrose Blocksley, aged 6, was about to burst into floods of tears.

School dinner had been a meat stew with potatoes and carrots, and she had liked all of it except for an obstinate and very rubbery slab of gristle in her stew. It looked what it was: totally inedible, like solidified slime.

The teacher on duty that dinner time was furious with her when she put it on the edge of her plate, uneaten. It glistened there, opaque and hideous, but apparently that teacher, a Miss Girdler (with a scarily long neck which prompted the nickname of Gooseneck amongst the braver children) eyed it with assumed relish.

Then she began.

“Blocksley,” she said in icy tones, “do you realise that there are little children, little dark children in darkest Africa, who would die for that delicious chunk of meat that you’re leaving on your plate?”

Primrose, just about in tears, shook her head, which Miss Girdler interpreted as dumb insolence, and made her voice freeze beyond the point at which words turn into ice.

“Blocksley,” she said in those frighteningly jagged freezing tones, “do you not realise that we have only recently finished fighting the most savage war in human history, a war in which thousands of children went hungrier than hungry and would have done just about anything for that lump of meat you are hoping to throw away in such a cavalier fashion?”

Primrose didn’t know what cavalier fashion meant and tears finally started to run down her pretty pink cheeks.

“Blocksley,” grated Miss Girdler in a voice that sounded very much like an icicle scraping on glass in the depths of the coldest winter ever, “I have a stick in the cupboard in my room. I have a thin and whippy stick, and if you don’t put that gorgeous chunk of meat back into your mouth I will thrash you with it! I will make you bend over, I will remove your filthy little knickers and I will stripe your bottom with my stick until you won’t be able to sit down for a month of Sundays! Now put that meat in your mouth!”

Miss Girdler was so good at italicising her words that Primrose picked up the offensive and offending chunk of opaque gristle and, trying not to vomit, put it into her mouth.

“You see, Blocksley, that wasn’t hard, was it? Not hard, not difficult, not impossible, was it?” And proud of being a walking thesaurus, she sauntered off to torment Tommy Hancock who had left a slice of carrot on his plate.

Primrose’s piece of gristle stayed in her mouth while the children were dismissed from the dining room and went in to the playground to run and jump and have fun. But Primrose didn’t run and jump and have fun, she had a lump of gristle in her mouth and she didn’t know what to do with it.

She thought of spitting it out into the toilet and flushing it away, but the toilet was an old black tar-stinking block in a corner of the playground and a voice in her head said that the toilet doors were all small and low simply to allow Miss Girdler to spy on whoever was sitting on the lavatory seats and take note on who was spitting her gristle down into the toilet’s grimy depths.

So she didn’t.

The end of the school day came and Ursula was at the gate, ready to meet her delightful daughter, but the little girl made her way out unusually slowly.

“What is it, darling?” asked Ursula, and she noted the lump in Primrose’s pretty little mouth. “Are you ill?” she asked, horrified, “have you developed a tumorous lump in your mouth? Shall we go and see the doctor and let him look at it? Oh, you poor little darling!”

But Primrose was an honest little girl and she didn’t want her mother to worry unnecessarily about her health when she knew that the only thing amiss was a lump of horrible gristle, so she spat it out into her own hand so that her loving mother could see what was wrong with her child.

“What on Earth is that?” asked a horrified Ursula.

“It’s my dinner, and Miss Girdler said she would hit me with a stick if I didn’t eat it, so I kept it in my mouth because I don’t want to be hit with any stick...” And now the agony, the obsession with trying to chew and swallow a nasty chunk of gristle was all over, Primrose burst into floods of tears.

“She actually threatened to hurt you because you wouldn’t eat that nasty thing?” asked a horrified Ursula. “Come with me, darling, and we’ll sort this out!”

And she took the lump of gristle from her daughter’s hand and marched into the school, straight through the entrance marked “BOYS” and to Primrose’s classroom.

Mrss Girdler was still in there, making a pile of books look as neat and tidy as she could before wiping half the blackboard with a felt board rubber, thus removing any evidence there might be in chalk that she didn’t know how to do simple subtraction herself.

Ursula went right up to her and held out Primrose’s lump of gristle and tapped her on one shoulder, making her turn so that only half the board was wiped.

“Eat this!” she commanded in the kind of voice her daughter had never heard her use before, slamming the gristle on the teacher’s desk.

“What?” asked an astonished Miss Girdler.

“I said eat this,” said Ursula. “This is what you threatened my daughter with a stick that you’d punish her if she didn’t eat it, so I want to see how you feel about eating it!”

“It was on the girl’s dinner plate, not on mine!” snapped Miss Girdler, needing to take command of a situation that was beginning to spin out of control

“But I asked you to eat it, so let’s pretend that it’s on your plate and that you’ve got to eat it… come on, teacher, look at it and eat it!”

“It’s been in that child’s mouth, and I happen to know she’s had a runny nose for the past few hours, so I’m not prepared to risk my health putting something into my mouth when it’s been in hers!” snapped Miss Girdler.

“Would you have eaten it if it was on your dinner plate?” asked Ursula, “would you have picked it up and put it into your mouth? After all, it’s a lump of gristle, of sinew, and has no nutritional value at all. So would you, could you, have eaten it?”

“There’s been a war … there have been shortages … there is still rationing and meat is hard to come by...” began Miss Girdler, “there shouldn’t be any waste by children. It shouldn’t be allowed. And there are starving people in Africa...”

“But this isn’t meat!” snapped Ursula, “it is inedible, lacks any nutrition at all and would make most people vomit if they had to swallow it. And as for there having been a war, don’t you think we don’t know that? Don’t you see that we are reminded of it ever waking moment of our lives? Don’t you wonder whether we were affected by the damned conflict, because I can tell you we were! Primrose’s father was a Spitfire pilot, you know, and a brave one at that, and he was shot down during the war and carries his injuries to this day! So don’t you start pontificating about wars!”

“But...” began Miss Girdler, but somehow words deserted her and she couldn’t find anything to say.

“And to threaten a child of six with corporal punishment because she has a normal reaction to something that is totally indelible… I warn you, Miss Girdler, if you ever, ever, ever touch Primrose with any kind of instrument of punishment when all she has done is react in a very human way to something that is impossible, then you’ll never hear the end of it!”

And before the teacher could say anything in reply she turned and started walking off. But she paused at the door. “By the way, half the sums you’re rubbing off that board are wrong. I hope they’re not what you were teaching my daughter...”

Miss Girdler turned to face the blackboard, and it was suddenly her turn to cry. Quietly to herself. And as she did so her moist eyes caught sight of remnants of Primrose’s school dinner, and in a moment of anger she swiped it off the desk where Ursula had left it and watched it as it flew across the room and came to rest against a central heating pipe.

© Peter Rogerson 05.08.18