RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31096, 27 June 1966, Page 22

RANDOM REMINDER

FAUX PAS

It took considerable time and very much persuasion to obtain the headmistress’s permission for her to take her class into the pool for a swim at lunch time. It took her flock of eight-year-olds no time or persuasion to get into the water to splash and shriek and gambol about like a school of very small porpoises. It was the fishing of them out, the drying and the dressing, the organisation after the swim, which persuaded her that the teaching life was not all sweetness and light. Of course she had to go in with them to keep an eye on them and to drag the more reluctant ones out when it was time to get dressed for afternoon

assembly. Assembly . . . and with it strict demands for neat and tidy hair, smooth frocks, stockings straight and unwrinkled, shoes polished and neatly laced. Young ladies of 12 and 14 cope well enough: but the eight-year-olds . . . “Mary, you’ve forgotten your stockings. Alison, where is your other shoe? No, Roberta. I haven't time to tie your ribbon. Ask Anne as we march in. Is everyone ready?” A quick glance before departure. “Halt. Whose bloomers are on the wall?” Twenty small hands were relieved to encounter 20 woollen thighs. One didn't. By the time she had seized the garment, caught a heel in it, pirouted and fallen

into a pool of water, been straightened and dried, all was orderly silence in the assembly hall. They were to be last in, again. The class sidled swiftly and easily into the rear seats and instantly achived that extraodinarily angelic expression all small girls wear when confronted with authority. But for their teacher, it was a long hike up the length of the hall, and then on to her seat, the only vacant one, at the far end of the front row, on the very edge of the platform. Stepping high to negotiate the outstretched extremities of her colleagues, she was startled to see a large, red bare foot. Hers.