Texts for guided reading

Text 1

Doreen pope

M. Loudon

1. Practically no one reading this will have heard of Miss Pope. Her greatness is not obvious and it has never been documented, but she is my hero nevertheless. This year she retires after a lifetime’s teaching, the last 25 years of which have been spent as a junior-school headmistress in Wantage, Oxfordshire. I was brought up in Wantage, and between the ages of eight and eleven I attended her school.

2. Miss Pope is a strong and wholesome woman. Tall, well-built and cosy with it, she was consistently cheerful without ever being too jolly or brisk. She had boundless energy, and soft skin that tanned easily and never lost its colour. Her clothes were functional and unobtrusive; heavy jerseys in neutral mauves and beiges, and sensible shoes.

3. Miss Pope’s permanent accoutrements were a white Saab 96, from which she would wave cheerily whilst driving around the market square, and a rather anti-social dog, a rare breed of Shetland collie called Sheena. Just as Shetland ponies look stunted, so do Shetland collies. Sheena consisted of long, thick, orangey fur on very short legs. We adored her because she looked arrested in permanent puppyhood, but she was completely indifferent to us. She would retreat into her kennel as the first child arrived for school and only re-emerge at 3.30. It was a marvel to me that such an affectionate woman could live with such an aloof dog, and yet they were inseparable, an item. I’m convinced that “Miss Pope and Sheena” were painted almost as often in that school as the Madonna and Child were in Renaissance Europe.

4. Miss Pope believed that children only learnt self-worth and corporate responsibility through recognition of their gifts, however insignificant they might

have seemed in scholastic terms: so while she was appreciative of talent and enthusiasm, it was those who were shy, or obstreperous, or who found reading or writing difficult, with whom she spent the most time. She was patient, kind and egalitarian, but she was also the sort of person that children don’t muck about: she had natural authority, and we were all in awe of her. Even the class delinquent would beg not to be sent to her office and that was saying something: after all, he wasn’t bothered by the local police. She never lost her cool, although running down corridors and throwing balls too close to windows could provoke a thunderous bellow identical to Albert Finney’s memorable “Stop Thaat Traaain!” in the film The Dresser.

5. Miss Pope was an enormous success with children because she had a genuine affinity with them. She enjoyed the things that children enjoyed, like pudding and snow and hugs and the slapstick bits of school plays. She had an insatiable sense of humour and a huge, rotund laugh, and she never failed to reward even the dullest anecdote or simplest joy with her reassuring boom. Indeed, her greatest gift was to make every child feel as if his or her joke, discovery, fear or pleasure was quite unique.

6. She also had an unpretentious disregard for the formal. One afternoon she came to see our class frieze of the Great Fire of London. We all crowded round her approval, while a pompous child called David insisted on explaining it to her: “Now Miss Pope, it’s 1666, and this is Pudding Lane, which as I expect you know is where they kept all the traitors, and this”  at which point she threw back her head and boomed with laughter, her attention caught by a hapless man engulfed in flames and plunging head first into the River Thames. “Good heavens, what an unlucky fellow! Who’s he?”. “No one,” said David, refusing to be diverted. “No one’s no one, David dear,” said Miss Pope. “He is,” said David. Miss Pope boomed.

7. Secondary school was a terrible shock to the system after Miss Pope’s cosy world. No camaraderie, and worst of all, no charm or imagination. The school was

infused with a suffocating emphasis on the importance of conformity. Within the first few days I was beaten up twice by burly fifth formers and taunted for the baffling, small-town sin of being the doctor’s daughter, something which had quite rightly not mattered at Miss Pope’s. I had my ears pierced and dropped my t’s and h’s, but it fooled no one. “You stick out like a sore thumb here, you know,” said my form teacher. “Fuck off, posh bitch,” said half the girls in my ear, for about three years, until I grew a skin like a bullet-proof vest.

8. Miss Pope remained a quiet source of support throughout the awful transition from a sunny childhood to a dark adolescence. Cards would arrive at Christmas, and every summer, detailing walking holidays with Sheena and the abundance of wild flowers in Devon and Cornwall. “Don’t fret about what others think of you,” she wrote once. “Just work hard, remember that it’s all right to be yourself, and try to laugh at the bad bits.” Her teaching was sensible, solid and compassionate. The values she sought to instill sound old-fashioned, but they weren’t. They were simple, timeless and good, and they filtered gently into hundreds of lives, without fuss or ceremony.

Shetland collie − a sheep dog of a long-haired Scottish breed.

Great Fire of London − took place in 1666, destroyed half of the city including the old building of St. Paul’s cathedral.

Renaissance − the activity, spirit or time of the great revival of art, letters and learning in Europe during the 14th  16th centuries making the transition from the medieval to the modern world.

egalitarian − a belief in human equality with respect to social, political and economic rights.

dropped my t’s and h’s − a way of pronunciation characteristic of Cockney, natives of the East End of London.

Saab − a Swedish car, small, expensive, with high quality performance; very posh.

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