The sight that greeted her in the children’s cloakroom was a familiar one now. Straggling lines of snow-covered wellington boots filled the corridor outside the classroom and on the pegs were hand-me-down coats of all sizes, knitted woollen scarves and damp balaclavas. Meanwhile, coughs and sneezes echoed in the Victorian rafters and the bitter wind rattled the wooden casements of the tall windows. Few children owned a handkerchief and many used the sleeve of their thick jumper to wipe their runny noses. In spite of all this, there was a smile on Lily’s face as she walked into the school office where Vera was checking registers with John.

‘Hello, Lily,’ said Vera. ‘I saw you talking to Tom Feather.’

Lily smiled. ‘Yes, he’s invited me to the cinema.’

‘That’s lovely,’ said Vera.

John said nothing, but gave a polite if slightly forced smile.

‘It’s a Ronald Reagan film.’

‘Oh yes, a very handsome man,’ approved Vera.

‘To be honest, I prefer Richard Burton. It said in Picturegoer that he was the hottest thing in Hollywood,’ said Lily.

John picked up his registers disconsolately. ‘I heard he could have been a Welsh miner,’ he said as he set off for his classroom.

‘John doesn’t sound happy,’ remarked Lily.

‘It will be his sister,’ explained Vera. ‘She’s staying with him and insists upon tidying everything. It takes him a week to get it back to how he likes it.’

At ten o’clock Lily was working with Sam Grundy, a keen little six-year-old who was progressing rapidly with his reading. Sam had opened his Janet and John reader and staring at Book Four, page 3, ‘Little Fisher Duckling’.

Lily was using a ‘look and say’ reading scheme to help Sam with an introduction to less regular key words. There were over three hundred of them in Book Four, a challenge for the curly-haired farmer’s son, but he was word-perfect as he read ‘wave, gave, flake, lane, snake, like, five, bite, slide and white’.

‘Well done, Sam,’ said Lily. ‘A gold star for you,’ and Sam smiled as if he had won the football pools.

However, Lily was still concerned at the quality and content of the reading scheme. It presented to her pupils a simple, middle-class world, a long way from that experienced by the children at Ragley. It was clear that the tale of ‘Little Peachling’ meant nothing to Frank Shepherd. The incongruous story concerned a baby inside a peach who grows up and leaves home to seek his fortune. He decides to give spiced buns to various animals, including a monkey.