—

The odour that pervaded the classroom was one that Otis would remember for as long as she lived. It was the smell of unwashed little children in unlaundered clothes. It wasn’t all that unpleasant – rather like a face-flannel that had been left rolled up and soapy, plus the fustiness of the interior of an old cake tin – but it was pervasive. The corridors and cloakrooms smelt of Lysol and the row of lavatories across the playground smelt of themselves. Two of these were kept locked for the use of teachers, but it was only in extremis that a teacher unlocked one of those doors. Otis wondered how one managed when it was the time of their Eve’s Curse – prudently wearing one’s linen strips or pads a day or so before the expected event appeared to be the answer.

The school did not boast a Principal, but each division – Boys one side of the divide, and Girls on the other – had a Head. There was a third Head, Miss Mason, who managed the Mixed Infants, and it was to Miss Mason that Otis answered.

The Mixed Infants had been assembled in one room for the purpose of worshipping God. The twenty or so new intake children who were in Otis’s own charge were in a bewildered little group around her. As the six-and seven-year-olds sang stodgily, fidgety, gasping breaths at the end of lines, Otis looked over the source of her ambition and the material that would fuel her driving force from here on.

Little bundles of ill-fitting, ill-assorted clothes covered by large, coarse aprons.

‘All fings bright and beautiful, All creachures great and small…’

Few had socks, very few had boots that fitted or were in a state of repair. Some boys had near-shaven heads. Most of the girls had their hair tied back with string, though here and there was a bit of ribbon. There, on their first encounter with the rest of the Mixed Infants, they stood as though planted, overwhelmed and afraid, perhaps on account of something dire they had heard from an older brother about what big children did to you at school.

‘He gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell…’

Otis, apprehensive too at the responsibility of it all, longed for the assembly to be over so that she might return to feeding the minds of these small, underfed, rough-skinned, rickety children. Here was the most basic clay of humanity that one could find, and it was going to be hers to mould and make into decent vessels and, with luck, perhaps form an occasional small work of art.

‘How Great is God Almighty, Who has made all fings well.’