13 13 Janice was a large healthy-looking girl sporting straw-coloured hair gathered up in enormous bushy bunches. She deposited her reading book and folder of written work in front of me, plopped onto the chair and stared up with a wearisome expression on her round face. It was clear that this pupil was not overly enthusiastic about showing me her work but she was by no means daunted by the presence of the stranger in the dark suit.
I smiled. And what is your name?’
‘Janice.’
‘Well, Janice, I’m Mr Phinn and I am here to see how well you are getting on in school.’ She nodded. And how do you think you are getting on?’
All reight,’ she replied somewhat sullenly.
‘Working hard?’
‘Yeah.’
And keeping up with the work?’
‘Yeah.’
And what do you enjoy best about school?’
‘Goin’ ’ome,’ she told me bluntly.
‘Well, would you like to read to me?’
‘I’m not dead keen, but I will if I ’ave to.’ She picked up the reading book in front of her. I saw it was called An Anthology of Animal Verse.
‘Ah, a poetry book. Do you like poetry then, Janice?’
‘Not really,’ replied the girl, then added: ‘It’s just that poems are shorter than stories and easier to read.’
She chose to read a poem called Nature’s Treasure. It was delivered slowly and loudly, the reader stabbing the words with a large finger like someone tapping out an urgent Morse code message.
Oh, what lovely little lambs
Prancing in the spring.
Hear their happy bleating,
Oh, what joy they bring!
I groaned inwardly and had to sit through six more verses, all as trite as the first.
‘Is that it, then?’ asked Janice, snapping the book shut and looking up at me. She was clearly keen to get away. I suggested that she might like to tell me a little about what she had just read.
She considered the prospect for a moment before replying. ‘I ’ave enough trouble wi’ readin’ it, ne’er mind havin’ to tell you abaat it as well.’
‘Do you like reading then, Janice?’ I asked cheerfully.
‘No.’
I gave it up as a bad job. ‘Well, shall we look at your written work?’
Janice’s written work consisted largely of spelling exercises, short pedestrian passages of prose, a few poor-quality rhyming poems and numerous accounts, rather more lively and descriptive, of calving, lambing, sheep-shearing and other farming matters.
‘You keep cows on your farm then, do you, Janice?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And pigs?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what about sheep?’
‘What about ’em?’
‘Do you have any?’
‘Yeah.’
This was hard work but I persevered. ‘And do you help with the lambing?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘It must be wonderful each year to see those little woolly creatures, like the ones in the poem, all wet and steaming in the morning air, with their soft fleeces, black eyes like shiny beads and their tails flicking and twitching.’
‘It’s all reight,’ she said, stifling a yawn.
‘And what do you like best about lambing?’
She considered me again with the doleful eyes before telling me without batting an eyelid, ‘Best part’s when me and mi brother slide on t’afterbirth in t’yard.’