Susan in NC’s Reviews > Village School > Status Update

“… on this particular afternoon I wondered how much reading was being done and how much daydreaming. My marking pencil slowed to a standstill…What an afternoon, I mused! When these boys and girls are old and look back to their childhood, it is the brightest hours that they will remember. This is one of those golden days to lay up as treasure for the future, I told myself, excusing our general idleness.” Lovely!

“ The children sang on the way home in the bus. They sang all the songs that they had learnt for the Festival, some they had heard on the wireless, and some regrettable numbers that someone’s father had taught them in an expansive moment.”

“ Thoughts by a graveside are too dark and deep to be sustained for any length of time. Sooner or later the hurt mind turns to the sun for healing, and this is as it should be, for otherwise, what future could any of us hope for, but madness?”

“It will be difficult when these two leave the board of managers to find two people in the village who will come forward to take their place…Few people nowadays, even if they have close ties with their local school, have either the time or the desire to take on these voluntary duties which an earlier generation shouldered with the feeling of noblesse oblige.”

“ In the presence of this ancient, silent witness, it was right that personal cares should assume their own insignificant proportions. They were, after all, as ephemeral as the butterflies that hovered over the Michaelmas daisies on the graves outside. And, hurt as they might be at the moment, they could not endure.”

“ ONE of the most difficult things to teach young children is to express themselves in sentences. When you listen to them talking you realize why. There is hardly a complete sentence in the whole conversation. ‘Coming up shop?’ says one. ‘Can’t! Mum’s bad.’ ‘What’s up with her?’ ‘Dunno.’ ‘Doctor come?’”

“ Sometimes they play shops among the roots, paying each other leaves and bearing away conkers, acorns and handfuls of gravel as their purchases. I like to hear the change in their voices as they become shopkeepers or customers. They affect a high dictatorial tone of voice when they assume adult status, quite unlike the warm burr of their everyday conversations.”