Bess and I ran towards the schoolhouse. Being late always meant we’d get at least two cuts, and probably six if old man Palmer was in a bad mood. He’d started calling the roll by the time I scurried into my chair.
‘Carter? Miss Carter? Edwards? Miss Hurley? Jones?’ He sounded as if he resented having to even say our names, especially mine. He spat them out like watermelon seeds.
‘Jones, you are late,’ he said without looking up from his register. As if I didn’t know. But why pick on me? Bess was just as late.
Because we were at war, lots of old teachers had been brought back from retirement to replace the regular teachers who’d joined the army. Mr Palmer was one of them, and didn’t we curse Adolf Hitler for that. Standing there facing us, he looked like he’d prefer being shot at by Germans. We would’ve preferred him being shot at by Germans too. It was a pity they’d been such lousy shots the first time round in 1917.
‘Jones?’ He glared at me over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. His left eye twitched. It looked like he was having one of his days. Most of the time he wasn’t too bad but sometimes he’d be overwhelmed by terrible black moods. I think sometimes he really did believe he was back in the trenches of the Great War. He had a limp that he said was from a war wound, but I reckoned it was probably self-inflicted. I wouldn’t have put it past him.
‘Sir?’ Why did he always pick on me?
‘Come out the front and begin with what you learned on the weekend. You should have “The Highwayman” word perfect by now.’
That’s the sort of thing we had to do in his class—learn great long passages of boring poems off by heart. They had to be word perfect or we’d score one whack for every word wrong.
I turned and faced the class. ‘“The highwayman come riding...”’ I began.
Swish, whack! His cane burned the back of my cold, damp legs. I winced but didn’t cry out. That just encouraged him.
‘Came,’ he snarled.
‘The highwayman man came riding, up to the inn door.’
Whack!
‘ Old inn door.’
Whack, whack, whack! And so on until Bess, the highwayman’s floozy, shoots herself in the chest and the redcoats shoot him and he ‘lay in his blood in the railway, with the bunch of lace at his throat’. Good. At long last. Not soon enough.
Whack!
‘ Highway, boy, not railway.’
Why couldn’t they have been shot two pages earlier? They could’ve saved the back of my legs a lot of grief. By crikey, those cuts stung. And Mum was going to give me hell when I got home for not knowing my poem well enough. I was going to get bread and a smear of dripping for tea tonight. And then I’d probably get another whack for being disrespectful to my ‘elders and betters’ when my dad got home.