![]() ![]() The chirpy claptrap of the early morning has died away, and those staff members who are not milling about, checking their timetables and so on, sprawl in lugubrious silence. The air in the staff room has a trapped, stagnant quality. ![]() If you were to plot a graph of a teacher's spirits throughout the school day, afternoon break would be represented by the lowest valley. My formal introduction to Sheba took place later the same day when Ted Mawson, the deputy head, brought her into the staff room at afternoon break for a "meet and greet." Afternoonbreak is not a good time to meet schoolteachers. When she dismounted-with a lithe, rather irritating little skip-I saw that the skirt was made of some diaphanous material. And there was definitely a long skirt involved, because I remember thinking that it was in imminent danger of becoming entangled in her spokes. ![]() Sheba's outfits tend to be very complicated-lots of floaty layers. It was the sort of hairstyle that film actresses wear when they're playing sexy lady doctors. Her hair was arranged in one of those artfully dishevelled up-dos: a lot of stray tendrils framing the jaw, and something like a chopstick piercing a rough bun at the back. George's car park, getting books out of the back of my car, when she came through the gates on a bicycle-an old-fashioned, butcher-boy model with a basket in the front. The first time I ever saw Sheba was on a Monday morning, early in the winter term of 1996. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |