The Great Village Show by Alexandra Brown

Author:Alexandra Brown [Alexandra Brown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007597390
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

Saturday, and I’m in the High Street updating the community notice board. I feel delighted on seeing that the village is starting to get its show hat on. The village square is undergoing a ‘dress rehearsal’ ahead of the big day, and has been swept clean, literally, by the WI women with their wooden, wire-bristled brooms. All the shop windows are looking super shiny and colourful, each with their traditional Tindledale themes. The bookshop in particular deserves additional merit as my favourite, with its collage of black and white photos depicting Tindledale through the ages. The picture of a horse and cart in the tiny village square – just a patch of dirt really, as it was back then – is incredibly poignant; the owner is dressed in shabby, ill-fitting trousers, worn-out boots and what looks like a scratchy shirt made from an old sack. The horse has a nosebag hung around its head.

Even the old Victorian lampposts have been swathed in Sybs’ polka-dot bunting; she’s standing on Pete’s tractor as we speak, on the other side of the road, securing the ties into place. And, talking of displays, the general stayed true to his word and had a cabinet installed in my school hall, which now houses a fascinating arrangement of various war medals and other merits donated by the villagers from over the years – he placed an advert in the Parish News magazine that gets delivered by volunteers to every home in Tindledale, asking for any kind of memorabilia to be loaned to the school. The villagers came up trumps and produced loads of fascinating artefacts – photos mainly, but also trophies for various sporting events won by the pupils over the years. We even have an old Tindledale school cricket jumper, circa 1940, which was donated by Hettie after she found it in amongst a pile of stuff in her back bedroom. There’s also a girl’s green gingham 1950s summer uniform dress, that Ruby, who owns the vintage clothes emporium, had donated by an anonymous person, who left a bag full of stuff outside her shop door one night.

There’s a wall montage too, showing the school right back to the beginning. In the centre there’s a glorious, whole school picture, of the Victorian children all lined up and looking very serious – not like nowadays; when we had the photographer in to do the leavers’ picture last summer, it took the best part of ten minutes for us to stop the children laughing and fooling around and to make them stand nicely and smile without doing silly faces. This contrast in children’s behaviour can also be seen in the ‘then and now’ section – a wonderful collection of photos taken in the same spot outside the main school door: Victorian children shivering as they shovel snow, versus our modern-day children wrapped up warm in padded anoraks, all laughing as they throw snowballs at each other, including us teachers.

God, I really hope the inspectors’ report comes back in favour of keeping the school open.

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