Witch Week

The door opened and Mr Crossley came in. When he saw Miss Hodge, which he had come early in order to do, his face became a deep red, most interesting to Estelle and Theresa.

“Am I interrupting a lesson, Miss Hodge?”

“Not at all,” said Miss Hodge. “We had just finished. Nan and Charles go back to your places.” And she swept out of the room, without appearing to notice that Mr Crossley had leapt to hold the door open for her.

Miss Hodge hurried straight upstairs to Mr Wentworth’s study. She knew this news was going to make an impression on him. But there, to her annoyance, was Mr Wentworth dashing downstairs with a box of chalk, very late for a lesson with 3Z.

“Oh, Mr Wentworth,” panted Miss Hodge. “Can you spare a moment?”

“Not a second. Write me a memo if it’s urgent,” said Mr Wentworth, dashing on down.

Miss Hodge reached out and seized his arm. “But you must! You know 2Y and my scheme about the anonymous note—”

Mr Wentworth swung round on the end of her clutching hands and looked up at her irritably. “What about what anonymous note?”

“My scheme worked!” Miss Hodge said. “Nan Pilgrim wrote it, I’m sure. You must see her—”

“I’m seeing her at four o’clock,” said Mr Wentworth. “If you think I need to know, write me a memo, Miss Hodge.”

“Eileen,” said Miss Hodge.

“Eileen who?” said Mr Wentworth, trying to pull his arm away. “You mean two girls wrote this note?”

“My name is Eileen,” said Miss Hodge, hanging on.

“Miss Hodge,” said Mr Wentworth, “3Z will be breaking windows by now!”

“But there’s Charles Morgan too!” Miss Hodge cried out, feeling his arm pulling out of her hands. “Mr Wentworth, I swear that boy recited a spell! Worms and custard and scummy potatoes, he said. All sorts of nasty things.”

Mr Wentworth succeeded in tearing his arm loose and set off downstairs again. His voice came back to Miss Hodge. “Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. Write it all down, Miss Hodge.”

“Bother!” said Miss Hodge. “But I will write it down. He is going to notice!” She went at once to the staff room, where she spent the rest of the lesson composing an account of her experiment, in writing almost as round and angelic as Theresa’s.

Meanwhile, in the 2Y classroom, Mr Crossley shut the door behind Miss Hodge with a sigh. “Journals out,” he said. He had come to a decision about the note, and he did not intend to let his feelings about Miss Hodge interfere with his duty. So, before anyone could start writing in a journal and make it impossible for him to interrupt, he made 2Y a long and serious speech.

He told them how malicious and sneaky and unkind it was to write anonymous accusations. He asked them to consider how they would feel if someone had written a note about them. Then he told them that someone in 2Y had written just such a note.

“I’m not going to tell you what was in it,” he said. “I shall only say it accused someone of a very serious crime. I want you all to think about it while you write your journals, and after you’ve finished, I want the person who wrote the note to write me another note confessing who they are and why they wrote it. That’s all. I shan’t punish the person. I just want them to see what a serious thing they have done.”

Having said this, Mr Crossley sat back to do some marking, feeling he had settled the matter in a most understanding way. In front of him, 2Y picked up their pens. Thanks to Miss Hodge, everyone thought they knew exactly what Mr Crossley meant.

29 October, wrote Theresa. There is a witch in our class. Mr Crossley just said so. He wants the witch to confess. Mr Wentworth confiscated my knitting this morning and made jokes about it. I did not get it back till lunchtime. Estelle green has started knitting now. What a copycat that girl is. Nan Pilgrim couldn’t climb the ropes this morning and her name is Dulcinea. That made us laugh a lot.

29.10.81. Mr Crossley has just talked to us very seriously, Simon Silverson wrote, very seriously, about a guilty person in our class. I shall do my best to bring that person to justice. If we don’t catch them we might all be accused. This is off the record of course.

Nan Pilgrim is a witch, Dan Smith wrote. This is not a private thought because Mr Crossley just told us. I think she is a witch too. She is even called after that famous witch, but I can’t spell it. I hope they burn her where we can see.

Mr Crossley has been talking about serious accusations, Estelle wrote. And Miss Hodge has been making us all accuse one another. It was quite frightening. I hope none of it is true. Poor Teddy went awfully red when he saw Miss Hodge but she scorned him again.

While everyone else was writing the same sort of things, there were four people in the class who were writing something quite different.

Nirupam wrote, Today, no comment. I shall not even think about high table.

Brian Wentworth, oblivious to everything, scribbled down how he would get from Timbuktu to Uttar Pradesh by bus, allowing time for roadworks on Sundays.

Nan sat for a considerable while wondering what to write. She wanted desperately to get some of today off her chest, but she could not at first think how to do it without saying something personal. At last she wrote, in burning indignation,

I do not know if 2Y is average or not, but this is how they are. They are divided into girls and boys with an invisible line down the middle of the room and people only cross that line when teachers make them. Girls are divided into real girls (Theresa Mullett) and imitations (Estelle Green). And me. Boys are divided into real boys (Simon Silverson), brutes (Daniel Smith) and unreal boys (Nirupam Singh). And Charles Morgan. And Brian Wentworth. What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan. They are allowed to cross the invisible line to prove this. Everyone is allowed to cross the invisible line to be nasty to Brian Wentworth.

Nan paused here. Up to then she had been writing almost as if she was possessed, the way she had been at lunch. Now she had to think about Brian Wentworth. What was it about Brian that put him below even her?

Some of Brian’s trouble, she wrote, is that Mr Wentworth is his father, and he is small and perky and irritating with it. Another part is that Brian is really good at things and comes top in most things, and he ought to be the real boy, not Simon. But SS is so certain he is the real boy that he has managed to convince Brian too.

That, Nan thought, was still not quite it, but it was as near as she could get. The rest of her description of 2Y struck her as masterly. She was so pleased with it that she almost forgot she was miserable.

Charles wrote, I got up, I got up, I GOT UP.

That made it look as if he had sprung eagerly out of bed, which was certainly not the case, but he had so hated today that he had to work it off somehow.

My running shoes got buried in cornflakes. I felt very hot running round the field and on top of that I had lunch on high table. I do not like rice pudding. We have had Games with Miss Hodge and rice pudding and there are still about a hundred years of today still to go.

And that, he thought, about summed it up.

When the bell went, Mr Crossley hurried to pick up the books he had been marking in order to get to the staff room before Miss Hodge left it. And stared. There was another note under the pile of books. It was written in the same capitals and the same blue ballpoint as the first note. It said:

HA HA. THOUGHT I WAS GOING

TO TELL YOU. DIDN’T YOU?

Now what do I do? wondered Mr Crossley.

CHAPTER FOUR (#u69483a27-a89e-5ee5-a135-aa68f23603ac)

At the end of lessons, there was the usual stampede to be elsewhere. Theresa and her friends, Delia, Heather, Deborah, Julia and the rest, raced to the lower school girls’ playroom to bag the radiators there, so that they could sit on them and knit. Estelle and Karen hurried to bag the chillier radiators in the corridor, and sat on them to cast on their stitches.

Simon led his friends to the labs, where they added to Simon’s collection of honour marks by helping tidy up. Dan Smith left his friends to play football without him, because he had business in the shrubbery, watching the senior boys meeting their senior girlfriends there. Charles crawled reluctantly to the locker room to look for his running shoes again.

Nan went, equally reluctantly, up to Mr Wentworth’s study.

There was someone else in with Mr Wentworth when she got there. She could hear voices and see two misty shapes through the wobbly glass in the door. Nan did not mind. The longer the interview was put off the better. So she hung about in the passage for nearly twenty minutes, until a passing prefect asked her what she was doing there.

“Waiting to see Mr Wentworth,” Nan said. Then, of course, in order to prove it to the prefect, she was forced to knock at the door.

“Come!” bawled Mr Wentworth.

The prefect, placated, passed on down the passage. Nan put out her hand to open the door, but, before she could, it was pulled open by Mr Wentworth himself and Mr Crossley came out, rather red and laughing sheepishly.

“I still swear it wasn’t there when I put the books down,” he said.