3 3 The children sat straight-backed and silent at their desks, looking nervously at me. Their teacher – a tall, thin woman with a pale melancholic face, and dressed in a prim white blouse buttoned up to the neck – scanned her class with an expression that would freeze soup in cans.
‘Mr Phinn is a school inspector,’ she told the children. ‘He will be testing your reading this afternoon.’ She turned in my direction and in a sharp voice announced, ‘They are very good at reading, Mr Phinn.’
‘I am sure they are,’ I replied.
‘And you will find that they are competent, too, at arithmetic’ She turned to the class and fixed them with a gimlet eye. Are you not, children?’
‘Yes, miss,’ they chorused unenthusiastically.
And I bet you have a lot of fun in school,’ I said. I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic but, judging from the teacher’s expression, it must have appeared like that.
‘Mr Phinn,’ she said with a slight smile, ‘we do have a lot of fun in this school.’ She stared at her class. ‘Don’t we, children?’ The children stared impassively. ‘We really do have so much fun, don’t we?’ she repeated a little louder.
There were a few nods. I caught sight of a small studious-looking little boy at the back with large glasses and a mop of unruly red hair. He shook his head. The teacher had spotted him, too.
‘Yes, we do, Oliver! We’re always having fun.’ She fixed him with a rattle snake look and gave a little laugh. It was not a pleasant little laugh. ‘Too much to say for himself, that young man, Mr Phinn,’ the teacher confided in me in an undertone. ‘We do have a lot of fun.’
As I passed Oliver on my way out, I heard him mutter, ‘I must have been away that day’ I suppressed a smile.
‘Oliver,’ continued the teacher quickly, her face now rather more leering than smiling and her voice with quite a sharpness of tone to it, ‘would you go and ask the school secretary to ring the bell for dinnertime, please, there’s a good boy.’ The last phrase was said with some emphasis. ‘And shall we all now say “Goodbye” to Mr Phinn, children?’
‘Goodbye, Mr Phinn,’ the class intoned.
Goodbye,’ I said.
Oliver and I walked down the corridor together. ‘Can I ask you something, Mr Phinn?’ he said.
‘Of course.’
‘How do you become one of these suspectors, then?’
‘Inspectors, Oliver.’
‘Well, you have to work hard at school, read a lot of books and when you go up to the big school you have to pass your exams and that takes a long, long time.’
‘How old do you have to be?’ he asked.
‘You have to be twenty-one to be a teacher, even older to be a school inspector, so you have a long way to go.’
‘And then you can sit at the back of classrooms and watch people?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And hear children read?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And look at their writing?’
‘And look at their writing,’ I repeated.
The little boy looked up and then scratched at the shock of red hair. ‘And you get paid for it?’
‘And you get paid for it,’ I told him. He still looked very thoughtful, so I said: ‘Would you like to ask me anything else?’
‘No, not really, but…’ He paused.
‘Go on, Oliver. Have you got something to tell me?’
‘Well, Mr Phinn, I was just thinking, that when I’m twenty-one, you’ll probably be dead!’
