THE TEACHER NEXT DOOR

A bullying teacher gets his come-uppance

There was one thing everyone who ever knew him was totally certain of and that was Mr Ballard was a b*****d.

To start with, he was a bully and not just any bully but the sort who hides behind the popular assumption that nobody in his position was really a bully even though some boys said he was out of spite because they’d been stupid themselves. He was a teacher at the local comprehensive and his subject was history and yet he didn’t seem to know a great deal about that subject.

For starters, he spent a whole lesson describing how Henry the Eighth, a portly king who records suggest might have been equally bullying by nature, died in the battle of Agincourt with an arrow in his eye, which couldn’t have been more wrong if he’d tried to be wrong. And while he had been waffling about something that never happened he walked around the class pinching earlobes until they almost bled.

You might say that was at leat two sins, the one of ignorance and the second of bullying, but nobody seemed to want to do anything about it. Then Frosty Winters moved in next door to him.

Frosty wasn’t his real name of course, it was Dennis, but he was quite happy to be called Frosty because it sort of encapsulated quite a lot about him. Like he was Mr Winters and everyone knew that winters were frosty seasons, and he’d been blessed with a very pale complexion indeed, more like ice than flesh. In fact, the story went round that once on his past he’d fallen to sleep on a bus and been pronounced dead by the bus conductor until he’d opened his eyes and told him not to talk nonsense.

Added to that, when he spoke it was in a very cold and wintery voice, one that seemed to have been forged by mother nature out of ice itself, and he accompanied that with a vocabulary dripping in wintery words.

But when it came to life and living he was what most would describe as a really good man, and he moved in to the empty house next door to Mr Ballard with just about everyone who knew him happy to help him. He wasn’t a teacher, of course, he was much grander than that: he was a milkman, one of a shrinking brigade of artisans who rose at the crack of dawn each day, and in winter long before dawn cracked, and drove an electric milk float round the village where both men lived, and because he rarely made any sort of mistake, even when it came to delivering things that weren’t strictly speaking milk but better described, say, as bags of potatoes or cauliflowers, neither of which resembled bottled milk in any way

Mr Ballard detested him from the word go, for two reasons: firstly because in a trivial conversation the day after Frosty moved in the milkman had contradicted the history teacher when Mr Ballard had said that in his opinion the battle of Waterloo should have been won rather than lost, and snorted when Frosty had asked him which side he meant. The second reason was that you couldn’t go round pinching the ears of milkmen, especially if they were a good foot taller than you, and he just felt like drawing as much blood as he could from the offensive (to him) milkman’s ears.

So there was no instant friendship between Frosty and the teacher next door, and things got to be worse when stories about the bullying tactics of the history teacher combined with the appalling results his pupils had in important examinations filtered through to Frosty via the village grapevine. And that grapevine was ultra-critical of a history teacher who had no idea that he wasn’t respected by one and all

He decided that something ought to be done about a man who on all accounts was a waste of good breath and an opportunity presented itself at the end of the summer term when there was to be a football match between the teachers and the sixth form boys (and a couple of girls who were too good to be left out because the boys who might have replced them were terrible at football) and via a gift of jiggery pokery Frosty managed to utilize a huge band of respect that just about everyone had for him, and was made into the referee.

To him it was a wonderful way of opportunity for him to become an avenging angel. He had one of the teachers he wanted to punish for being a bully in his sights and on the field he would be all-powerful. He was sure that the dreadful Mr Ballard would be in the teachers team because just about every male teachers and two of the female cleaning staff had to play, as nobody else on the teaching staff was healthy or fit enough. Miss Grosvener volunteered but was rejected because everone knew that she would want to turn out in the iiest mini-skirt ever seen and minuscule underwear, both of which would cause unnecessary suffering to teenage boys in shorts

And Mr Ballard was on the list of players, which he considered only right and proper because wasn’t he a latter day? An Pele and didn’t he look good in shorts?

But our milkman wanted to teach the man the evil of his ways, and it seemed more respectable if he used a football match in his mighty act of revenge, of putting the man straight, rather than spilling a large quantity of milk on the fellow’s doorstep, and breaking a bottle of ketchup into the resultant liquid mess to give it a fascinating shade of blood, which had crossed him mind.

So the time for the big match came round and Frosty looked powerful in his referee’s outfit complete with whistle hanging from a golden chain round his neck asa he ran onto the field. He examined the two teams after the toss of a coin gave the boys the right to kick off, and as good fortune would have it Mr Ballard was in the centre. It wasn’t his best day from that moment because he tapped the ball forwards with the gentlest of kicks.

At that moment Mr Winters, referee sublime, blew his whistle again, and held up a red card.

“Off!” he barked to the confused history teacher, “for time wasting! And if you don’t hurry up I’ll give those ears of yours a damned good squeeze!”

Ninety minutes later the staff, down to eight men and two ladies, lost by seven goals.

© Peter Rogerson 11.09.22

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